Big Don’s Smoked Meats serves world-class American barbecue from a former auto wreckers − and scores a hat

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Is 2024 the year that industrial areas finally get their due as bona fide dining destinations?

East Vic Park’s Milford Park Commercial Centre, for one, is home to Youssef Sweets, makers of top-tier baklava and knafeh. Among the factories and warehouses in Welshpool lurks Perth Lebanese Bakery: a secret weapon for ace pita bread, atayef, lahmujun and other Arabic pastries.

O’Connor’s Garling Cafe & Lunch, meanwhile, serves banh mi and pho alongside hot chips, Chiko Rolls and other lunch bar standards. (Even Google classifies it as a “Vietnamese restaurant”.)

And then there’s Big Don’s Smoked Meat: a one-time auto wreckers workshop turned place of worship for American-style barbecue. While Big Don’s operates under a restaurant license, it’s not a restaurant in the traditional sense of the word, starting with its one-day-a-week (usually Saturday) trading schedule. You can’t just rock up and buy stuff either.

Instead, diners pre-purchase food from Big Don’s website when orders go live at 7pm on Tuesday and sell out roughly by 7:06pm. The menu changes weekly but most people just Slikpik it and order packs: a grab-bag of that day’s meats and sides that feeds around four adults.

Come game day, guests queue to get their food with wait times somewhere between 30 minutes and an hour. Some eaters take their food away, but most eat it in-situ, either in the car park sitting in the tray of their utes (“tailgating” in America) or plonked into BYO camp chairs in the airy Big Don’s warehouse.

In a town where (some) customers leave one-star reviews for small businesses where owners dare to go on holiday with their family, it beggars belief that Perth’s (at-times) fickle diners would jump through such hoops for a feed. Such is the reputation of Big Don’s food and the Pied-Piper-esque charisma of founder and namesake, Donovan Macdonald.

A former middle manager at Woolworths, Macdonald began his self-taught barbecue journey smoking meat in his backyard before graduating to pop-ups in bowls clubs and bottle shop car parks. At the end of 2022, Macdonald moved Big Don’s and his battery of nine wood-fired barbecue pit smokers into his forever home in Bayswater and spent 2023 fine-tuning his (already impressive) processes.

This hustle and having a permanent kitchen to work out off has paid serious dividends, starting with Big Don’s legendary beef brisket. The cornerstone of Texas-style barbecue – a regional barbecue style that relies heavily on pepper, Lawry’s seasoned salt and dry rub seasonings – Macdonald’s brisket is a juicy, beefy ode to patience and nailing the one-percenters.

The brisket cook is a two-day process that culminates in wrapping the beef in butcher’s paper and resting it overnight to slowly render the fat marbled throughout the (WA wagyu) beef.

It’s a bit like making a beefy self-saucing pudding. Like all the meat served here, the brisket is sliced to order. It’s not just a detail that guarantees maximum succulence: it also makes for brilliant theatre for guests as they edge ever closer to the front of the line where the open kitchen and fast-moving chefs chop, weigh and serve behind the safety of wipe-clean Perspex glass.

Macdonald’s brisket is a juicy, beefy ode to patience and nailing the one-percenters.

The lady working the pass bellows out orders – “listen up!” – and her comrades call back with the enthusiasm and bonhomie of a footy team about to play a grand final they’re overwhelming favourites to win.

This confidence isn’t unwarranted.

The pork ribs, another Big Don’s signature, are finger food of a higher order. Whereas many Perth grill and barbecue spots serve their ribs saucy and sweet, team Big Don’s uses smoke and spice to underscore the porcine savour of the ribs themselves. They’re also some of the biggest ribs I’ve ever gone toe-to-toe with. (The key, says Macdonald, is his supplier: a little-known craft butcher whose name starts with C and ends in ostco.)

Tender, just-unctuous enough slices of smoked pork belly further reinforce swine-kind’s affinity for coarsely-ground pepper (“14-mesh” in kitchen-speak) and low-temperature smoking.

While these headliners are deserving of their star status, I wonder if Big Don’s best-on-ground might be hiding in the chorus. House-made sausages – take a bow, general manager Dom Boult – put paid to any notion of mystery meat tomfoolery. I’ll spare you the schoolboy innuendo and instead say that snags with this much juiciness, heft and snap are things of beauty that should be treasured.

One week the offering might include a cheddar beef sausage made with wagyu trim and shot through with pockets of high-melt cheese. Another week there’ll be honey chicken numbers buzzing with the low hum of cayenne and red jalapenos. All are essential.

If there’s a sausage roll available as a special at the till, buy one immediately. The farce – the fancy French word for the filling – is succulent-as while the pastry is wonderfully short and has zero chance of gaining the Heart Foundation’s tick of approval.

Big-hitting flavours like these call for equally gutsy sides. Fiery cowboy beans are an event in themselves, while the world would be a better place if all supermarket delis carried Big Don’s elote pasta salad: elbows of macaroni in a gently spiced dressing, topped with the crumbly cheese cotija that features in Mexico’s famous street corn, elote. The dense honey-butter cornbread (a recipe obtained from Geelong’s Wildfire Craft BBQ) is another head-turner, although you’d be forgiven for assuming this brick of golden, calorific deliciousness was a
dessert.

Admittedly, The Big Don’s experience won’t be for everyone. Maybe you like your dining rooms with a little more razzle-dazzle and a little less ’90s warehouse rave energy. Maybe lining up for an hour just isn’t viable for you. Maybe your idea of a suitable portion size of veg is more than just a handful of – admittedly great – house-pickled red onions and quartered jalapenos. (Some guests, I noticed, brought their own salad to dinner). I get it.

But based on the response to Big Don’s first service of 2024 last weekend, Perth eaters obviously reckon this kind of relaxed, family-friendly night out is the best thing since sliced-to-order brisket.

Big Don’s might have its roots in American barbecue tradition, but laying siege to trays of slow-cooked meat – a meal that, financially, socially and nutritionally, needs to be shared – in a room filled with groups, grown-ups, girls on tricycles and live music from a talented local muso, is a shared experience that feels so spot-on for Western Australia.

We’re lucky to have Big Don’s, Perth. Has the (food) media always appreciated and accorded these sorts of places the attention they deserve? I’m not sure. Is 2024 the year these establishments finally get their due as bona fide dining destinations? I sure hope so.