Casual Barbecue & Fireplace in Murray: The 32-Year-Old Storefront Quietly Powering Utah's Backyard BBQ Scene

This one's about the building, not a plate. Casual Barbecue & Fireplace has sat at 555 West 3900 South in Murray since 1994 — thirty-two years of selling smokers, gas grills, fireplaces, and the propane to run all of it to the same Salt Lake Valley pitmasters, again and again. The 4.6-star Google rating with 55 reviews isn't measuring a brisket. It's measuring a relationship.

Salt & Seek doesn't usually write about retail. We're doing it here for the same reason we wrote about BBQ Pit Stop a few miles up State Street: Utah food doesn't just happen in restaurants. A surprising amount of it happens on the patio, on a Saturday morning, on a smoker somebody had to buy from somebody. Casual Barbecue is the somebody for an awful lot of people in Murray, Holladay, Sandy, and Cottonwood Heights.

The Owner Who's Been Behind the Counter Since the Clinton Administration

The President and Director is Keith Deppe, and Keith has been running this storefront since the doors opened in 1994. That kind of operator longevity is rare in any retail category, but it's especially rare in a niche category like grills, smokers, and gas-line work. Most stores in this space either get bought by a big-box player or quietly close once the owner retires. Casual Barbecue did neither.

What customers consistently praise — paraphrased here from review aggregations rather than direct Google or Yelp scrapes — is some version of: "Keith is really knowledgeable in all facets of propane and natural gas configurations such as fireplaces, both internal and external, grills, smokers, etc." That's not the kind of compliment a customer leaves for a sales clerk. It's the kind they leave for somebody who actually talked them through a problem.

The technical fluency matters here. Anyone who's tried to convert a natural-gas grill to propane, or run a gas line from a basement utility room out to a backyard patio, knows that the difference between a clean install and a leaking, code-violating mess comes down to whoever's giving the advice. Keith is that whoever for a meaningful slice of the Salt Lake Valley.

What's Actually on the Floor

Casual Barbecue is a hybrid in a way that's increasingly uncommon. The retail side covers grills, smokers, and fireplaces — both interior and exterior. The service side covers gas-line installation, propane refill, BBQ repair, and fireplace service. That combination is the moat. Big-box stores will sell you a smoker, but they won't run a propane line to your patio. Specialty fireplace stores will install a hearth, but they won't talk you through your first brisket cook.

The product mix runs across the major Utah-relevant categories: wood pellet smokers (the segment that has exploded in the Salt Lake Valley over the last decade), gas grills (where the everyday volume lives), and outdoor fire features like fire pits and outdoor fireplaces (where the high-margin patio-build business hides). Add in the propane refill business — straightforward, recurring, sticky — and you get a retail floor that doesn't depend on any single category to keep the lights on.

The shop also handles construction heaters, hoses, and the smaller propane accessories that contractors and serious patio-cookers actually use. That's the inventory mix of a store that's been listening to its customers for three decades.

What Customer Reviews Actually Say

Reviews of Casual Barbecue & Fireplace cluster around three themes — and again, the quotes below are paraphrased from review aggregators rather than direct platform scrapes.

The first theme is owner expertise, which we've already covered. The recurring phrase is some variation of Keith being "knowledgeable in all facets of propane and natural gas configurations." Customers don't say this about every store they walk into. They say it when somebody actually answered their question.

The second theme is product quality. Customers describe "excellent products such as smokers and gas grills with great propane prices, fine fire features" — the kind of compliment that reads less like a marketing pull-quote and more like a satisfied homeowner trying to articulate why they didn't regret the purchase. A grill is a multi-year decision. People remember which store steered them right.

The third theme is service depth. The store provides "home delivery and installation services" — important enough that reviewers flag it specifically. In a category where a 600-pound pellet smoker has to make it from the showroom floor to a second-story Daybreak patio, "delivery and install" isn't a luxury. It's whether the sale happens at all.

Where Casual Barbecue Fits in the Utah BBQ Map

Salt Lake's home-BBQ scene has been compounding for years now, and it's worth being specific about which corner of it Casual Barbecue serves. BBQ Pit Stop of Salt Lake, a few miles north on State Street, is the rub-and-meat-counter destination — that's where the brisket and the seasoning blends live. Casual Barbecue is the hardware-and-fuel side of the same ecosystem: the smoker itself, the propane to run the grill next to it, the fireplace on the patio you're cooking on, and the gas line that feeds all of it.

That hardware side is structurally important. Utah's backyard cookers have to deal with altitude — Murray sits at roughly 4,300 feet — and altitude does specific, annoying things to combustion. Lower atmospheric pressure changes flame characteristics. Wood pellet smokers behave differently at 4,500 feet than they do at sea level. A store with thirty-two years of selling and servicing this equipment to Wasatch Front customers has watched every iteration of that problem play out. That experience is in the room when you walk in.

The other quiet thing Casual Barbecue is doing is keeping a category alive that big-box retail keeps trying to absorb. The Lowes and Home Depots of the world sell grills, but they don't service them, don't install gas lines, and don't have somebody at the counter who can talk through whether your pellet smoker's getting good thin-blue-smoke at altitude or whether you're choking the fire. Specialty retail in this category is shrinking nationally. Casual Barbecue is one of the reasons it hasn't shrunk in Salt Lake.

Planning Your Visit

Address is 555 West 3900 South, Suite A, Murray, UT 84123 — between State Street and Redwood Road, easy parking. Phone is (801) 263-9646. Website is casualbbq.com. @casualbbq

Hours run Monday through Friday 9:00 a.m. to 5:30 p.m., Saturday 10:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m., closed Sunday. Plan a real visit, not a drive-by — if you're shopping for a smoker or a gas grill, you want time on the floor to actually look at the units and talk through what you're trying to cook on it. The propane refill, by contrast, is the in-and-out trip you'll do a half-dozen times a summer once you're a regular.

Why a Place Like This Matters to Salt & Seek

Salt & Seek covers Utah food. Utah food is a smoker on a patio in West Jordan at 6 a.m. on a Saturday in July, with the brisket already four hours in. That smoker came from somewhere. The propane lighting the patio fireplace next to it came from somewhere. The gas line feeding the side burner came from somewhere. For an awful lot of Murray, Holladay, Sandy, and Cottonwood Heights cookers, the somewhere is Casual Barbecue & Fireplace.

Thirty-two years of one owner running one storefront is a hard thing to build. It's an even harder thing to maintain. Worth checking out — especially if you're in the market for your first real smoker, or your fifth.