East Coast BBQ has closed it's doors. A decent BBQ that made a bet that serving just spare ribs (no babybacks) was good enough, battled continuous problems with their location and landlords and finally decided that it wasn't worth the risk. With Smokey Bones just down the road serving alcohol and showing all of the games, East Coast was relegated to being a take-out place with too high rent to compete with other BBQ take-out shacks.
East Coast gained notoriety through its "relationship" with New Times, which may hurt more than it helps. They won numerous "awards" including the 2011 "best BBQ" award. It just goes to show that you can't pump up a restaurant artificially; once people have tried a place they have their own opinion and they aren't going to go back no matter now many awards a place wins. Winning bogus awards can give a place a false sense of confidence that may cloud their understand of how the public really views their product.
The company also had no website or facebook page, which required them to spend more money on marketing than other places. When they first opened, they had a big political sign in front of the counter. I remember thinking to myself, "why alienate half of your customer base so early on"? Maybe those from the "other" party never came back.
Owner Dave Audet says that they'll be resurfacing again "somewhere to the North", hopefully by the end of the year.