This restaurant takes its name and some of its staff from the old take-out stand at the East Coast Grill, which preceded Chris Schlesinger’s expansion of the dining room and seafood offerings. The original was a helluva barbecue spot, and even its reflected glory in Waltham makes for some terrific eating. Although this is a blues venue on Friday and Saturday nights, we’re there for smoked meat and spicy trimmings.

You get the general idea from the "Smokin’ Bowl of Red Chili" ($5.95), topped with sour cream and grated cheese. It also comes with a slab of cornbread, so you could really call it a meal right there. The underlying chili is very spicy, but not loaded with tomato, and it’s based on smoked pork, so it has more chew and an extra flavor dimension. The basic rule of chili is that your own is the world’s greatest, and everyone else’s is unworthy of comparison, but Jake & Earl’s chili really is a decent second to mine. The yellow cornbread, interestingly, isn’t that good.

I don’t deep-fry, so Jake & Earl’s cooks have the field to themselves on spicy stuffed jalapeños ($3.95), and theirs may be the best. I’m always reading that jalapeño chilies aren’t actually very hot, but that all the heat is in the beginning of the taste. This theory falls apart when the chilies (four large ones), fried dry and crisp, are stuffed with a gooey cheese mixture that seems to embed the spice in your mouth for minutes. With Buffalo shrimp ($8.95), the act of immersing deep-fried shrimp (seven) in hot sauce tends to get enough oil into the picture to manufacture a burn against which blue-cheese dressing and token sticks of celery are hopeless.

Jake’s spicy gumbo ($4.95) isn’t quite as spicy as the chili, and it’s loaded with okra and tomato. The only weakness (besides the cornbread) is the andouille sausage, thin slices without a lot of garlic flavor. This is what happens in my house when I try to use a more healthful chicken- or turkey-based sausage. You need some fat to carry the garlic and meaty flavors.

Southern caesar salad ($7.95) probably takes the whole thing too far. The smoked chicken is okay, but the croutons are made from cornbread, and the dressing is brown and full of hot pepper and a little more smoke flavor. It wouldn’t be a bad effect, if you weren’t eating everything else smoky and spicy, but you are. So a real caesar salad would be a better contrast. "Earl’s Straight House" salad ($3.95) is a garden salad with some yuppie-looking mizuna greens for class, and no distracting smoke and spice. The Tex cobb salad ($7.95) is more shredded than diced, and includes pulled smoked chicken as well as carrot, bacon, onions, romaine, cheese, and such.

Cutting directly to the barbecue, we ordered the Bubba (pork, chicken, brisket, and ribs, $16.95) to check out the smoked chicken ($12.95/entrée, $6.95/pulled-chicken sandwich), smoked beef brisket ($12.95/$6.95), Memphis spareribs ($18.95), and pulled pork ($12.95/$6.95). The pulled pork is the absolute winner, as it often was at the East Coast Grill. The Memphis ribs are quite good, but the original Jake & Earl’s used to make them with an eighth-inch crust of sugar-pepper dry rub that was simply amazing. The brisket I found rather dried out and not that smoky. The chicken had a wonderful satiny texture from the slow cooking, but also surprisingly little smoke. There are three levels of sauce, spicy (which is darn hot but very flavorful underneath), house (which seems like a "lite" version of the spicy), and sweet (which is harmless).

Fried chicken ($12.95) is a vast platter, again nicely fried, with some milk gravy. I actually think a little more salt and pepper would do here. Grilled chicken ($12.95) comes with wonderful skin-on smashed potatoes, but the chicken — boned breast slices — was dried out and burnt at the edges. It helped to have a nice salad and fresh salsa on the platter. A "Burnt Ends" platter ($12.95) is a wonderful hash of chopped smoked brisket and spice, but lacked the crunchy character of true "burnt ends."

All these entrées come with a bewildering assortment of rather large side dishes. Collards are salty but good for you. Baked beans are dull; a slice of watermelon is just what you need; the coleslaw is above average; the dirty rice is relatively clean. There’s lots more, but portions of everything are so large here that you don’t need side orders.

In particular, you want to save room for beer, of which there are lots of interesting choices on draft and in bottles. Lemonade ($2) isn’t bad at all, and refills are included. Desserts are about four, counting all the ice creams (homemade up the street at Lizzie’s) as one dessert. The peanut-butter pie ($4.45) is a Southern classic, all sweet peanut butter just trimmed with a chocolate topping and a crunchy crust. "Mad Dog mango sorbet" ($2.95) is the sort of thing that ought to be locked up. Like the habañero lollipop I put down the disposal a few years ago, this stuff is a real hazard to young children. It looks like ice cream, and the first flavor is a very nice ripe-mango effect, but because the sorbet is physically cold, you don’t notice the spice of the habañero peppers until it’s much too late, and there is an instinct to quench the fire with more ice. I don’t think even a blues bar should encourage practical jokes.

That said, the owners of Jake & Earl’s — who aren’t Jake or Earl; if I remember right, Jake and Earl were dogs that lived in Schlesinger’s house — go in for joke posters in the bathrooms and on the walls and windows: BARBEQUE MAN GROUP is a clean one. HANNIBAL LECTER ATE HERE starts down the slippery slope. They also have some fine blues memorabilia, like the signed poster of Professor Longhair near our table. The rooms are tall, with yellow walls. The bar has a tin ceiling painted yellow. The background music is good blues, so the atmosphere is always a little raucous and a little desperate, as it should be.

Service early on a weeknight was very good. Our server kept track of a complicated order, got things out on time, warned us about portion sizes, gamely packed up the leftovers for two different destinations, and gave me two warnings about the Mad Dog mango sorbet. I can’t tell you who goes there to hear music, but Monster Mike Welch is a frequent performer. The management should also book Johnny A — his CD was perfect with the leftovers.

Robert Nadeau can be reached at RobtNadeau@aol.com