Schmidt’s BBQ — Restaurant in Leesburg

It’s pretty rare that I leave a negative review but Schmidt’s service has gone down hill. I used to love coming to this place but am hesitant to return for a while largely due to the service quality.

Friday night we call ahead and get our names on a list with a wait time of 20 minutes. Upon arrival we’re told that it’ll be another 30 minutes despite the fact that they have several open tables. Oh well we decide to get a beer right down the street. Get a call 3 minutes later and they give us attitude when we say we’ll be there in 5 minutes (didn’t want to chug out IPAs). They’re busy … not the end of the world. We get seated and it takes 15 minutes for anyone to greet us until we flag someone down. We order drinks and at least 10 minutes later (not exaggerating) one drink comes that’s not what we ordered. Bartender comes and apologizes and corrected it. You look around and see the service staff is constantly overwhelmed but there is several tables open. Schmidt’s management needs to hire more customer friendly/service-oriented staff. Maybe it’s tough to attract employees now so I do empathize with the fact that they’re often short staffed. I don’t mind hiring all high school kids but they need to be trained.

The food isn’t bad - I personally enjoy the Little Schmidt pork and brisket combo. It does appear they you now get noticeably less food on your plate than they used to serve. Meat is always pretty tender and never too dried out so that’s a plus for a BBQ place. I like their potato salad and would give it an 8/10. Cornbread is alright. Sauces for the meat are also pretty good. We most recently ordered fried pickles and I was not satisfied and the fact that those are $13 on the menu definitely made us regretful that we ordered them … what robbery for a bunch of sliced pickles!

Overall vibe - they tend to book talented musicians out back and a good mixture of covers and original songs. The outdoor patio is an awesome set up. It’s dog friendly which is a huge reason we keep coming back. I will return to Schmidt’s but seriously hope the service can do a 180 and get a better system in place. Food quality typically meets expectations. Prices are higher than they should be for...

Overall I was severely underwhelmed.

I absolutely love BBQ and absolutely hate leaving reviews like this.

I consider myself a BBQ aficionado, I'm no professional BBQ critic, but I've done enough BBQ side-by-side tastes to know what's good, and what's an average price for BBQ. Schmidt's underperformed in both categories.

Service: Good We called in an order of a half lb of both brisket and pull pork with a 16oz side of mac and cheese. When we arrived, the food was ready for us.

Portions: Lacking However when we got home and saw what we had received, we we're shocked, the portions seemed very small. I figured it must be the way the food was presented since we bought by weight- not as a platter, but after weighing the food, each came up short. Note: the container weight also contributed to the food weight. I should also mention that I wouldn't normally break out the scale, but when you order a half lb of meat, and you only see two pieces, you get concerned. I also don't expect portions to be exact, but I would sure hope that at least one of the items ordered met expectations. Regardless, when you pay for 16oz of mac and get less that 14 (assuming the container weights more than 0.1oz), or 8oz of brisket and get less than 6.5oz (~80% of the expected weight), it's incredibly disappointing.

Taste: Mixed Mac n Cheese - Run of the mill. Nothing special. Not bad, just nothing to write home about. Pulled Pork - Bland. It was tender and had smoke to it, but literally nothing else. Brisket - Good. Not the best I've had, but I'd put it in the around the 70th percentile compared to other Brisket I've had. It had good flavor, and was relatively tender though was just a touch dry. Sauce - Good question. Don't know. We found out once we got home that there wasn't any sauce included. This one could have been on us for not asking, but it also wasn't offered. A real shame considering that pork needed sauce.

Cost: High This is by far the most I've paid for BBQ in the area. I thought Monks was high, but this is higher. I guess you're paying extra for getting food in the middle of town?

Conclusion: I'm just sad there's one less BBQ place in Leesburg that I'd...

We went on a Thursday evening and sat outside - there was live music and one other couple, but mostly felt desserted. The server was super nice, but could not make up for the fact that we were served super old leftovers out of the fridge, microwaved in plastic containers.

I ordered the pulled pork platter with mac and cheese. It was NOT pulled pork. It was the dregs of some catering tray they had in the fridge. It was absolutely doused in sauce, way to salty, and I ended up feeding it all to my dog. The mac and cheese was lukewarm, and I politely asked that the server microwave it for another minute, which he graciously did. It was slightly better hot, but not great. It might have been good when it was fresh, but the noodles had a terrible texture, like they'd been sitting in their cheese sauce in the fridge for at least a week.

Hubs ordered the brisket platter with potato salad and beans. The brisket was also old. It pulled apart like you'd expect, but when you tried to chew it it was so dry it just makes a nasty paste in your mouth. The beans were pretty good, and by far the strongest dish of the night was the potato salad, which while it looked like the goopy mustardy-mayo type that I usually don't enjoy, it had a nice acidic balance and if it was a week old, we couldn't tell.

We're really sad because before the closure and reopening, we used to LOVE to go to Schmidts regularly. It's so sad, but after that meal, we won't return. They don't draft beer anymore, they don't have the fermented pickles anymore, and the quality of what they do have is...