Supersmokers Closing

This was an up and coming barbeque chain in St. Louis and Southern Illinois, headquartered in O'Fallon, Illinois. They had won first prize in some national barbeque contests and did catering around the midwest at ribfests and large barbeques. They suddenly announced that they were closing last week.

It seems like barbeque restaurants have a higher mortality rate than others. This one was quite good. They shouldn't have failed.

I thought they were headquartered in Eureka? That's the original location, at any rate....

The official story is that they've been hurt badly the last several years by a combination of factors, including the 2001 economic crunch, the recent death of one of the founding partners, and too-rapid expansion.

Personally, I think their quality had tanked, too. You never knew the last few years if you went in to one of their locations if you were going to get good barbeque or bad barbeque. A lot of folks switched to Bandana's (another semi-local barbeque chain) when they realized this - when Supersmokers was on top of their game, they were better, but Bandana's has been more consistant. You could -sometimes- get fantastic bbq at Supersmokers, but you could -always- get good bbq at Bandana's.

Still, I'll miss Supersmokers. I fully expect the founder to open up at least one small location somewhere after he's financially stable again. But it may be a few years....

We visited the O Fallon, IL Supersmokers 3 times as we breezed by on I-64 in the past year or so. One time was quite good. The other two were NOT.
I guess we picked the wrong time to show up on those two visits. None the less I am always sorry to see a business go under, if there was any chance of it pulling its "stuff" together.