Sweet and Sour in Boston

We decided to take a quick road trip to Freeport, ME to walk around their outlet shops and enjoy the nice weather. Searching for places to eat lunch online before heading out, I saw Buck's Naked BBQ and after looking at the website and menu, I knew that was where we were going to have lunch. Needless to say, we had very high expectations for Buck's. Sadly, those expectations weren't met.



Buck's Naked BBQ is aptly named because the BBQ comes out naked. Meaning with no sauce. Basically, the slow cooked meat should speak for itself. This, in theory, is usually the best practice for any type of cooking. However, Buck's does provide 4 types of BBQ sauces for you to add as much or as little as you like. The sauces are all at the table, which is nice. The last place we had BBQ only gave us a small portion of sauce on the side of our BBQ and charged us if we wanted extra. So that was a definitely a plus at Buck's.



Abby started with the gumbo. I enjoyed the crawfish that came with the soup, but the one spoonful I had was somewhat bland. Abby enjoyed the pulled chicken that was in the gumbo and even remarked that this was a good sign that the rest of the BBQ that we ordered would be really good.




As we were waiting for our main entree (I went with the smokehouse sampler, which consisted of babyback ribs, beef ribs, and chicken wings, and Abby went with the pulled pork sandwich) we heard the ding from the kitchen bell that indicates to waiters and servers that food was ready to pickup. Abby noticed that the food sitting under the heatlamps appeared to be our lunch. It sat there. Servers walked past the kitchen not even caring. It continued to sit there. One of the managers, or maybe the owners' son, was sitting at the bar with legs up over multiple seats not really caring about anything other than his laptop. Our food continued to "die" under the heat lamps. Finally, after several minutes someone noticed our food and brought it over to our table.




My ribs were big and covered in the dry rub that was used over the meat. Neither babyback ribs or beef ribs were "fall off the bone" tender, but weren't completely dry either. Each bite though was so overpowered by the dry rub, it was hard to really get the flavor of the ribs. I thought that was the whole point of the naked BBQ. I did add some sauce though, choosing the WNC Skinny Dip. This was my favorite sauce of the 4 and I thought was a pretty solid BBQ sauce. The babybacks were the better of the ribs, as it should since they are listed as "award-winning". While the ribs were naked, the chicken wings most definitely weren't. I had the wings in Jerk sauce, and they came slathered. I had to scrape the sauce off the wings before I ate them. That being said, the wings were cooked perfectly and were very juicy. The jerk sauce, once I took the majority off, was better than average, but still nothing to write home about. Abby's pulled pork was like my BBQ, slightly dry and needing sauce. The sides weren't bad, but weren't great either. I didn't like the cornbread much, but did like the baked beans.

Bottom line: Buck's Naked BBQ isn't the greatest BBQ I've ever had. It's not even on the list of best BBQ in New England. Not sure if we went on a bad day or not (the couple sitting behind us didn't seem to be enjoying their lunch either) but there wasn't anything worth coming back to. I give Buck's Naked BBQ a 1 and 1/2 out of 5. (Probably closer to a 2 than a 1 since the portions were pretty big and the sauces weren't bad either.)