The brisket arrives on butcher paper, and there’s a moment before you pick it up where you just look at it. The bark is nearly black, the fat cap glistening in a way that suggests someone actually paid attention to time and temperature instead of just slapping it in a smoker and walking off. That moment, right there, is what Sugarfire has been delivering consistently since Mike Johnson opened the original Olivette location back in 2012.
These days there are several outposts around the region, but the Olivette spot on Olive Boulevard — a strip-mall address that has never once tried to dress itself up — remains the reference point. The line forms before they open most days, and on weekends it snakes outside. This is not a place that apologizes for making you wait, and after eating there you understand why people keep coming back for more of the same inconvenience.
The menu is long in a way that could easily become unfocused. It doesn’t. Johnson has a background in fine dining — Niche, before he went the barbecue route — and that training shows in the daily specials, which tend toward the unexpected: smoked lamb shoulder with harissa, brisket tacos with pickled red onion and cotija, a smoked beet salad that has no business being as good as it is. The rotating specials are chalked on a board, written in that enthusiastic scrawl that either means someone cares or someone’s been told to perform caring. At Sugarfire, it’s the former.
The core menu holds up without any of that flourish. The pulled pork is smoky and moist without being soupy. The burnt ends are irregularly sized, crusty on the outside, yielding in the middle, and gone from your tray before you’ve made a decision about sides. Get the mac and cheese, which is richer than it has any right to be, or the smoked corn if it’s on the board. Skip the coleslaw if you’re not into sweet; it leans that direction pretty hard.
Pricing is what you’d expect for good barbecue in 2024 — not cheap, but not outrageous. A two-meat plate with two sides runs around sixteen to eighteen dollars depending on your choices. Brisket by the pound is around twenty-two. The specials can push higher. Plan on spending twenty-five dollars a head if you’re eating like a reasonable adult and not just doing reconnaissance.
What makes Sugarfire worth calling out, beyond the obvious fact that the food is good, is that it has not coasted. Plenty of barbecue spots hit a moment of local fame and then quietly start declining — the smoke gets lighter, the bark gets thinner, the sides get pre-made somewhere else. That hasn’t happened here. The place still feels like it’s being run by people who would be embarrassed to serve you something mediocre, which in the barbecue world is rarer than it should be.
Go on a weekday if you can manage it. The weekend crowds are enthusiastic but dense, and the dining room — a cheerful, mismatched chaos of vintage signs and long communal tables — is more enjoyable when you’re not pressing elbows with strangers. Arrive hungry, bring cash as a backup even though they take cards, and do not skip the burnt ends just because they might run out before you get to the counter. That’s precisely the right reason to get there early.
