Las Vegas is a city of steakhouses — and with good reason. The business model is practically bulletproof in a place like the Strip, where tourists congregate with their wallets at the ready. Inside, meat and red wine are offered freely in dim corners and deep booths, giving customers a sense of importance and celebration, before being rolled back out the front door to the casino floor. Like the Rock in a cashmere sweater, Vegas steakhouses offer excess, beef and a thin veneer of luxury.

Lately, though, Las Vegas has begun to embrace a new kind of cow. Less sizzle, more smoke. The city’s barbecue scene, while still young by Texas, Kansas City and even California standards, has grown significantly in the past half decade.

“Vegas has a melting pot of barbecue,” said Dusty Ardoin from a long wooden table inside Rollin Smoke Barbeque, the Highland Drive joint he co-owns with his brother and father. “You can go to one stop,” he said, referring to the city at large, “and get a bunch of different styles. And that’s very unique for barbecue in America.”

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Indeed, the Las Vegas barbecue scene is growing — and, in some ways, morphing into its own unique ecosystem. From slow-smoking celebrity chefs to dusty, locals-only joints deep in the suburbs, the scene here is a high-low mix that allows room for everyone, simply because it isn’t trying to be defined by tradition. If there is an emerging Las Vegas barbecue “style,” it’s built on quality across regional boundaries, yes, but also a bit on showmanship and the happiness of occasional excess. Just like those famous Strip steakhouses.

The hand-drawn mural inside Humo Barbecue in Las Vegas.

It helps, too, that greater Las Vegas remains something of a modern boomtown, having grown by more than a million people just in the last quarter century while still largely staying true to its hands-off municipal approach. Suffice it to say: There’s something going on in the desert these days.

A new BBQ tradition emerges

When Ardoin first got to Las Vegas in 2012 from his small town of Magnolia, Arkansas, he found a city that had the “best food in the world,” except for smoked meat. He missed the Arkansas-style barbecue he’d grown up eating, and so he set about changing that, first with a street smoker that he and his brother John would lug around on a trailer with a pickup truck. The pair plied the city’s side streets with slow-smoked pork sandwiches, served with coleslaw and the state’s thin, slightly sweet and vinegar-heavy sauce, plus ribs, chopped brisket and burnt ends. Unlike Texas, pork remains the prevalent protein, along with smaller game like chicken and slow-smoked turkey.

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Rollin Smoke’s early menu worked. Today, the family has multiple restaurant locations, including a space at the Las Vegas Raiders’ Allegiant Stadium and a partnership site in Arizona. 

Customers queue up inside Rollin Smoke Barbeque in Las Vegas. 

Years ago, the scene was much slimmer. While various strip mall operators and street-level cooks have been smoking meat here for many years, John Mull’s Meats, which opened in 1954, is widely credited with bringing the first high-profile barbecue spot to Vegas. Originally just a historic butcher shop located in a dusty, semi-residential pocket of northwestern Las Vegas, Mull’s grew from smoking sausage for others into a fully realized standalone barbecue ranch called the Road Kill Grill.

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The place is still busy today — when it’s not too hot, Saturday lines form before lunch —and has all the classic trappings you might expect at a throwback barbecue joint, from the picnic tables and American flags to the handmade wooden sign in off-kilter lettering that spells out GRUB SHAK........

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