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Editorial Review

Reviewed in July/Aug '05 Issue of WHERE

Since The Forks is the place to see and be seen during Winnipeg summers, it is renowned for its many and varied patios. Muddy Waters Smokehouse is no exception. The restaurant’s interior is a hybrid of glass and Tyndalstone with high-beamed ceilings and rustic tablecloths. It’s a bright, airy space with a year-round summery feel where you can sit back and relax, kick up your feet and throw rib bones into the metal buckets conveniently provided. But when the weather is beckoning and you need to be outdoors, Muddy Waters offers not one, but two, relatively small, primely positioned patios. The upper patio is an ideal suncatch, occasionally too hot on a scorching day. That’s when the lower patio awaits, sitting cooly beneath spreading trees ideally exposed to river breezes. It faces the Assiniboine River Marine Basin, making it the closest thing to a waterfront beach bar in this neck of the woods.

A creation of Winnipeg’s WOW! Hospitality Concepts, Muddy Waters works because it offers the best Memphis barbeque in the city. The prices are reasonable and the service is southern-style friendly.

Barbeque is a religion in the south, but it’s rare here. Purists define it as pork (and only pork) slow-cooked over a smoldering woodfire. Barbeque is more broadly defined as an event at which people come together, often outdoors, to celebrate and eat barbeque (the pork from the first definition). Muddy Waters is the place for both; it’s a slow-cooked celebration of barbeque pork.

The restaurant’s Memphis barbeque has a delightfully deep, smoky flavour to it from the hickory wood used on the fire. The rib meat blushes a pinkish tinge, its smoky tenderness literally causing it to fall off the bone. Although not technically barbeque you can also get slow-cooked chicken (finished on the grill) and grilled steak.

These meats are sauced with one of two flavours. As with all good barbeque, the sauce is added towards the end of the slow-cooking process, not slathered on at the beginning. The first is a traditional sauce: sweet and thick, ideal for the ribs or steak. Then there’s the chile mango sauce, with a nice kick smoothed by the natural sweetness of the mango. It is an excellent way to liven up chicken.

Perhaps not surprisingly, Muddy Waters also offers one of the city’s finest (and most expensive) burgers—a half pound of ground beef, formed into a thick patty, with a large hole left in the middle of it. This shape is claimed to shorten cooking time and reduce shrinkage. True or not, the result is a burger that bursts with flavour.

There are a number of side dishes available—two of which are especially noteworthy. Muddy Waters’ coleslaw is creamy and flavourful; far superior to the overly-sweet, soggy mush at some of the chain restaurants. The baked beans are also blissful. These little brown beauties are slow-cooked to deliver delightful hints of chile, tomato, molasses, apple, vinegar, and sugar in every sweet, spicy mouthful. The bartenders for the patios mix some of the best fresh fruit margaritas in the city. With lively blues and reggae music playing on the outdoor speakers, these frosty concoctions can set the ideal summer mood.

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