2840 West Parrish Avenue
Owensboro, KY 42301
(270) 684-8143
Featured in Gourmet Magazine, on The Food Network, in Money magazine, and in USA Today, Moonlite is not just small time bbq restaurant. It's also not just the best Owensboro bbq restaurant. It's got serious press! As I mentioned in a previous post, I have vivid memories of going to Moonlite with my family, growing up in Kentucky. The food was and is the best around. Now living in Texas, I know good barbeque! Don't just take my word for it, listen (okay, you can read it) what Gourmet Magazine has to say about the best barbecue in Owensboro:
“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.
Want to know a key as to why Moonlite has the best BBQ around? It's in the MEAT! We will have a new blog post about mutton, but for now take a look at this awesome informational video compliments of Moonlite BBQ Owensboro, and Youtube:
