"Local food truck Smoking Kow BBQ’s new brick-and-mortar restaurant is poised to welcome smoked meat lovers this weekend. First-time restaurateur Dylan Kough tells Eater that he and his general manager, Paul Tecchio, handled much of the remodeling work themselves. The duo remade neighborhood Italian eatery Cafe Monti into a 20-seat barbecue restaurant featuring communal picnic tables, stained wood, brushed metal, and one gleaming white animal skull. 'It looks cool,' Kough says of the bony decoration hanging above the main dining room. One original piece of art featured at the restaurant is a black and white sketch of the D.C. area displayed on a chalkboard. Kough says he asked local artist Riley Sheehey to illustrate the areas serviced by his two roving Smoking Kow vehicles (black truck; white truck) while also highlighting the location of the new flagship restaurant. The remainder of the space is filled with the bare necessities required to operate a barbecue establishment: neatly stacked hickory logs to be fed into the wood-fired smoker; a self-service station stocked with assorted barbecue sauces and plenty of paper towels; light and dark colored picnic tables that Kough says he refinished by blowtorching and staining them to his liking; and the obligatory figurines showing where the smoked brisket, shredded pork, pulled chicken, and sausage served at the restaurant comes from on each respective animal. The new Smoking Kow BBQ, which is right around the corner from local barbecue chain Rocklands, is currently scheduled to open at 11 a.m. on Saturday, April 14." - Warren Rojas
