Rapid City’s slow cooking love affair with barbecue ignites

Ruth Allison remembers her initial reaction when she was first
approached about managing the new Dickey’s Barbecue Pit in Rapid
City.

“When they told me they wanted to open a barbecue place in Rapid
City, I just looked at him and laughed,” Allison said.

Allison’s reaction was rooted in the on-again, off-again
relationship between Rapid City and its barbecue joints. Never a
regional food specialty, local barbecue places have tended to come
and go in the past decade in Rapid City faster than you can smoke a
rack of baby back ribs.

In 2005, HOTexas Bar-B-Q opened in the former Ponderosa building
across from K-Mart on East North but didn’t last. Neither did
Adventures in Barbecue at 208 E. North St. One of the more famous
local names, Art’s Southern Style Smokehouse BBQ, closed up its
store on East North in 2006. The replacement in that space was
Black Hills Barbecue, which didn’t last very long. In 2007, Black
Hills BBQ was sued by the former owner of Art’s for allegedly using
its confidential sauce recipe. When that shut down, Mike’s BBQ
opened in the same location in September 2007. That business also
closed.

But Allison isn’t laughing any more. The success of one large
national barbecue chain and the launch of another in Rapid City has
changed her mind. She has been the general manager of Dickey’s ever
since it opened its doors in May 2010. Business is good, and the
coming competition with Famous Dave’s BBQ, the newest national
chain to enter the barbecue business in Rapid City, is welcomed,
Allison said.

“We more or less set the trend, so Famous Dave’s can slide on in
now,” Allison said Wednesday, half tongue-in-cheek.

Famous Dave’s BBQ will hold its official “rib cutting” at 10:30
a.m. Monday, Nov. 14. It opens its doors for business in its
Rushmore Crossing location at 11 a.m.

“We use a slab of ribs instead of a ribbon,” owner Casey Ryan
said.

The two big chain barbecue restaurants are “totally different,”
Allison said. Famous Dave’s is a large sit-down restaurant with
indoor and outdoor dining that is known for its atmosphere and
extensive menu. Dickey’s has counter service and drive through,
with inside seating for 70 people, and does a booming catering and
take-out business. “We’re what we call ‘fast casual’ dining,”
Allison said.

Part of the spotty performance of past barbecue joints in this area
may be attributed to a notoriously high failure rate for
under-capitalized restaurant start-ups, she said.

“A lot of those were family-run businesses,” Allison said. The
business model that a national franchise like Dickey’s or Famous
Dave’s provides can be a better formula for success, she
said.

And because barbecue has not traditionally been part of South
Dakota’s food culture, Ryan and Allison agree that customers often
have erroneous ideas about what, exactly, it is.

“A lot of people haven’t been exposed to real barbecue. That’s
what’s good about Famous Dave’s. It takes the best of barbecue from
around the country and introduces people to it. We have Texas-style
brisket and St. Louis ribs,” Ryan said. “It’s not just
unidentifiable meat on a bun.”

“When people say, ‘I don’t eat barbecue,’ … I don’t think they
really understand what barbecue is,” Allison said. “Hey, it’s just
not pork slathered in a sauce and thrown on a bun. It’s not just a
steamburger.” She contends that the long-smoked poultry, pork and
beef cuts are nutritionally healthier than most people
realize.

Local barbecue aficionado Mike Hagen thinks Famous Dave’s and
Dickey’s draw customers precisely because they are well-known
chains.

“I think Rapid City embraces national chains,” Hagen said. “When we
get something that Denver or Sioux Falls has, people get excited
about it. They’re a novelty.”

Hagen is a Famous Dave’s fan who began doing his own barbecue out
of necessity when he moved to Rapid City in 2006 after living in
cities where the chain restaurant operated. “I love Famous Dave’s.
It was a staple for me, weekly. They have a really good product
line. I can tell you five or six things on their menu that I love,”
he said.

He has noticed the high failure rate of local barbecue spots and
blames the tight profit margins inherent to barbecue. “It’s
expensive to do,” Hagen says of good barbecue.

Matthew Cline, manager of the small, 10-table Jake’s Barbeque, at
320 E. North St., admitted to being “a little worried” about the
barbecue behemoth opening on Monday but said his restaurant’s
specialty barbecue sauce and its hickory and apple smoked meats had
loyal customers. “Maybe a little worried that it will cut into our
business, but I really don’t think we’re going to lose too much
business, because people really like our barbecue,” Cline said. “I
think we’re going to be here to stay.”

Ryan’s restaurant may be part of a large national chain, but the
way Famous Dave’s makes barbecue hasn’t changed since it began as a
one-shop shack in 1994, he said. All of its menu items are smoked
on site with hickory wood — some for 10 hours.

“Granted, it’s a chain, but it started off as a one-shop place, and
the processes are still the same. There’s an art to it, and it’s
pretty involved,” Ryan said.

Contact Mary Garrigan at 394-8424 or
[email protected]. 

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