Quest: Best BBQ 
We're on a quest to find the best place in Chattanooga to get a plate of pulled pork -- day in and day out. As you can guess, there are a heckuvalot of barbecue joints in town and it is going to take us some time to visit them all. But we're up for the challenge, so each week we'll be visiting at least one place in town and grading them. If there are places you want to be sure we know about and visit, please tweet us or email us: chattfoodcritic@gmail.com.
Our criteria:
We're sampling only pulled pork plates for our purposes. We might taste test ribs too, but that's not what we're basing our grades on. We have five categories that we rate, with each category receiving a possible 4 points. The better the grade, the higher the score. So if a plate received the highest grade possible it would get 20 points.
The five categories we grade on:
1. Is it tender and juicy?
2. Does it have a good smoky flavor?
3. Is it seasoned properly?
4. Does it taste good without sauce?
5. Does it taste good with sauce?
We've hit six place in town already, and you may not like what you see -- almost all of them have 'failing' grades...
Porkers = 8
Shuford's = 8
Purple Daisy = 7
We were shocked to find all of these places (above) scoring very poorly in every category, but especially in seasoning and tenderness.
Sadly, we found a couple franchises to do better than our local guys, but not by much:
Sticky Fingers = 10
Smokey Bones = 10
They mainly gained points in the tenderness and seasoning categories, but could obviously improve in every aspect.
By this point we were pretty disappointed, and had pretty low expectations, but we got surprised by:
Sweeney's = 12
The tenderness and taste without sauce were the areas that gave Sweeney's the bump over the others -- so far. But still, if you look at percentages, even the highest score is only 60% of the possible points. That would be a D in elementary school.
So we still have a lot of sampling to do, but we want to find a place where we can consistently find a great plate of pulled pork. Clearly this is an area of BBQ that not many restaurants are paying attention too... Yet we still have hopes of finding a high scoring 'cue!
More to come! Keep checking up on our reviews.
