While barbecue is an immensely popular style of food, and an , there are very few national restaurant chains that specialize in it. There are several reasons for this. Firstly, barbecue is a difficult style of cooking to master and staff require extensive training before they can turn out briskets and ribs of a sufficient standard.
This means, unlike McDonald's, new staff cannot be rapidly trained thus limiting the rate of expansion. A more significant barrier to national expansion is how the preference for various barbecue styles and sauces varies from region to region. Historically, these different preferences make it difficult for barbecue chains to grow beyond their local area.
For example, a chain that does well in Texas might struggle to sell its wares in Kansas or Tennessee. National barbecue chains are few and far between. However, .
The quality of these chains is not to be sniffed at and it is this quality, along with a growing acceptance of all types of barbecue, that will likely see some of the following regional barbecue chains breaking out on a national scale sometime soon. City Barbeque At the time of writing, City Barbeque has 74 restaurants spread across nine states, and it plans to reach 100 locations by the end of December 2025. This is an impressive number given that chain only opened its first restaurant in 1999.
City Barbeque has grown thanks to a menu that spotlights a variety of barbecue styles and regional dishes from St. Louis Ribs to a Nashville Hot .
