Cufflinks or flannel: This upscale Lexington BBQ joint refuses to stick to the script

County Club, the 50-seat smoked-meat restaurant on the edge of Coolavin Park across from West Sixth Brewing, tends to defy pigeonholing.

From a certain distance it has a trendy, even fancy vibe, with an eclectic menu, progressive food sourcing practices and a sleekly industrial design aesthetic — high, gastropub-style tables seemingly bolted to the polished concrete floor — that exude relaxed sophistication. (Things get even more relaxed in the warm months, when the restaurant seats another 50 people outdoors.)

And yet, at its heart, County Club is a barbecue joint. It stakes its strongest claim to diners’ loyalty by satisfying every serious carnivore’s deepest craving with succulent mounds of chopped pork butt and sliced beef brisket, all of it smoked for between 11 and 13 hours with Kentucky white oak.

However much you appreciate the composed salads, the elegant cocktails and the arty chandelier, you come for the meat. (And maybe the poutine, about which more later.)

On the other hand, County Club isn’t just any barbecue joint. It’s a barbecue joint you can go to wearing cufflinks or a flannel lumberjack shirt. Whatever.

“Sometimes the media and people from travel agencies get a little confused and don’t know what to call us, where to put us,” says chef Johnny Shipley, who started County Club with co-owner Chesney Turner in 2013. “Are we a fast casual? Are we casual upscale? Are we a barbecue joint? Everyone has different opinions, and they seem to change with every year and every person you ask.”

What’s Shipley’s own opinion about what category County Club falls into?

“I think it falls into several,” he says with a chuckle and a shrug.

“It’s a barbecue restaurant, but as with most small, independent restaurants, you grow, you try different things,” says Shipley, a slightly scruffy, knit-cap-wearing veteran of the Lexington restaurant scene whose resume includes stints at Dudley’s, Buster’s Pool Hall and, most recently, Table 310. “Our core is barbecue, which means we smoke meat, then apply flavors to it. But it’s not as simple as that sounds.”

It sure isn’t. County Club makes its own versions of four classic American regional barbecue sauces:

• A smoked hot sauce most associated with Texas border towns;
• A slightly edgy tomato-based sauce straight out of Kansas City rib joints;
• A thin, zingy vinegar-and-pepper sauce of the sort Shipley recalls from the whole-hog, cinder-block barbecue pits he once researched in the small towns of North Carolina;
• The yellow mustard-based sauce prized in central South Carolina.

As delicious as these are, it’s arguable whether they’re needed at all. The meat, from Duroc heritage-breed pigs and Black Angus cattle sourced from Creekstone Farms in Kansas, is raised humanely and without antibiotics, leaving it tender and naturally flavorful.

And the base flavor of the smoke, which permeates and perfumes the meat as it slow-roasts, gets your taste buds tingling from the aroma alone. The restaurant’s most-ordered item, the smoked brisket sandwich ($11), therefore comes unadorned except for cornichons and house-pickled onions, both functioning mostly as garnishes.

You don’t need much more than that — except French fries. Make that French Canadian: County Club is one of the few Lexington restaurants that offer poutine, a decadent Montreal speciality that tops the fries with gravy and cheese curds (locally sourced, naturally, from Kenny’s Farmhouse Cheese, which started making its now-popular curds only after Shipley started ordering them). True to form, he puts his own spin on the dish, in this case with a vegetarian version of the gravy.

“A lot of people don’t know what it is,” Shipley says of the poutine. “We get lots of questions.”

The menu is full of smaller mysteries and surprises as well. The appetizers, for example, include Vietnamese fried Brussels sprouts and house-smoked pork belly sticks; the roasted crispy sweet potato, with miso butter and toasted nori, is a featured side.

Then there are the $10 cocktails, which change every three months and tend to come with cheeky names like “Hot Tamale, Cold Today” (tequila, mezcal, agave, lime, lemon, elderflower) and “Don’t Tiki to Me or My Son Ever Again” (bourbon, madeira, cream, nutmeg).

So what kind of place is County Club? Does it matter?

“I don’t want to put too much focus on what I’m trying to do as a chef,” Shipley says. “I want to get the point across that we’re just doing great-quality food that’s fun to eat in a fun environment. That’s plenty.”

County Club

Hours: 5-10 p.m. Tue.-Thu.; 11 a.m.-10 p.m. Fri., Sat.; 11 a.m.-3 p.m., 5-10 p.m. Sun.; closed Mon.

Call: (859) 367-0263

Online: countyclubrestaurant.com

Where: 555 Jefferson St