This place is aptly named Smoke Berkeley which isn’t that kind of hinting at doing some other method of smoking? Well, so they do bbq in this food stop and if you’re one of those folks that like to speed down San Pablo, you’ll likely miss it. Location wise, it is located adjacent a do-it-yourself car wash place. Keeping that in mind as a landmark will help you get there more consistently, given that the building color is even the same as the carwash.
So we stopped here as a birthday lunch, hoping to get exposure to some new local bbq. On yelp you’ll probably get this place as a search hit for “gluten free” because they do have gluten free cookies on their menu, however, unfortunately that particular day they did not have any gfree variety, just the normal cookies.
At order time I stated that we’ve never been there before and could use some guidance for gfree menu items. It was an older woman behind the counter with a slight southern drawl responding to us, which she kindly ran down the items, coincidently basically everything I expected to be gfree. The wife and I chose the same item, Rib dinner. She opted for the potatoes side and I went for the chili as my side. One thing to note is that the cornbread is normally served with the dinner plate and are NOT GFREE!