Bounti Fare BBQ
All You Can Eat in Adams
By: Pit Bulls - Sep 30, 2011
Bounti Fare Restaurant
200 Howland Avenue
Adams, Mass. 01220
413 743 0193
At 200 Howland Avenue on the strip between Adams and North Adams, just before or after Goodwill, depending on which way you are driving, is Bounti Fare Restaurant.
It’s a big, cavernous place with a warren of rooms, lounge, and functions space.
Sometimes you drive by and it’s packed with cars jammed in all around.
For the locals it’s a popular spot for those big receptions and events. They cater both on and off site.
But on a typical weeknight it seems tough to lure in many diners.
It’s not the kind of high on the list priority destination for a cozy dinner.
Unless you are hooking up with say a hundred of your nearest and dearest.
So there is usually a sign out front with an all you can eat deal on the buffet or a special on lobster.
On Thursday’s it’s All You Can Eat BBQ for $12.95.
Great price. Hard to beat.
And you know how the Pit Bulls just love BBQ.
We’re on a mission searching the Berkshires high and low for great ribs.
But it was an off night so Cisco went solo while Pancho was home with Sweetypie.
We talked about this at the 99 the other day.
Pancho knew the joint but took a pass and wished me luck.
It rained last night.
Hey, what else is new?
Which meant puddle hopping the ponds in the parking lot.
Inside there were a few customers.
Looking about the décor seemed vintage 1960s, or perhaps 1950s.
Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.
Ou non.
The locals don’t seem to mind.
The buffet was set up in the lounge.
There was a lot to choose from.
For starters four different salads: Greens, cole slaw, potato salad, and pasta salad.
All fresh and quite nice actually. We tried a bit of each.
Then an array of chafing dishes.
The first had mac and cheese as well as baked beans.
The mac and cheese was dry and generic. We passed on the baked beans which looked right out of the can. At an authentic barbecue joint baked beans can be just stunning.
Next we encountered corn on the cob. Which you never, but never, eat out of a chafing dish. It’s either fresh steamed or not at all.
Next to it. Get this. Sliced Italian sausage with peppers and onions. I sampled just a bit. Quite nice actually. But what the heck is that doing in a BBQ buffet? Good heavens.
So far so good as with guarded optimism we loaded a plate.
Then disaster struck.
The ribs, good grief, looked not nicely done but incinerated and given a funeral under a daunting slather of out of the bottle sauce. They looked like they had been prepared in a kiln rather than an oven. And who knows when or how long they had sat around.
More of the same with the chicken.
But we sucked it up and headed for the dining room.
The salads were quite nice especially the cole slaw and potato salad.
The essential point is that they were freshly made. Which was not the case with the embalmed chicken and rib.
The server failed to provide a steak knife. So it was a bit of a mess to hack at the slab of four ribs. The meat came off stringy and mostly tasteless. The burned on sauce just added insult to the injury. On a scale of one to ten these ribs were a two. Ditto the chicken.
After all we came for the BBQ.
Perhaps we should have come for the All You Can Eat salad bar. A safer bet.
Now in a funk we headed back to the buffet.
There we assembled strawberry (frozen and thawed) short cake with a fresh biscuit and real whipped cream (not out of a spray can). It was ok. Good, not great.
Bottom line.
If you are looking for cheap eats this is truly a bargain.
But for authentic BBQ, well, fuggeddahboutit.