SUMMARY: If you love smokey meats and interesting, flavorful sides, you might be disappointed. Otherwise the food is OK.
The restaurant is clean and the staff are friendly.
I will not be able to recommend Magnolia Smokehouse. I really want to recommend every smokehouse that I eat at, but this one just did not do a very good job of their presumed goal of offering smoked meats. However, all the food they did serve was thoroughly edible, it just didn't seem that the meats I ordered had been smoked much at all except for the ribs. I can only give this restaurant a middling rating.
For your reference, these types of smoked meats should display a prominent smoke ring (a region of pink colored meat visible in the outermost portion of the smoked meat).
Also, to make sure you don't think I'm new to smoked meats, I eat at smoker style BBQ restaurants often, and I've done so for the past 22 years.
At Magnolia's Smokehouse I ordered ribs, pulled pork, chicken, and brisket. The pulled pork, the chicken, and the brisket showed no sign of having been smoked - either visually or by flavor. The chicken was - as far as I could tell - just oven-baked chicken. It tasted fine but it showed no visual sign of having been smoked and it had no smoky taste. The menu specifically called this item "smoked chicken."
The menu does not describe the pulled pork or the brisket as smoked, and that leads me to believe that they probably were not. For both of these items there was definitely no visible smoke ring and no taste of smoke at all. In addition, the pulled pork was served colder than room temperature and the brisket was served after apparently having been reheated. The brisket was a uniform gray color, covered in grease, and was unusually hot for freshly sliced brisket.
That leaves the ribs, which were VERY good, VERY tasty, and were definitely smoked - they had a prominent smoke smoke ring visible on each piece. However, these were by far the 2 smallest pork ribs I have been served.
Based on this one experience with the smoked meats alone, I cannot recommend Magnolia Smokehouse, but it will do if you are not a big fan of the smokey flavor that can be had with wood-smoked meats.
As I said earlier, the food was all quite edible, it was just not what I had hoped for and not what I have enjoyed at every other smokehouse BBQ joint I've visited.
I will also take this opportunity to mention the 2 sides that I had. I had the corn nuggets and the fried okra. I feel that these items were not prepared in-house but we're received by the restaurant frozen and just fried to order. There was nothing wrong with these 2 sides, but they were just bland and underwhelming.
Magnolia Smokehouse has plenty of room to improve, especially with their smoked meats. I think - as if the owners want my opinion - that the pulled pork and the chicken need to be smoked to the point where the smoke ring is clearly visible and the smoky taste is easily detectable. Also, the brisket needs to be smoked to where the smoke ring is clearly visible (perhaps for 10-12 hour sat the apprpropriate temperature). The brisket also needs to be sliced and put in a container where it is not sitting in hot fat before being served. As noted above, my brisket was greasy, a uniform gray color, and unusually hot for brisket in my experiance
I am giving Magnolia Smokehouse a middling rating because everything was perfectly edible, but nothing was exceptional except for the ribs and even the ribs were unusually small.
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