Reviews:
Featured on Food Network. May 31st, 2004
Top 5 (BBQ Surprises)
Voted Best Barbecue in Ky by KY Monthly Magazine Readers. (June 2004)  
Voted top 10 must stops in Kentucky by Travelocity.com In the tradition of an old-time southern pig­pickin’.
Gourmet
Mutton: The older wiser tastier lamb
The LA Times


Go for the buffet; you can't loose November 2002
...just one more reminder of America's rich gastronomic diverstiy
Money Magizine 
The Wall Street Journal 

Voted best BBQ Restaurant in Kentucky

AAA Home and Away

10 great places to fill up your plate
and Rated among the best barbecue in America
USA Today

Featured in  Summer 2003 Southern Living

 

GOURMET MAGAZINE SUMS UP MOONLITE'S FAMOUS BUFFET EXPERIENCE

RoadNotes: Kentucky Q

“You all goin’ buffet?” the waitress asks as she sets down suites of silverware (each wrapped in a paper napkin) and a pair of sauce pitchers on the table of our booth.

In the tradition of an old-time southern pig­pickin’, the buffet at the Moonlite Bar-B-Q in Owensboro, Kentucky, is spectacular. It occupies its own dedicated room, with meats and vegetables on one side, salads and desserts on the other. Never have we dipped a plate when there wasn’t an employee replenishing ribs or dabbing drips of ham-cabbage hash off the counter.

What’s special about a Western Kentucky bar­becue buffet is the variety of meats Most of America’s serious barbecue scenes specialize in just one kind: beef sausages in East Texas, pork shoulder in South Carolina, ribs in Chicago. In Owensboro, they’ve got it all, and at Moonlite, it is all good.  There are chicken and ribs and pulled pork, even a pan of non barbecued sliced country ham that is firm and salty and fits so well into Moonlite’s buttery dinner rolls, with maybe a dab of sor­ghum. (Beyond meats, we’ll just mention the im­pressive deployment of “vegetables,” including cheesy broccoli casserole, macaroni and cheese, creamed corn niblets, ham and beans, and butter-drizzled mashed potatoes, plus the western Kentucky soup/stew known as burgoo.)

The beef brisket is sensational. It is sliced a half- inch thick and has a chewy crust blackened by hours in the pit. But the interior is butter-soft, with some quivery veins that appear to be meat but that are so infused with long-cooked fat that they literally melt on the tongue in a torrent of pure, noncorporeal meat-smoke flavor.

Mutton puts Owensboro barbecue in a class by itself. Cooked until pot-roast tender, it is set out on the Moonlite buffet two ways: chopped or pulled. Neither has sauce on it; you apply your -own at the table from the pitchers the waitress brings.

One is a dark-orange emulsion with gentle vinegar-tomato zest; the other is called “mutton dip,” an unctuous gravy that is used to baste the mutton as it cooks. For those who need heat, Moon­lite also supplies bottles of “Very Hot Sauce,” -which is brilliantly peppered and will set your lips and tongue aglow. But we recommend sampling -this meat sauceless. The chopped mutton is pul­verized to nothing but flavor: tangy lamb and wood smoke in a bold hash duet. The pulled ver­sion is a textural amusement park—rugged and chunky with aIot of hard outside crust among soft, juicy chunks of interior meat that fall into shreds so supple they make us want to abandon all utensils and eat like happy cave dwellers.

 

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