Top 10 Barbecue Restaurants in Missouri: Best MO BBQ Spots

When it comes to American cuisine, few regions of the Lower 48 are as attached to any given food stock as the Show-Me State is with the great national pastime known as barbecue, with Missouri joints dishing out some of the best-smoked meat in the land.  

Whether it be Kansas City-style pulled pork or St. Louis-style ribs, there’s no wrong choice when it comes to picking the right Missouri BBQ item for your Super Bowl LIX party, which got us thinking about which joints in the state are scoring the best online.  

What are the best barbecue spots in Missouri? BetMissouri.com broke from Missouri sports betting updates and scoured the internet and tracked down the best BBQ restaurants in Missouri for 2025.  

Top 10 BBQ Restaurants in Missouri

When broken down by search interest scores, it seems like Missouri residents can’t get enough of their St. Louis-style BBQ, with both of the Show-Me State’s top-ranked joints located in the Gateway City, with Pappy’s Smokehouse and Bogart’s Smokehouse taking home top honors in Missouri, while Kansas City legends Q39 and Jack Stack Barbecue were the next spots up statewide.  

Throw in Springfield’s City Butcher and Barbecue at No. 5, followed by Branson’s Danna’s BBQ & Burger Shop and you have the majority of the Missouri barbecue top 10 covered, with joints like Salt + Smoke of St. Louis, Char Bar, BB’s Lawnside BBQ and The Original Arthur Bryant’s BBQ of K.C. finishing off the statewide rankings for 2025.  

Missouri’s favorite BBQ joint by search interest total also happened to be the winner of The Food Network’s Best Ribs in America contest, in addition to winning best BBQ in Missouri by Southern Living magazine, while the runner-up choice touts succulent pork and apricot bruised ribs as being among their culinary calling cards. 

Top 10 BBQ Restaurants in Kansas City

*Utilized TripAdvisor customer reviews for ranking.

In the Crossroads, you’ll find that top choices like Q39, Jack Stack Barbecue and Char Bar are all applying new spins on age-old meat smoking techniques, while age-old BBQ standards like BB’s Lawnside BBQ, The Original Arthur Bryant’s BBQ and Danny Edwards BBQ all slot in at spots four through six in Kansas City, representing the bulk of this year’s list.  

Other top choices in Kansas City include Country Road Ice House at No. 7, followed by Smokehouse Barbecue, L.C.’s BBQ and Gates BBQ in spots eight through 10, illustrating how deep the love of smoked meat goes on the western flank of the Show-Me State, with reviewers on TripAdvisor giving high marks to each of the joints listed above.  

Top 10 BBQ Restaurants in St. Louis

*Utilized TripAdvisor customer reviews for ranking.

Over in St. Louis, the top BBQ joint when broken down by TripAdvisor was Pappy’s Smokehouse on Olive Street, with the Midtown smoked meat emporium beating out Bogart’s Smokehouse and Salt + Smoke for the top spot in the state’s largest city in 2025, while Sugarfire Smoke House and The Shaved Duck were the other restaurants to make the top five.  

Throw in five more BBQ slingers, in Dalie’s Smokehouse, Adam’s Smokehouse, Roper’s Ribs, Gobble Stop Smokehouse and Bandana’s BBQ, and you have the full rundown of the top picks on TripAdvisor for St. Louis barbecue, speaking to the city’s excellent breadth of barbecue slingers, from the banks of the mighty Mississippi River west towards the bluffs on the banks of the Missouri River. 

Whether you're into the food of the Show Me state or awaiting the legalization of sports betting, we have all the latest news for you at BetMissouri.com. Be sure to keep tabs on our best Missouri sportsbook promos page as we will have exclusive deals once they are legal and live.  

Author

Christopher Boan

@cgboan

Christopher Boan is a lead writer for BetMissouri.com, specializing in covering state issues. He has covered sports and sports betting in Arizona for more than seven years, including stops at ArizonaSports.com, the Tucson Weekly and the Green Valley News.