La Luna BBQ: The Competition Pitmaster Bringing Contest-Grade Brisket to Tooele

Most people will never taste competition barbecue. It lives in a closed world of canopy tents and turn-in boxes, where pitmasters chase perfect bites for a panel of judges and the general public never gets a fork in. Trevor Jensen wants to change that. His outfit, La Luna BBQ, is a KCBS Pro Competition BBQ team and catering company working out of Salt Lake City and Tooele, and his whole mission is to drag that contest-level smoke out of the competition circuit and onto your event table. "Competition style BBQ is not a world that most people have an opportunity to participate in," he writes, "so my mission is to bring this world to more people through my catering."

In a state Jensen himself calls "a less predominant BBQ state," that's a genuinely ambitious pitch — and the people who've eaten his food seem to think he's pulling it off. "Absolute mouthwatering delicious," one Yelp reviewer wrote. "I have yet to taste anything from La Luna that I don't completely love. The owner is passionate about his cooking." That passion is the through-line of the whole operation.

From Ten Siblings to the KCBS Circuit: Trevor Jensen's BBQ Story

Jensen's origin story doesn't start in a restaurant. It starts in a crowded family kitchen. "I have been cooking and creating since I was a young child," he writes, "and my parents and 10 siblings were a constant support and often the unwitting recipients of a food experiment." That's the kind of detail you can't fake — a kid in a big family using a dinner table full of brothers and sisters as a test panel, long before there were judges.

What makes him interesting as a Utah pitmaster is that he's not a purist. "My strength and passion is in creating without the constraints of set recipes," he says, "making something new, and trying new things, pairings or techniques as I go." He's spent most of his adult life around smoking, curing, and processing meat, and he openly folds modern cooking techniques into traditional barbecue "to create unexpected results." The result, by his own description, is "a unique take on traditional BBQ, combining styles and techniques from various regional traditions."

He's also refreshingly open about the craft. On his own site, Jensen lays out his methods in obsessive detail — the kind of transparency that tells you he actually knows what he's doing. His hot-and-fast brisket runs a USDA Prime packer on a Yoder YS640 pellet smoker at 350 degrees, phosphate-injected and cooked fat-cap down in a pan to fight moisture loss, finished around 205 internal once the probe slides in "like warm butter." He calls the result "the most tender, and juicy brisket I can remember cooking." His ribs follow a 3-2-R method (three hours of smoke, two wrapped, a 30-minute rest) on St. Louis-cut spares, rubbed with a little fresh-ground Colombian coffee and wrapped with turbinado sugar, Tiger Sauce, and peach-mango "Texas Bird Bath" preserves. This is competition logic applied to catering — and it's why his meat shows up the way it does.

What La Luna BBQ Does Best: Brisket, Ribs, and Competition-Grade Smoke

If you want to know what to order from La Luna, follow the meat. The reviews keep coming back to the smoke. "Trevor is a very talented chef and his food is delicious," one customer wrote. "All of his smoked and BBQ meat is moist and exploding with flavor." Between that and the Yelp regular who hasn't found a single thing she doesn't "completely love," the verdict is consistent even if the review count is small: this is a small operation where the quality is the entire point.

The brisket is the headliner, and it should be — Jensen's whole technical philosophy is built around it. A properly executed hot-and-fast Prime packer, sliced after a long rest in the Cambro, is the kind of thing that converts skeptics, and it's the dish he's most dialed-in on. The ribs are the other pillar: that coffee-rubbed, 3-2-R spare rib that he insists "no sauce is needed for," because the rub and the wrap have essentially built the sauce into the bark already. For a Utah crowd more used to chain barbecue, eating ribs that pull-but-don't-fall-off-the-bone, with a real smoke ring and a competition-style trim, is a small revelation.

Because La Luna is a catering company and competition team rather than a counter you walk up to, the move here is to think in terms of an event — a wedding, a work party, a family reunion — and let the pitmaster build the spread. "La Luna BBQ strives to provide the very best service and professionalism," Jensen writes, "while also providing a quality of BBQ that the typical consumer is not accustomed to." That's the promise: not just trays of meat, but contest-grade meat with the service to match.

Competition BBQ in "a Less Predominant BBQ State"

Here's the bigger story, and it's a real one for Utah. Barbecue has exploded across the Wasatch Front and beyond over the last few years — smokehouses, food trucks, and pitmasters are popping up from Logan to St. George. But competition barbecue, the KCBS-sanctioned, judged, deeply technical version of the craft, is still a relatively rare thing here. A pitmaster who competes on that circuit and then turns around and caters your backyard party is bringing a level of obsession most Utah eaters never get to experience.

Jensen is candid about being a student of it. "I am certainly new to the BBQ community as a whole," he writes, "and I am constantly learning things I never knew living in Utah." There's something very Utah about that humility paired with that ambition — a self-taught kid from a big family, grinding through the competition world in a state that isn't famous for brisket, trying to raise the bar one catered event at a time. That's exactly the kind of under-the-radar craftsperson that makes a local food scene worth paying attention to.

How to Book La Luna BBQ

A heads-up before you go looking: La Luna's Tooele storefront listing is currently marked closed, and the operation runs as a catering company and KCBS competition team based in Salt Lake City and Tooele rather than a sit-down restaurant. So this isn't a "drop in for lunch" situation — it's a "book the pitmaster for your event" one.

The best path is the official site, lalunabbq.com, which has a catering menu and a "request a quote" form, plus Jensen's BBQ blog and technique write-ups if you want to see how the sausage (or brisket) gets made. The listed contact number on file is (801) 888-4259, and La Luna maintains a Facebook page (@lalunaBBQ) for updates. If you're planning anything where the barbecue is supposed to be the thing people remember, this is the kind of small, owner-run, competition-driven operation worth a call.

The Bottom Line

La Luna BBQ is a "this is why we live here" kind of find for the BBQ-curious — a competition pitmaster quietly working to bring contest-grade brisket and ribs to a corner of Utah that doesn't expect it. Trevor Jensen's story (ten siblings, a lifetime of food experiments, a self-taught march onto the KCBS circuit) is the real deal, and the early eaters are sold: moist, smoke-ringed, "exploding with flavor" meat from someone who clearly cares more than he has to. Book him for your next event, ask for the hot-and-fast brisket, and taste what competition barbecue tastes like before the judges ever get to it.