Flavor's big at this little barbecue joint

SmokeShack BBQ feels a little like a man cave: One mounted TV blaring news or sports. Two quilted red booths that look like they were rescued from a 1970s lounge. A few bare tables with plastic-sleeved menus. And walls the color of barbecue sauce.

Ah, but the most telling details: In the air, the smell of smoke. On the walls, more barbecue competition ribbons than you can shake a hickory stick at.

Owners Kenny and Tammy Meyer, known to fellow barbecue competitors as the Smokin' Tailgators, have worked the competition circuit for about 12 years. Before opening the SmokeShack in Bellevue last August, they took home five grand championships and placed ninth in the Jack Daniels World Championship Invitational in 2007.

One whiff or taste of their hickory-smoked meats, and you'll know why.

The appropriately named restaurant — in an aging strip mall about a half-mile west of the Kennedy Freeway — seats about 16.

The menu is similarly small: ribs, brisket, pulled pork, chicken and a host of house-made sides.

There's just one sauce in ketchup-style squeeze bottles on the tables — a sweet but balanced house-made mild. (You can ask for a slightly hotter version.)

But this hole in the wall serves up big flavor.

My favorite dish from two recent visits — one dine-in, one takeout — was the ribs.

Though the menu describes them as St. Louis style — and that's the cut the Meyers started with — those I had were full spare ribs, with one small cylinder of bone and two little nubbins of cartilage nestled inside a rectangle of meat. Kenny Meyer later explained that he switched to spare ribs because they are meatier.

They had a dark but tender bark, a nice pink smoke ring and an almost-falling-off-the-bone quality — the result of a dry rub, three to four hours of slow cooking over hickory and a delicate glaze of the house barbecue sauce.

They were impossible to eat without getting sauce from ear to ear. My dinner companion and I kept grinning and pointing at each other's sauce-stained cheeks. The only thing we needed after plowing through a half rack was a washcloth and a nap.

A pulled pork sandwich was a pretty tangle of meat on a yellow Kaiser roll, with sauce served on the side so as not to mask the pork's flavor. The meat, dry rubbed and smoked 10 to 12 hours, had beautiful blackened-pink fringes. It was tender and tasty, though a tad dry; perhaps some of its moisture had leached into the bun.

Brisket on two occasions was neither sliced, pulled nor served in a recognizable hunk. Rather, it was a pile of chopped bits steaming in what Meyer later said was nothing but their own juices.

Meyer said people often ask for his recipes, but I thought the house-doctored pork-and-beans had a muddled flavor, the potato salad lacked salt and the coleslaw had a funky twang owing to yellow mustard and celery salt in its mayo-and-vinegar-based dressing. Perhaps they just suffered from comparison to the meats.

Of the sides, I particularly liked the battered and fried onion rings; the simple (and, thankfully, free of processed cheese) macaroni salad; and the sweet moist cakes of cornbread, which had the terrific fluffy-sticky texture of snowman-worthy snow.

No-fuss plating — meats in foil-lined baskets, sides in styrofoam cups, soda by the can with a cup of ice — suited the place's no-frills vibe.

Service was efficient.

Prices — $6 to $8 for a sandwich and a side; $9 to $13 for meatier meals — seemed a smidge high for the atmosphere (or lack thereof) but appropriate for the portions and quality of the meat.

Those ribbons on the wall aren't for nothing.