B-Side Social

B-Side Social keeps two large-format platters at the centre of its menu, and they pull the kitchen in opposite directions. One is the Pitmaster Board, a survey of the smoker: beef brisket, pork belly, chorizo, baby back ribs, and a rotating smoked feature, plated with sides and meant for two or three to share. The other is the Signature Seafood Boil, a hands-on heap of snow crab, Canadian lobster tail, shrimp, and crawfish tumbled with smoked sausage, mini red potatoes, and corn. A contemporary American smokehouse on one plate, a Louisiana-style boil on the next, each built to be worked through by a table rather than finished by one person. The whole operation runs out of a late-Victorian brick house on Augusta Street, in Hamilton's Corktown, where B-Side opened in 2024.

Around those two anchors, the menu keeps mining the same smoke-and-Southern seam in smaller formats. The sixteen-hour beef brisket comes on its own under bourbon barbecue sauce, the long cook and the bar's whiskey leanings arriving on one plate. Burnt ends, salt-and-pepper dry ribs, a smokehouse pork melt, and a brisket mac and cheese push the smoker into starters and comfort plates, while bacon-and-jalapeño cornbread and a jalapeño cheddar dip fill in the edges. From the Creole side there is jambalaya and a set of Louisiana crab cakes bound with Cajun spice and a Meyer lemon–tarragon remoulade. The Oklahoma smash burger stacks double brisket-and-chuck patties with bacon, old cheddar, and caramelized onion; a butter-poached lobster roll arrives in a top-sliced potato bun with lemon aioli and chives. Bourbon pecan pie closes the range roughly where the whiskey list picks up.

The bar reads as a deliberate echo of the kitchen rather than an afterthought. An American-whiskey and bourbon list sits behind food whose defining sauces and long cooks lean the same direction, so the pairing the menu nudges toward — brisket against a bourbon pour — is really the restaurant describing its own palate. Beer, wine, and cocktails fill in around it, and a daily happy hour from four to six trims the price on oysters, draught, and featured cocktails. What the food and the drink share is a preference for the generous over the precise: broad boards, shared boils, sauces laid on with a heavy hand. B-Side is less interested in the plated single serving than in the spread a group picks over for a couple of hours.

The setting does its own work. The house dates to 1895, part of Corktown's late-Victorian brick stock, and B-Side treats it as more than a backdrop. On Friday and Saturday nights a live act starts around ten, and the kitchen holds until two in the morning once most of the neighbourhood has gone dark. Early in the week it behaves like a straightforward dinner house; late on a weekend it turns into something looser, the same address carrying a quiet Tuesday pour and a loud Saturday set without changing costume between them. Reservations run through online booking, and groups larger than twenty move to an event inquiry — a sign the place expects to host the whole table, not just seat it.

That range is easiest to read through the week B-Side builds around it. Tuesday puts wine bottles at half price and pours eight ounces for the cost of five; Wednesday pairs two-dollar oysters with Guinness; Thursday takes a quarter off the Pitmaster Board; Sunday does the same for the seafood boils. The specials work less like discounts than like a map — each one points at a different corner of the kitchen and hands a table a reason to keep coming back to it. Order the board on a Thursday with a couple of friends, leave a boil for another Sunday, chase the brisket with bourbon somewhere in between, and the menu stops reading like a list and starts moving like a rotation.