O.T.’s Up-N-Smoke (Augusta)
501 E. Michigan AvenueI never pass up a BBQ place if I can help it.
I spent most of the day in Augusta one day earlier this week and after a couple hours of sitting and waiting, I was hungry. Augusta has a surprising number of options when it comes to lunch but a few months ago, I was driving through town on my way back from Battle Creek and spotted a familiar name in a location I hadn’t seen them at before.
O.T.’s Up-N-Smoke is pretty well known in Battle Creek with a location on Capital Avenue and a seasonal trailer on Beadle Lake Avenue. They’ve also opened another permanent location just on the east edge of town on Michigan Avenue/M-96 in a building shared with Unique Treasures Plus.
The restaurant is on the west end of the building while the antique shop is on the east. In between the two is the order area and kitchen for O.T.’s. There’s no divider between the two so you can actually browse while you’re waiting on your food to be prepared.
There is also a pretty large dining room for O.T.’s when you walk in the door. This is something the other locations don’t have. There are old kitchen tables and booths throughout the large space that is sparsely decorated but There are menus on the tables but I’m unsure if there is table service or if everything is done at the counter.
I put in an order for a pulled pork sandwich and an order of fries. I didn’t do the combo meal because I had a Mountain Dew in the car I got from the Shell station down the street earlier.
It took less than ten minutes for the lone employee to put my meal together. The bulk of that time was for the fries to be cooked.
I started in on the fries when I got back in the car with my co-worker. There was a lot of them in the Styrofoam box. They were the flat, out of the bag, frozen fries. They had just come out of the fryer so they were super hot and very crispy.
When I got done with the fries, I started in on the sandwich. The big pile of meat was served on a white bun with a thick, sweet sauce. I did the fork thing with this sandwich because there was no way to pick it up and not make a mess. The smokiness of the meat was mostly drowned out by the sweetness of the sauce. It’s a really good sauce and if I’m going to eat a sandwich with that much sauce, this is the kind of sauce I want on it.
The meal cost me a little under ten bucks and it was delicious. O.T.’s doesn’t do the BBQ the way I do BBQ…I like the naked, smokey way, but this is one of my favorite places that does it this way. Their sauce is pretty fantastic..it’s the kind of sauce that you can drink. The meat is juicy in tender but all of the flavor comes from the thick, sweet sauce.
SW Michigan Dining 