As your meal arrives at this US-style barbecue joint, staff tie a plastic bib around your neck (motto: ‘bone appetite’). They also hand you a stack of branded wetwipes bearing the legend ‘messy pig’. And with good reason: CRS’s signature dishes are piles of ribs that vary from small baby back racks to gigantic beef bones that look like they’ve been hewn from a dinosaur. The sticky, saucy meat is packed with fatty goodness and blackened charcoally bits that taste like pork crackling. After you’re finished, you’re not going to look pretty.
It’s a fun, casual eatery packed with trendy post-industrial decor (lightbulbs mounted in egg whisks, drinks racks made of burnished copper piping and so on). It’s slightly too brightly lit to be a place to a linger, and the odd non-rib-based dish can be underwhelming (there’s something a bit 1980s about a portion of deep-fried pickles that includes cauliflower and carrot). For big hunks of nice, smoky flesh, though, this is a solid option.