Burnt Out BBQ: A Valters Veteran Hauls a Brisket Trailer Around Salt Lake

The Salt Lake food-truck and -trailer scene has been on a long expansion since the mid-2010s. The Cup Bop empire, the Waffle Love trajectory, the dozens of taco trucks that started in parking lots and built into bricks-and-mortar storefronts. What's harder to find in the Salt Lake mobile-food economy is a chef-driven BBQ trailer — a trailer where the operator's resume reads like a fine-dining-restaurant menu and the smoker's running because the chef wanted to pivot away from the saucepan and into the firebox.

That's what Burnt Out BBQ is. The owner is Colin Almquist — and the resume is the story. Before the trailer, Colin spent the past decade as an executive chef in two of Salt Lake's serious restaurants: Valters Osteria (the Italian operation downtown that anchored the post-2010s Salt Lake fine-dining wave) and Kimi's Chop & Oyster House (the Holladay seafood-and-steak operation that has held a steady reputation for a decade and a half). He also worked as a private chef and ran catering on the side. Then he burned out on kitchen work — which is also, he's said, where the trailer's name came from. Burnt out on the line. Burnt out on trying to register other food-truck names. Burnt Out BBQ.

The trailer is now parked at 3232 South 400 East, Salt Lake City, UT 84114 as a base of operations, runs lunch and dinner schedules at various Salt Lake catering and pop-up spots, and bookings come through Instagram @burntout_bbq and the catering page at burntoutbbq.square.site. The Google rating sits at 4.5 stars across 10 reviews as of May 2026 — a small public review sample, but the customer messaging is consistent. The Yelp listing was updated in June 2025. The Facebook page (BurntOutBBQSLC) carries the catering schedule and weekly drop locations. The Roaming Hunger and StreetFoodFinder listings track the rotation. Burnt Out is not yet an institution. It is a chef-driven operation that's at the earlier stage of the Cup Bop trajectory — the moment when the food is dialed but the customer base is still being built.

What the Burn-Out Pivot Did to the Cooking

The standard food-truck BBQ operation in Utah runs on a Texas-style brisket-and-rib menu, a Costco-rack rib smoker, and a sauce program that copies one or two of the canonical regional styles. Burnt Out is doing something different. Slow-smoked pork and brisket, locally sourced, paired with the kind of handheld preparations that a fine-dining-trained chef would build before they would build a standard rib platter. Sandwiches. Quesadillas. Tacos. Brisket grilled cheese. Brisket mac and cheese. Sauces and sides made from scratch.

Each of those preparations tells you something about the operation. The brisket grilled cheese is a chef move. Most BBQ operators sell brisket as a sliced platter, on a bun, or as a chopped sandwich. A grilled cheese stack — sourdough or country bread, two cheeses, the brisket sitting in the middle, the pan-griddled finish browning the bread and rendering the cheese into the meat — is a fine-dining-or-bistro construction. The Valters background shows in the move. The brisket mac and cheese is the same idea translated into a side-dish format — a baked mac with the smoked brisket folded in, the cheese sauce coating both, the brisket adding the smoke rather than carrying the dish.

The tacos and quesadillas are where the brisket shows up most often in the trailer's day-to-day rotation. A Salt Lake taco operator who can land a brisket taco — corn tortillas, the brisket chopped and lightly resauced, a salsa verde or a chile colorado on top, the cilantro and onion finish — is delivering a different proposition than the standard al-pastor-or-carne-asada Salt Lake taco truck. The brisket-on-corn-tortilla move is the bridge between Texas barbecue and Mexican comal cooking, and it's one of the moves a chef-trained operator with a smoker will reach for before they'll reach for the standard rib platter.

The scratch-made sauces and sides are the second tell. A standard food-truck BBQ operation buys its sauce from Sweet Baby Ray's or runs one house sauce that's been calibrated for the lowest common Utah palate. Colin's running a sauce program — multiple house sauces, the herbs and the acid balanced for the specific protein, the sides built from scratch rather than purchased pre-made. The reviewers flag the brisket grilled cheese as a hit and the brisket mac as the order. Both descriptions are consistent with what a chef-driven operation would prioritize.

The Valters and Kimi's Pedigree

Both of Colin's former kitchens are worth understanding to understand the trailer.

