Bubba’s Good Eats was a surprise find in the middle of western North Carolina. We arrived when it opened, and it was bright, extremely clean to the point of gleaming, and clearly very supportive of the town’s baseball and football WHC champions. Green, green, green everywhere! Athletic banners, posters, signs, and framed photographs cover every square inch of paint, including the bathroom. It’s all local schools, junior and high schools mostly, and the Mountain Heritage High School cougars most prominently. The ambiance is small town, open-air sports hall, not a bar by any means, and not loud and quite casual. You order at the register, get your own drinks, bus yourself, and paper towels are on the tables – which I appreciate as I don’t consider potato skins a first class appetizer, and I do find myself with enough grease on my hands to give my car an oil change.
Now here, you can get something a little different on your potato skin. The appetizer is normally 3 potato skins for $5.99 and it comes with ranch and sour cream. But for a dollar more, you can add smoked pork and barbecue sauce. Because I wanted to try both, I asked if we could do half and half, (not knowing it was an odd number of skins on the plate at the time). But they did it no problem and actually made one of them – at least it was large – literally half normal, half barbecue.
So how was the barbecue pork potato skin? It seemed a bit low on sauce and a bit dry. The barbecue taste was too subtle and the taste experience was not very “wet”. It tasted more like I was just eating a regular potato with a few afterthought barbecue ideas on top. And because I live in the South where they take their barbecue very seriously – nay, fanatically – that was a bit disappointing.
The ratings here are for the regular skins:
Skin: The menu says it’s deep fried, and while some parts of the skin were crispy, most was not – and it was a large potato skin. I would not call it overall crispy.
Cheese n’ Bacon: Bacon seems to be pre-chopped “salad” bacon – i.e. the bacon that comes in a bag from food service vendors, so you never end up with crispy bacon unless they do something more with it. Otherwise, it’s limp bacon. The cheese was your standard Colby and Monterey Jack blend. The potato was tasty – and overall the flavor all together was good: salty, juicy, not overly cheesy but a warm, as-expected bite.
Proportionality: These were very large potatoes with a near-perfect bacon to cheese to potato ratio. I could have used a smidge more cheese (it’s hard for me to be satisfied with the cheese amount).
Value: Good, as it comes to about $2 per potato skin, and they were large. For barbecued pork, a dollar is pretty reasonable, though I wish there was more sauce.
Honorable Mentions: Still no scallions/chives. Where are my chives, guys?
Overall, they were good, but fall short on not being crispy enough. Would be a decent choice if they were!