Move over Texas pit masters, there’s a new brisket boss in town. According to a recent ranking by Yelp, Phoenix favorite Little Miss BBQ is the best barbecue restaurant in the United States.
Not only did it best the country’s regional heavyweights, including world-famous Franklin Barbecue in Austin and iconic Joe’s Kansas City Bar-Be-Que in Kansas, but it topped all the others in order to make it to the top spot on the Top 100 list. Compiled by Yelp’s “Elite Squad,” the ranking was based on the volume and ratings of reviews on the business-review website.
Little Miss boasts two Phoenix locations. The first opened in 2014 as a tiny takeaway spot on University Drive in South Phoenix. The larger, dine-in restaurant on North Seventh Street in Sunnyslope, which comes complete with a bar and full-service all day, debuted in 2018. The reviewers praised the restaurant’s brisket, ribs, and turkey carved to order, as well as its friendly staff and laid-back setting.
With so much good barbecue in the country, we had to find out how this 10-year-old operation trumped the others. So, we sat down with Little Miss owner Scott Holmes to learn how he helped transform Arizona’s desert capital into a nationally renowned bastion of barbecue.
Were you surprised when Yelp’s list came out and Little Miss BBQ was No. 1?
It was a welcome surprise. Both restaurants have been really busy since the announcement, and it was absolutely insane when it first came out. The University location sold out that first day, and their sales have been up 50 percent since then. But we have a great team who takes a lot of pride in what they do. They care tremendously and pay attention to all the little details.
Little Miss serves Central Texas-style barbecue. How is that different from other barbecue styles?
It’s all about the cooking method and flavorings. Central Texas-style is very simple. A lot of people there cook with post oak, and they’re seasoning with just salt and pepper. They’re really trying to let the flavor of the meat come through.
If you go to Kansas City, pork is very dominant. The folks there are proud of their pork ribs and pulled pork. They also like their brisket burnt ends. They’ll cook the lean brisket, cut off the point and cube it, and then put it back into the smoker with a bunch of barbecue sauce, so it’s very sweet. Everything there has sauce on it.
Whereas in Central Texas, you can eat the meat without the sauce. If you start with a great ingredient and cook it right, it will shine.
You’re known for your brisket. What makes it so special?
The brisket is my baby. It’s the hardest thing to cook, it’s expensive, and you can screw it up so easily. When [my wife] Bekke and I first started cooking competition barbecue, we practiced on chicken thighs, then ribs and pork butt, and kept working our way up to the more expensive meats. Finally, we had to suck it up and decided to spend $1,000 on brisket and figure it out. Ever since then, I’ve had a massive appreciation for it.
We source a really great Holstein brisket from California. It’s prime, all-natural, just a really incredible brisket. So we try to start with a great product. Then for our team, we have one full-time butcher and about five other people who know how to trim all the briskets and other meats.
At the University location, we have six people on our pit crew, and around seven here in Sunnyslope. They all care so much about what they do. And that extends all the way up to the front, where we have our cutter. We put our cutters through a six-week training program.
It’s pretty intense because we try to buy the best meat, we try to trim it as well as we can, we cook it as well as we can, but then the cutter has the ability to ruin the entire process. They might serve it too thick. They might serve it too thin. They might serve a brisket that needed a little bit more time on the smoker. So the cutter is a super important role.
How long do you cook your meats?
Briskets run anywhere between 8 and 12 hours, depending on the size and internal marbling. Usually, the more marbling in the meat, the faster it cooks. For the pastrami, it takes anywhere from 9.5 to 12 hours because we’re injecting it with brine, and all that water has to evaporate out of it. The pork ribs take about 4.5 to 5 hours, and the beef short ribs take roughly 8 hours. Turkey breasts only take a couple hours.
What types of seasonings do you use?
When I started, I wanted to be as simple as possible, so I just used Lawry’s Seasoned Salt and black pepper, and that was it. But there are a couple ingredients in Lawry’s that I don’t like, so I said, “Hey, let’s create our own seasoning salt and use that as our base.”
So now we use that as well as coarse black pepper and kosher salt. We do a two-stage process. We brine all of our briskets for about 12 to 18 hours, and then we season with black pepper and kosher salt right before we put it on the smoker. And then we have a slight variation for our pork ribs and a slight variation of that seasoning for our turkey.
I think the biggest issue people have when they cook meat is that they don’t use enough salt. We try to balance it so that it’s seasoned enough but you don’t pick up the salinity in the beef or pork or whatever it may be. We do tend to go a little heavier on the seasonings than a lot of people do, but it doesn’t mask the flavor of the meat.
In addition to the brisket, Yelp praised your turkey. What’s the deal with that meat?
People love our turkey. We use an all-natural turkey breast from Michigan. It’s cooked really slow, around 200 degrees, and seasoned with our mix that has a little bit of sage and thyme and a touch of rosemary. It’s super moist and juicy with a slight smoke flavor and a touch of herbaceousness. If you were to ask the team what their favorite meat here is, most would say turkey.
For folks who’ve never been to Little Miss BBQ, what do you recommend they try?
I’m gonna go with brisket all day. If it’s Thursday, definitely try the Pastrami. We’re curing it in-house, and it’s fantastic. My other go-to is the Jalapeno Cheddar Sausage. We’re using roasted jalapeños and hand-diced sharp cheddar cheese. People also love our beef short ribs. I don’t recommend one for a single person, but they’re great if you’re sharing.
We also sell a lot of the pork belly burnt ends. Currently, we only offer them on Sundays at Sunnyslope, but we’re going to be moving them to every single day, probably in a couple weeks. I also like the pork ribs, and we sell a ton of pulled pork, but for me, I have to go with the brisket. It’s what we’re known for.
Little Miss BBQ really served as a catalyst for Phoenix’s growth in the country’s barbecue scene. Did you ever think the city would be mentioned in the same sentence as Texas or Kansas or North Carolina?
A rising tide lifts all boats, right? When we first started, we had folks like Stacy [Phipps] of Stacy’s Off Da Hook BBQ and Soul Food and Joe [Johnston] of Joe’s Real BBQ come in, and we just talked barbecue and techniques.
Owen [Hartman] of NakedQ was a fantastic customer of ours before he decided to open up a barbecue spot, and the guys from Caldwell County BBQ came in all the time. One of the guys who used to work here is over at Wild Barbecue, and one of the first pit guys I ever hired is down in Tucson running Bashful Bandit Barbecue. There are so many great places now, and it’s awesome to see how the quality keeps coming up. It’s really nice to see the recognition that everyone is getting. I love that.
Little Miss wasn’t the only barbecue spot in the Valley that got recognition. Also check out: No. 8: Caldwell County BBQ, 18324 E. Nunneley Rd., Gilbert; No. 36: Eric’s Family Barbecue, 12345 W. Indian School Rd., Avondale; No. 61: Smoking Tiger Korean BBQ, 1919 S. Gilbert Rd., Mesa; No. 83: Hapa Food Co., 5235 E. Southern Ave., Mesa; and No. 88: Bobby Q, 3154 E. Camelback Rd., Phoenix.