Valters Osteria opened on Main Street in downtown Salt Lake City in 2010 and ran one of the city's most consistent Italian programs for the better part of a decade — handmade pastas, the wood-fired pizza program, a wine list that brought in the downtown business crowd at lunch and the Salt Lake fine-dining scene at dinner. Working as executive chef at Valters meant running the pasta-making, the pizza-fire timing, the seasonal-menu rotations, the staff-discipline on a downtown service line. It's the kind of resume line that translates directly into the operational discipline a food trailer needs to scale — knowing how to hold quality through a long service, knowing how to cost a menu, knowing how to handle the one busy hour that breaks most amateur operations.

Kimi's Chop & Oyster House in Holladay is the other half of the Colin resume. Kimi's has been one of Holladay's restaurant anchors since 2014 — seafood-and-steak, an oyster program, a serious dry-aged steak program, a wine list. Working as executive chef there meant running the protein program at the highest end of the Salt Lake culinary economy. The oyster handling, the dry-age timing, the steak-over-fire technique. Colin spent years on those line. The smoking-and-rendering technique that anchors a brisket comes out of the same fire-and-time discipline that runs a dry-aged ribeye. The Kimi's pedigree shows in the brisket.

Together, the two restaurants gave Colin a fine-dining-line resume that almost no other Utah BBQ operator has. R&R BBQ was started by competition pitmasters. Pat's Barbecue runs on a multi-decade Salt Lake BBQ family lineage. Hog & Tradition is a music-venue kitchen pivot. Most Utah BBQ operators come from BBQ. Colin came from the line at two of Salt Lake's serious fine-dining operations, and the trailer is what happens when that resume meets a smoker.

Catering, Pop-Ups, and the Trailer Economy

The Burnt Out operation runs primarily as catering and weekly pop-up rotations. The Salt Lake food-trailer ecosystem has a regular rhythm — trailers post at the Saturday Downtown Farmers Market in Pioneer Park, anchor the Wednesday Liberty Park markets, run the lunch shift at the Sugar House office buildings, do private events on the weekends. The base address at 3232 South 400 East serves as the prep kitchen and trailer storage; the actual customer-facing operation rotates by week.

The Burnt Out catering page on Square handles private events, weddings, and corporate parties. Instagram (@burntout_bbq) and Facebook (BurntOutBBQSLC) post the weekly schedule. The trailer also picks up rotational shifts on the Roaming Hunger and StreetFoodFinder food-truck networks. Anyone wanting to find Burnt Out on a given night should check Instagram first.

This is the typical earlier-stage trajectory for a chef-driven Salt Lake mobile-food operation. The Cup Bop founders built six years of trailer reputation before the bricks-and-mortar locations opened. Waffle Love did the same. Burnt Out is at the earlier end of that arc — the moment when the food is dialed, the catering is steady, the regulars know the trailer, and the next phase will likely be a fixed location somewhere in the valley if the brand keeps building.

Planning Your Visit

The base address is 3232 South 400 East, Salt Lake City, UT 84114. The phone is (385) 267-9356. The Instagram is @burntout_bbq. The Facebook page is BurntOutBBQSLC. The catering / online ordering page is burntoutbbq.square.site. The published service window is roughly Monday 11 a.m. – 5 p.m. and Wednesday through Friday 5 p.m. – 8 p.m., with the weekly schedule rotating by location — confirm the day's spot via Instagram before driving. Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/BurntOutBBQSLC

What to order: the brisket grilled cheese is the obligation — it's the dish that signals the chef pedigree most clearly and the most-flagged item in the reviews. Add the brisket mac and cheese as the side. Order the brisket taco if it's on the day's menu — the corn-tortilla translation of the smoked brisket is the trailer's regional crossover move. Pull a pork sandwich if you're with someone who wants the second protein on the rotation.

This is why we live here. Salt Lake's BBQ scene has been quietly building a depth bench over the past five years — the Pat's-and-R&R standard at the top, the Top Pot and Burnt Out and Pica Rica generation building behind it, the Hill Country and Texas-transplant operators expanding the regional vocabulary. Burnt Out is the chef-driven entry into that bench. A Valters and Kimi's pedigree. A brisket trailer. Slow-smoked pork. Tacos and grilled cheese and mac. Worth checking out, especially if you can catch the trailer at a regular weekly spot.