Denver’s Black barbecue scene is ‘slim to none.’ That could change

On a sunny afternoon in late May, a dark gray Jeep Wrangler pulled up outside Mississippi Boy Catfish & Ribs at East 33rd Avenue and Holly Street in Denver’s North Park Hill neighborhood.

The driver, Ty Allen, stepped out, walked to the back and lifted two pots of flowers from the truck bed before heading toward the front door. Allen is the owner and pitmaster of Mississippi Boy, a restaurant named for his family’s roots.

“My entire family is from Mississippi, but my parents and grandparents brought us up here in the late ’50s,” Allen said. “And so, essentially, I was raised here.” 

Mississippi Boy began as a food truck before Allen turned it into a full-service restaurant and bar that serves up a combination of live music, catfish, ribs, gumbo and other Southern treats.

“What I’ve always liked, what I’ve always enjoyed, is getting people together,” Allen said. “Food is a great reason to get folks together, more so than just alcohol. Food is a wonderful starting point and allows people, allows different folks, to be themselves.” 

That work now carries a heavier meaning. Denver once had a deeper Black barbecue scene, with restaurants such as Daddy Bruce’s B-B-Q, M&D’s Café, Pierre’s Supper Club, Big Chef BBQ and Winston Hill’s among the names residents remember. Today, many of those restaurants are gone, and the number of Black-owned barbecue businesses in Denver has sharply declined.

Adrian Miller, a Denver-based culinary historian, two-time James Beard Award-winning author and certified barbecue judge, said the city is in a low point for Black barbecue. His book, “Black Smoke: African Americans and the United States of Barbecue,” won the James Beard Award in 2022 for reference, history and scholarship.

“It’s definitely a downward period for Black barbecue in Denver,” Miller said. “Most of the restaurants that I had on my website, places to go, have closed.”

A few years ago, Miller said, he could point people to four or five Black-owned barbecue restaurants in Denver. Now, he says, Mississippi Boy is one of the few businesses with a permanent location that continues the tradition within the city. Allen sees the same shift.

“Slim to none,” Allen said when asked about the current state of Black-owned barbecue in Denver. “In the past, you had a number of places. You had Big Chef when I grew up, which was on Welton. You had House of Barbeque. They’re gone.”

For Miller, that loss matters because Black cooks have shaped American barbecue from the beginning. In his telling, the roots of barbecue stretch back to Virginia, where Indigenous cooking techniques, European colonists and enslaved Africans helped create what became Southern barbecue.

“Old school barbecue was digging a pit a couple of feet deep, a couple of feet wide, cutting a bunch of wood, setting it on fire, butchering whole animals, carcassing and then putting poles in them and cooking those animals over the heat, so somebody had to rotate it, and be cooking a sauce on the side and all that other stuff,” Miller said. “Huge labor, so given the racial dynamic in the South, guess who did all this work? Enslaved African Americans.”

That history came west, too. Miller said some of the earliest large barbecues he has found in Colorado were cooked by African Americans, including events that drew thousands of people. One of his favorite figures is Columbus B. Hill, a Missouri-born barbecue cook who arrived in Denver in the late 1870s.

“By the early 1880s, he’s doing large barbecues,” Miller said. “There was something called the Merchant Barbecue in 1882. 5,000 people showed up for this thing. On July 4, 1890, he did a barbecue for 25,000 people in front of the state capital because the occasion was laying the cornerstone for the state capital.”

In 1894, he cooked for 10,000 people at Greeley Potato Days. Four years later, a stock show barbecue meant for about 3,000 people drew roughly 30,000 and became national news.

“He’s my favorite,” Miller said. “I told the story in my book, ‘Black Smoke,’ and through my own advocacy efforts, I got him inducted into the American Royal Barbecue Hall of Fame a couple years ago. I found his unmarked grave at the Riverside Cemetery, so I brought him a headstone that has his image and quotes him as the best barbecue cook in the West, which is something he said. Because, you know, there’s a lot of bragging and barbecue.”

Denver’s more contemporary barbecue history also includes Daddy Bruce Randolph, the legendary pitmaster and philanthropist whose name now appears on Bruce Randolph Avenue. Randolph, who was born in Arkansas in 1900 and came to Denver in 1960, ran Daddy Bruce’s B-B-Q in Five Points for years.

