Darden Restaurants opened its first Smokey Bones restaurant in Orlando in 1999, hoping to do for barbecue what the company had previously done with seafood and Italian food. By 2007, it had 129 locations.
And then Darden pulled the plug. Frustrated with the brand’s performance, it closed 56 of the restaurants and sold what was left to the private-equity firm Sun Capital. By last year, with 61 locations, Smokey Bones was sold to the chain collector Fat Brands for $30 million. Fat Brands’ primary reasoning: It felt a lot of the Smokey Bones restaurants would make great Twin Peaks locations.
Barbecue may be a popular American cuisine. But it is not as chainable as Italian food or even seafood for that matter. And Darden is hardly the only restaurant company to find that out over the years.
Just this week, in fact, we wrote about Dickey’s, the country’s second-largest barbecue chain by sales. The company is struggling with low unit volumes and franchise disputes. Nearly 20% of its U.S. locations shut down over the past year, leaving it with the lowest number of units it’s had in a decade.
Famous Dave’s, the largest barbecue chain by sales, closed more than 9% of its restaurants last year. Its system sales remain 7% below where they were in 2019. The company is now owned by the Canadian brand collector MTY Group.
Barbecue chains on the Technomic Top 500 Chain Restaurant Report grew sales by less than 1% last year.
It’s a little bit better when we factor out Dickey’s and Famous Dave’s, with sales up 3.7% last year. Yet in the sector as a whole, sales among that group are up just 4.4% since 2019. Not one barbecue chain is in the Top 100 and it’s a good bet that there will be none in the Top 150 when the 2025 Top 500 is released next year.
It’s not like the sector is devoid of brands making some noise. Sales at City Barbecue increased 13.4% last year. They grew 12.3% at the fast-casual Mission BBQ and 13.5% at the full-service Jim ‘N Nick’s Bar-B-Q.
Why can’t barbecue work as a chain? Lots of reasons. Foremost: There are a lot of ultra-strong local and regional brands that draw long lines of customers until they run out of barbecue.
Think of barbecue in the U.S., and a chain will rarely come to mine. You’d think instead of Franklin Barbecue in Austin, Texas, Lewis Barbecue in Charleston, South Carolina, or Q39 in Kansas City.
These days, most cities have popular barbecue joints that attract locals in droves.
Barbecue itself is difficult, because most of the dishes take time, as in hours. Such concepts typically need pitmasters and other specialists who understand the way to properly smoke a brisket or a rack of ribs.
It can also be difficult to manage just how much food you might need for a typical day, which can increase the chance that the operator will compromise on quality to ensure they have enough supply.
Consumers just don’t eat barbecue all that often. Customers then will often look for good barbecue when they do go get some. And they will usually think of one of their favorite local places when they do want some.
That, plus the difficulty of managing the day’s supply, can put pressure on brands to add items to the menu that are easier to prepare and have an everyday appeal.
Famous Dave’s, for instance, has a hefty selection of burgers on its menu along with Bakers Square pies. Smokey Bones, meanwhile, has broadened its menu over the years to feature a lot more steaks and burgers and other sandwiches.
Chains often place pressure on themselves to add new items to their menu in a bid to lure more customers, believing that a cool new appetizer or creative new protein can solve whatever sales ills they have. If that innovation strays too far from the barbecue core, it can diminish the brand’s reputation for the specialty.
Maybe more to the point: Barbecue restaurants operate on a different plane than many other concepts. They’re smokey and informal. The food itself is messy, at best. That can create a culture clash in a chain world that tends to prefer things neat and tidy and upgraded.
The best barbecue restaurants we’ve ever been to typically don’t look all that good. One of our all-time favorites, now closed, was in a nondescript shack on a rural road in Charleston. The smokers were out back. And the pitmaster, wearing a dirty apron, delivered the food right to the buffet.
Meanwhile, years ago a former CEO of Famous Dave’s once required managers to wear suits on the job. Nobody should wear a suit to a barbecue joint.
None of this is to say that barbecue cannot work on a national scale. The restaurant world has ultimately figured out how to chainize a lot of cuisines, such as Asian, that had been difficult to do for years. It goes to reason that someone will eventually crack the barbecue code. It just hasn’t happened yet.