Bg's Main Event
 Rittman, Ohio         Date of Visit  09/23/12         http://bgsmainevent.com/ 

If you don’t count fast food (sorry, "quick service") restaurants there are maybe three of four restaurants total in Rittman. Our breakfast at the Depot was pretty good so we thought we might exhaust the rest of the city since it won’t take that long. We definitely would have returned to the Depot to try the lunch/dinner menu but they are closed. Bg’s isn’t. We parked right across the street where apparently every Sunday their pit sits in front of the bar belching porky smelling smoke into the atmosphere. Pollution I can get behind.
 

Crunchy Even If Swimming In Butter

Inside Bg’s is definitely a bar with some restaurant mixed in. Darts seem to be the draw in addition to the adult beverages with a single pool table a few tvs and a high tech jukebox. The Steelers are on most of the sets as the electronic dart machines tally up some friendly competition leading to league play. I could tell you a lot about the interior of the place…unfortunately.

Between the service and the kitchen I had more time to study Bg’s than I had to study for my licensure exam. The kitchen seems to prepare one order at a time, completing a table before starting on the next one and we sat for an uneasy hour twiddling. I had cash ready to leave on the table for the beverages and was ready to walk for fifteen minutes…trying to convince Steph to join me at another restaurant…when our dozen wings, handful of fries, already cooked ribs and sandwich and scoops of preprepared sides were plopped onto paper plates and then plopped on our table. Which one of those do you think took an hour? Distressing. Not the server’s fault again. What was her fault was dropping off our beverages and while nearly tripping over us a dozen times, dashing to and fro, never seemed to notice us again for an hour. Sad.
 

If you are looking for a place to drink that will eventually get you some vittles to keep you in the game, sure. If you want to eat, Bg’s will disappoint. I think the reason the remaining BeeGees look so wrinkled and crusty is they ate at Bg’s once for a laugh and left 30 years older. I think people were into Disco when we ordered...my memory is getting a little hazy after all this time.

So back to the food. Six wings twice, a pulled pork sandwich and ribs. Sundays again is chicken/ribs day at the bar but they were out of chicken…hence the sandwich. The ribs are overdone but have a decent amount of smoke, a serious improvement from our last outing at Charlie’s Tragic Rib Hole. The sauce is a single note sweet tomato affair which needs some layers to find any sense of maturity. The pulled pork was a worry. We have had some very poor versions of the stuff but Bg’s again provides a perfectly average chop with I’m assuming the same simple sauce. There won’t be a line for BBQ around the corner here…except maybe for the chicken. Could that be why they were out? Probably not.
 

The beans were every bit as bad as Charlie’s. Thin, watery, mush. More bean soup than baked beans. Horrible lack of effort. The cole slaw and the potato salad certainly appear to be a relatively generic store bought bucket type which tastes just fine but isn’t anything you would remember. The fries were also pretty standard. The wings were actually good enough to interest me in traveling back to Rittman. With a thin crispy crust very similar to Louie’s in Akron, they arrived screaming hot in little baskets. Half of the limbs were dusted with shakey Parmesan cheese and reclining in a pool of melted butter or margarine but still managed to keep the crisp. The dry rub which had been recommended by someone online was actually very good. Rangy flavors with even a just detectable note of sweet made for interesting and delicious wings. Worth the wait? No. Hell No! If you happen to be playing darts, or if your car broke down in Rittman and Triple A can’t make it for quite a while. Enjoy some wings.