Covington, GA 30014
770-784-1401
http://www.cowboysbarbecue.com/
After no luck finding BBQ anywhere between Atlanta and Augusta on a Monday night, I was able to find a little BBQ spot off of I-20 in Covington later that week. Cowboy's BBQ is easy to miss since it's attached to a small gas station on Highway 142. BBQ might be the only type of food that can be more promising when attached to a gas station. I decided to pull over and give this two year old BBQ joint a try. The stale cowboy decor was a little offsetting at first, but I made sure to try and keep an open mind for their food.
Once inside the faux corny corral, I pulled up a chair and placed my order with the sweet waitress behind the counter. I'd try the baby back ribs, pulled pork, and brisket today. With a name like "Cowboy's" they better have some decent brisket. I ordered my brisket from the moist end to give them their best shot at quality BBQ. I noticed the smokehouse outside that housed either an Ole Hickory or Southern Pride smoker the best I could tell (owner later confirmed it was an end-loading Ole Hickory). I waited about fifteen minutes for my manly meat plate to arrive.
Hmmm...Something was off when I got my food. This pulled pork had clearly been BBQ'ed, but I just couldn't tell how many days before. It tasted as old and dry as it looked. After one bite I moved on to the ribs and brisket. The first bite of brisket was Ok, but the huge pieces of fat left hardly any other meat to try. I can say that there was some kind of nice salty bark on the outside though. The ribs were sweet and smoky but dry and old. The membrane snapped when you bit into them like a piece of sausage. This meal might have actually been decent had I arrived the day before when it was pulled out of the smoker.
Disgusted and frustrated, I asked the worker in charge of the pit when this food came off the smoker. He confirmed that it was all yesterday's meat. I commend his honesty, but was still frustrated that they would serve this to customers. There are a lot of ways to effectively use yesterday's BBQ (burnt ends, Brunswick stew, baked beans, etc.). Throwing it an oven to reheat and serve isn't one of them. He told me he was sorry and would get "some good stuff" for me. The good stuff was foil wrapped pork that was thrown into a crock pot for ten minutes. I don't get it. They don't get it. There are couple sauces to choose from here if you'd rather not taste the old meat. My favorite was the honey BBQ, but the spicy and mustard sauces were pretty good too.
On my way out I was able to run into the owner, "Cowboy." He told me some story about how competition BBQ wasn't for him and how much Southern Pride smokers are overrated. I said my goodbyes, never to return. See ya' around, Cowboy.
Last November, our friend Dantigravity came up with a concept for something that had potential to be life-altering – Scotch Pong. It’s like Beer Pong, but much classier. Dantigravity thought D.Rough and I should host this event, since we have the room to pull off a party of this magnitude.
If you’re unfamiliar with Beer Pong, I’ll give you the basics: You set up a triangle of red solo cups at each end of a long table (like a bowling pin configuration). Then, one member of each team throws or bounces a ping pong ball and tries to get it into the cups at the opposite end of the table. If the ball goes in the cup, that opposing team has to drink what’s in the cup. Simple, right?
Now let’s look at some numbers. Beer generally has 3-7% alcohol by volume. Scotch has 40-50% alcohol by volume. Do you see where we are going with this? I had to come up with some way for people not to DIE at this event. I thought we’d go with just a shot of scotch in the cups, rather than a mostly full cup. Also, we’d only use 6 cups, instead of 10 cups. Still too deadly, in my opinion. This event is a double elimination tournament, so participants would be playing a minimum of two complete games. And people sometimes forget to drink water during these events, so I needed to add water into the game. That lead to three cups of water and three cups of scotch for each team. 
The entry fee was simple for this event – bring a new or full-ish bottle of whatever scotch you would like to drink. We had one team accidentally bring Irish whiskey and we would not let them participate. However, KingDavid had brought a bottle of Islay Mist (clearly the Arbor Mist of Scotland), and happily donated it to the team so they could play. Thank you, KingDavid, for your generous donation.
We had eight teams participating in this double elimination tournament with only one team swap out when one team went home ill (flu-related, not alcohol-related). Awkward Taco was under the weather to begin with, and coincidentally, The Kool-Aid Kids arrived just as Awkward Taco forfeited the game.
We had The Highlander and Braveheart showing on the television to highlight the Scottish heritage of this event. We also realized that we had inadvertently scheduled the event on Robert Burns’ (famous Scottish poet) birthday. What better way to honor his fine work than with a Scotch-drinking event.
We had a crowd of designated drivers, spouses, live-tweeters, photographers, and revelry-lovers. This group provided much cheering and heckling and even some food to help participants absorb alcohol. I’m so glad we had spectators to witness the shenanigans.
There were numerous upsets and nail-biting rounds. Many matches came down to one cup for each team. That cup is extremely difficult to drop a ping pong ball into, especially using glass cups. 
(Thanks for the photo, Spike!)
The inside is tastefully decorated with various Asian artifacts and decorations. It wasn’t overwhelming and it wasn’t sparse. There are also some randomly placed tables in the room with wine bottles on them – likely to indicate to people that they should drink wine at this classy place. And it honestly is one of the classier Asian restaurants we’ve been to. 
With the groupon, we had to spend a lot. That lead us to the Pu-Pu Platter (which we just love to say anyway). It’s got an egg roll, two cream cheese wontons, two chicken satay skewers, 2 coconut shrimp, and some tempura vegetables. Perfect. Fried, fried, and more fried! I got the Triple Crown and D.Rough got the Thai Basil Chicken. We asked our server about the spice level here and she indicated it was more of a “Minnesota spice”, rather than a normal person spice. So we got ours spicy.
The appetizer sampler came out first and surprisingly, we one of the best pu-pu platters we’ve ever gotten. Everything was perfectly cooked, which I know isn’t easy to do with tempura vegetables. The egg roll was perfectly crispy and filled with delicious cabbage and maybe some pork? Really quite good with the dipping sauces provided. The satay had some sort of glaze on it and was extremely tender, and went perfectly with the peanut dipping sauce. The coconut shrimp was sweet and crunchy and fully cooked, and the cream cheese wontons weren’t greasy at all, somehow. The tempura vegetables were just the right finisher and we ended up dipping them in all of the remaining sauces.
The Triple Crown is chicken, BBQ pork, and shrimp in a ginger and garlic sauce, stir fried with a bunch of veggies. I was honestly surprised at how flavorful this was. I thought it was going to be the standard garlic sauce and frozen vegetables I’ve gotten at other places, but this place woke me up a little bit. The vegetables were warm, but still firm and crunchy, and you could actually taste each one of the different meats. The sauce could have been a little bit spicier in my opinion, but I’m not complaining. I was able to eat it without crying or sweating, so I was thrilled with it.