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For those of you who haven't visited, 4Points has been in an old, red brick home on South Main Street in Winterport since 2011, and every day they smoke what they smoke, and they sell it till it's gone. Inside that brick building are several picnic tables surrounded by red and white walls covered with framed pictures and posters of blues musicians and witty sayings, like "appalling vegans across New England."
The waitress whom I remember from at least one other visit is a real pistol with a sharp sense of humor and an Oklahoma accent both of which leave humble Mainer's like me smiling. Busy as she might be, she is very attentive, "Hun," and could be heard shouting out from the kitchen to regular customers. The menu includes several choices of meats including Andouille sausage, pulled pork, ribs, brisket, smoked turkey, and if you're lucky, the burnt ends of the brisket. They keep the sides simple and traditional with just BBQ beans, cole slaw, potato salad, and potato chips. Of course there's cornbread (or a bulky roll) with every meal. To drink, they have soft drinks, quite a few draft and bottle beers, and wine.
This night, I hemmed and hawed, and thought about getting the sausage and turkey, but as you can see in the picture, finally decided to order the ribs + 1 meat meal, in my case, brisket, with a Belgian white ale to wash it down. Now, before you grumble about why I got a white ale, let me explain myself. Next to food like this, lager is practically water, and if you like water, well, get yourself a glass. Anything dark and moody might be good by itself, but too much malt or hops would just clash with the smoked meat and sauces. The white ale was perfect with it's light citrus taste to cut the fat and a bit of body to stand up to the meat without competing flavors. And if you're still wondering, just ask the guy who sat down next to me as I was about to leave and took my advice, much to his delight, to order an Allagash White to go with his dinner.
First, the brisket: tonight most of it was tender, juicy, and almost impossible to keep on the fork, with a nice dry rub crust. In short, perfect, but there were one or two thicker slices that were on the dry side. The ribs were delicious, but just short of the fall-off-the-bone perfection I look for but rarely find aside from when I cook ribs on my own. 4Points serves their meats with the five different sauces I mentioned in the opening. The Memphis sauce is thick, sweet, and smoky, and is a deluxe version of what most people around here think of when they think BBQ sauce. The Kansas City sauce isn't as sweet as the Memphis, and has tang on the nose that doesn't make it to the tongue. The Carolina sauce has a mustard base as you'd expect, but not the gritty mustard taste that I've seen in some. The Texas sauce is more fluid, and made me think of liquid dry rub, a contradiction, of course, and the Maine XXX is the sweetest sauce of them all with a kick of heat and what tasted like apple sweetness to me, but that could have been some cider vinegar.
While the cornbread, NOT the sweet kind, wasn't as light and fluffy as I would have liked, the BBQ beans were wet, sweet, and smoky with bits of smoked meat in them. The slaw as fresh, crisp, and on the sweeter side with celery seed just like I like it.
While BBQ is all the rage in these parts--I can think of seven places to get it within an hours drive--4Points does it better than most. Now that most of our summer guests have left, you probably don't have to worry about them running out of what you need, but on the weekends, I'd recommend working up an appetite and going in the middle of the afternoon just in case. Now, as you may have noticed, the last part of their name is "Blues House," and while I haven't been to any of their shows, they do have an events calendar of regular shows of mostly blues and R&B including a few local bands, but also including some Grammy winning musicians. Definitely worth a listen.
Food: ★★★☆☆ Ambience: ★★★★☆ Service: ★★★★☆
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(207) 223-9929
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