Some of you may be familiar with Magnolia Gastropub and Brewery, a little pub down on Haight Street. They make excellent small-batch beers, and their menu includes things made with dates and bacon that are the perfect blend of sweet and salty. Last year Magnolia expanded their crazy-delicious empire to a restaurant in the Dogpatch called Smokestack. Smokestack is an urban BBQ you can smell a block away. The thick odor of roasting meat calls you in. We are proud to feature them in our Dogpatch Microhood this Thursday, where they will host an after party featuring off-menu items and discounted beers. Founder/brewmaster Dave Mclean was nice enough to answer some questions and talk shop – tasty, tasty shop.
Magnolia is a brewery. What does a brewery have to add to BBQ? What makes Smokestack different or special?
To us, it’s simply about being able to stand enthusiastically behind everything we do. Part of our message and belief is that beer is an amazing beverage with a great diversity of flavors and incredible versatility. Put more simply, it goes with everything – any food you can throw at it and any occasion. We’ve been having a lot of fun showcasing Magnolia beer at our original pub, with its gastropub menu, for 17 years, and Smokestack is a new way for us to showcase our beer alongside something else we love – BBQ.
Why beer and BBQ?
We couldn’t help but notice that beer, BBQ, and whiskey (which we also shower with attention at Smokestack) share similarities in how they are made. They all require patience, time, and a deep intimacy with process, an understanding of what’s happening slowly along the way, always with an eye toward where you want it to end up. It seems like everywhere you turn at Smokestack – the bar, the meat smokers, or the brewery out back—we’re celebrating some iteration of the same kind of maddening quest to wrangle a bunch of always-changing variables into something delicious.
What is your favorite menu item and beer pairing?
That’s just it! There are so many possibilities and combinations that it’s quite possible I haven’t yet had my favorite pairing. One of the things that sets beer up as a great match with a lot of slow-cooked meat is that malt and wort also go through varying degrees of caramelization and browning, leading to some very natural hooks. But there’s more to it than that. The hops and the carbonation can cut through the fat and richness, and then the smoke character just seems to find all kinds of ways to connect with the beer.
What’s a pairing you’d recommend today?
Prescription Pale is a great match with our pork dishes, whether it’s the house-made sausages, chopped pork, or the pork chop loin we’ve been doing. That’s where the slow-cooked, caramelized notes from the meat dovetail perfectly with malt notes, and it has enough hop character (bright cascades) to keep the palate lively. I should add that there’s an even deeper level of magic at work here because we give all our spent brewery grain to Devil’s Gulch Ranch and then get their heritage-breed pigs back to turn into BBQ. So we’re feeding these pigs, and sometimes a pint of beer and a rack of pork ribs came from the very same grain.
There are a lot of Thai-influenced things on the menu. Would you call yourself a fusion joint?
I wouldn’t. I think we just incorporate a lot of inspiration from our backgrounds and interests. With the food in particular, Chef Dennis Lee certainly draws on his own Korean heritage here and there, but we’ve always studiously avoided identifying ourselves with any one BBQ region or culture, whether it’s Texas, Memphis, the Carolinas, or any of the many other cultures around the world that have a history with smoking meat over wood. BBQ conjures a lot of passion and devoted beliefs about what’s correct or best, but as with beer, it just needs to be good, regardless of the inspiration or background.
What do you like about the Dogpatch neighborhood?
So far, I love everything about the Dogpatch. It’s been such a great experience from the day we got the keys to this place. It’s got strong connections to and a lot of pride for its history-making, industrial-waterfront past, but it’s reinventing itself with a ton of enthusiasm and collective spirit. It feels like a real community, and I felt welcomed into it from the earliest days of our long construction process. People were rooting for us to finish and get open (sometimes impatiently, though, as it did seem to take forever), and we got a lot of neighborhood encouragement that helped keep us all sane. I couldn’t wait to get our doors open and contribute to the local culture, and now it’s supremely gratifying to see the community come in and make Smokestack a part of their lives. Dogpatch is a pretty special place.
Main image courtesy of Eric Wolfinger.
Make sure to check out our Dogpatch Microhood party this Thursday, January 29, where Smokestack will be hosting an after party featuring exclusive off-menu items and discounted beers.