New Restaurant Tuesday: The Big Easy

The Big Easy
332-334 Kings Road, Chelsea, London, SW3 5UR

Megan’s first turn to choose a restaurant, and she picks a place that is definitely more up my alley than hers (I’m a meat-and-potatoes gal, Megan likes, well… vegetables): The Big Easy in Chelsea. This place is something of an anomaly, and I’m not really sure what it’s trying to be – a self-proclaimed BBQ and Crab Shack… that’s also won a Wine Spectator award! Now, I love BBQ and seafood and wine, but I’m not sure I can recall the last time I had all three at the same place! Oh yeah, and they’re known for their tasty margaritas too! Weird…

Anyway, we started with a couple of margaritas – clementine & ginger for me, passion fruit & chile for Megan. Megan’s was painfully sweet, and mine was OK, but I generally like to taste my booze instead of being tricked into drinking it, so these weren’t really a huge hit with either of us. We opted for bottles of Dos Equis to go with our meals.

The menu is huge – there must have been 75 items on it. The best way I can describe this restaurant (and everything about it) is that it’s Dock’s (a well-known seafood mini-chain in NYC) meets Brother Jimmy’s (another NYC mini-chain which has the same motto as the Big Easy, “put a little South in your mouth”). The décor definitely swung the way of Brother Jimmy’s – Christmas lights, US license plates, plank walls, etc. I think the desired effect is to make you feel like you’re in a Cajun crab shack (albeit one that serves BBQ… and huge steaks… and Alsatian wines), but it felt a bit contrived to me. An added bonus – this place played great music. During the first part of our meal, they were piping in southern rock: CCR, the Black Crowes (!!!) and a little Tom Petty for good measure. Later in the evening, a cover band started playing upstairs; they were pretty good, and were definitely playing crowd favorites like Oasis, Jack Johnson, U2, the Foo Fighters, etc. The place is clearly catering to American expats looking for a bit of home.

We started our meal with the Voodoo chicken wings. I was hoping for Buffalo-style (these weren’t), but these did not disappoint. Fairly spicy and a homemade bleu cheese dressing on the side. The chicken was breaded though, and that didn’t go over great with either of us. Overall, they were pretty delicious. After we polished off our order of 5 wings, the waiter brought over hot towels – a nice touch, especially considering that we were both covered in wing sauce.

For our entrees, we decided that we would order baby back ribs and a half of a roasted chicken and share. Big mistake. The portions were HUGE, and I suspect that we were fed some genetically modified, mutant (though delicious) chicken. I thought the ribs were good, but Megan thought they were a bit overcooked. Both featured the same BBQ sauce, which was pretty good, but a little sweet for my liking. On the side of both plates (really platters) were huge portions of coleslaw and BBQ baked beans. The coleslaw was just OK, but the beans were great, if for no other reason than they weren’t of the Heinz canned variety that are ubiquitous here. Everything made for delicious leftovers on Wednesday night!

Total damage: £66. We don’t think that we would hurry to come back here, but it could be a fun place to catch a baseball or football game (they have NASN too!) and hang with some expats.