Hanging with Chester in the New Land of BBQ

Evenly spaced on the dining room walls of the main dining room in Chester’s Barbecue is a series of framed black and white photos of various smokehouses and barbecue-eaters from generations ago and from across the country. The antiquated nature of the images — along with the accepted notion that most any barbecue restaurant worth a damn is probably in some dilapidated shack or another — makes the pictures almost seem like a Walker Evans exhibition if he’d focused on his favorite rib joints rather than the Great Depression.

Located in a Groton strip center, Chester’s is neither dilapidated nor a shack, but it’s hardly Monte Carlo real estate, either. In that spirit, the photo gallery is a noble aesthetic — an homage, maybe, to what might be called Real BBQ.

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