“He was known for his barbecue but also just a big heart,” Miller said. “He would, every Thanksgiving, have free food for the community. He was a man of deep faith, so he’s inspired by the story of Jesus feeding 5,000. So that was his kind of way of doing that. And then also, not so much Denver, but his son, Bruce Randolph Jr., ran a restaurant in Boulder well into the 2000s.”

According to Allen, these figures are part of a tradition that Mississippi Boy is attempting to carry forward today. The restaurant’s barbecue is rooted in Central Mississippi, with additional family ties to Laurel, Biloxi, Gulfport and the Gulf Coast. Allen said that makes his food distinct from the Central Texas style that now dominates much of Denver’s barbecue conversation.

“We’re more influenced from central Mississippi,” Allen said. “So there’s a difference between the Delta and Central Mississippi. The Delta is sauce on. Central Mississippi, i.e., Chicago and Kansas City, is sauce off.”

Miller said that national barbecue trends have shifted heavily toward Central Texas over the past 10 to 15 years. That style, he said, is often associated with white and European immigrant traditions in Texas, even though Texas barbecue also includes Black, Latino and Indigenous influences.

“The epicenter of barbecue has shifted to Central Texas, which is the most white-centered barbecue style in Texas,” Miller said. “That’s the sexy barbecue right now.” 

In Denver, that dominance has coincided with a harder era for small restaurants overall. Miller pointed to rising energy prices, high meat costs, COVID-era disruptions and generational turnover. Many restaurants that opened decades ago were built around one owner or pitmaster.

“The problem being is that when the shadow of that one man established it, when he’s gone, it was gone,” Allen said. “(They) didn’t have a true succession plan in place, and a lot of times you want to pass it on to family, but a lot of times family didn’t have the same vision.”

Mississippi Boy is also tied to the revival of Holly Square, a longtime North Park Hill community anchor that was destroyed by arson in 2008 and later redeveloped. Allen said the neighborhood needed investment when he arrived.

“I’ve been here eight years, and we’ve been open six,” Allen said. “This neighborhood really needed a facelift. People used to come over here and call this a one-block slum until we came in, and so we made a huge change here.”

The restaurant now serves as both a dining room and a gathering space, with jazz and blues performances on weekends. Allen said Mississippi Boy has a performing arts license and tries to feature local artists alongside national acts.

That mix of food, music and community is part of what he believes Black-owned restaurants still bring to Denver. But he said Black and minority-owned food businesses need more support, especially when navigating city systems, permits, licensing and regulations.

“Our institutions could do a better job of highlighting Black entrepreneurs,” Miller said. “These entrepreneurs could use more resources. Not just straight money, but kind of technical training and mentorship to really be effective in what they do. Then the ever-present thing is just making sure people are at least in a position to get government contracts.”

Allen said he is working with Denver’s excise and licensing department, health department and fire department on a symposium for Black-, brown- and women-owned food trucks and restaurants. The goal is to help business owners understand paperwork, inspections and government processes that can feel intimidating or inaccessible.

“Our minority businesses as a whole are underserved in Denver, especially in the culinary industry,” Allen said. “Absolutely, but what the city identifies is that if you encompass more folks, then you bring in more revenue. So it’s hand in hand. The city benefits by opening doors there. It doesn’t benefit by trying to shut down our entities or preventing them.”

Miller said consumers also have power. Buying a meal is one way to support a restaurant, but so is purchasing a gift card, leaving a positive review, recommending a business to friends or hiring a Black-owned caterer for an event.

“I don’t want to put it all on institutions and the government, because I think actually probably the most powerful way we can change things is on the consumer side,” Miller said. “We need to be better about celebrating these places. And a lot of times, it’s even just going on social media … Be positive and tell people how much you love a place.”

Keeping Mississippi Boy open means upholding a tradition that is both personal and larger than Allen. He does not see himself as the last word on Black barbecue in Denver, but he understands the responsibility of being one of the few still doing it at scale.

“We’re the standard bearer right now,” Allen said. “And there’ll be another standard bearer after us. But right now, we’re the standard bearer of bringing food and entertainment, Southern cuisine. Heavy is the head that wears the crown. So it’s tough, but we enjoy the fact that this has been our responsibility.”