Sergeant's Serves Saucy and Succulent Barbecue

It doesn’t look like much from the street, but the delicious smell of slow-cooked barbecue hits you like a wave when you walk into this tiny eight-table restaurant, which sits off of Dunn Road.

There’s nothing fancy about . The handwritten menu, on a board in dry erase marker, hangs above the order window. The only decoration is a stencil of a happy pig on one orange wall. The one-man operation doesn’t even have a soda fountain. Instead, a few bottles of Coke products lurk in a fridge.

I love places like this. You can’t get more home cooked than a one-man operation that’s obviously a labor of love. Rather than limit myself to one meat, I ordered the combo platter with pulled chicken and beef brisket. I could hear him cutting chicken off the bone and chopping brisket together with sauce while I waited.

If you love barbecue chicken, you really have to try Sergeant's. The all-white meat of the breast was impossibly succulent. This is the texture all chicken wants to be, but it's rarely achieved. It came drenched in the house sauce, a sweet Kansas City-style barbecue, which I think could've benefited from a little bit of black pepper to balance the sweetness. Anyone who complains about this chicken is unworthy to put it in their mouths. It’s that good.

The brisket, on the other hand, was a little disappointing. Instead of distinct pieces, it was almost a brisket paste. The mushy texture might have worked better as a sandwich. Brisket, by its nature, is somewhat fatty. I like mine in slices, so I can trim any excess. Here, it was chunked in with the meat, creating a few downright gristly pieces.

The macaroni and cheese was as far from a blue box as you can get. That's a compliment. This is the kind of macaroni and cheese small kids hate, but grown-ups adore.

Sadly, the potato salad suffered from the same over creaminess as the brisket. There were chunks of potato in there, but they drowned in a sea of mayo-based sauce. That said, the flavor of the sauce was rich with egg yolks and fresh ground pepper, which made for a tasty combination.

Although I love hole-in-the-wall restaurants, the drawback of a true one-man operation is the owner can lean over the order window and ask if you like your ordered food. I inhaled my delicious chicken, but I left a lot of brisket on my plate. It felt like trying to explain to your favorite aunt why you didn’t finish her special casserole. I took the mature route and hid my uneaten food under a napkin.

Sergeant's gives you a great deal for the money. My $13 plate overflowed so much that I left about half of it behind. Normally, I pack up leftovers, but after eating all my chicken, I was left with nothing but a couple of heavy dairy sides, which wouldn't survive in my car before I made it back to the safety of my fridge.

Sandwiches range from $5.50 for a Polish foot long to $6.99 for the sliced brisket. Combo dinners all end up about $13 after tax for two meats and two sides. It’s worth the money. You end up with a footlong plate covered in two kinds of meat and your choice of potato salad, cole slaw, barbecue beans, green beans, mac 'n' cheese or corn on the cob.

If you're not in a mood for sides, you can get the meat by the pound for $8 for rib tips up to $11 for pulled chicken or brisket.  However, there is a two-pound minimum when ordering by the pound.

I give Sergeant's a solid B for well prepared home cooking (and one more time--the moistest chicken I’ve enjoyed in years). The next time you want an alternative to big corporate chain barbecue, support this one-man show.