Tennessee BBQ in Kamas, Utah: How Richie Lush Brought 16-Hour Smoke to the Foot of the Uintas

Drive east out of Park City, past the last roundabout where the ski traffic thins and the Uinta foothills open up, and you land in Kamas — a high-valley ranching town at about 6,500 feet that most people treat as the on-ramp to the Mirror Lake Highway. Blink and you'd miss the smoke. But it's there, curling off a smoker on Main Street, and it doesn't smell like Utah at all. It smells like Southern Middle Tennessee, because that's exactly where the man tending the fire learned to do this. This is Tennessee BBQ in Kamas, Utah, and the locals figured out a while ago that they'd stumbled onto something worth the drive. "This place an amazing BBQ stop," one Yelp regular wrote. "Try the pork and brisket with the amazing homemade hot sauce. DAMN!! Soooooo good folks."

That's the kind of review you can't manufacture. Lush's BBQ has been quietly building it one 16-hour brisket at a time.

The Man Behind the Meat

Lush's BBQ is Richie Lush, full stop. He grew up in Southern Middle Tennessee, raised around some of the finest barbecue cooks you'll ever meet, and he absorbed two things down there that he never put down: how to coax a tough cut into tenderness over a long, slow fire, and the idea that a plate of food is really just an excuse to build a friendship. He'll tell you himself that he doesn't want customers so much as he wants regulars who become friends.

The work is not glamorous. For 16-hour intervals, Richie is up with the smokers — feeding them, reading them, adjusting for the dry mountain air and the altitude that makes everything cook a little differently up here than it would in a Tennessee backyard. In between, he's whipping up the sides and desserts he's spent years dialing in. There's a partner in the operation too — Nadine Lush, whose name and number sit right on the storefront — but the pit is Richie's church. The whole brand runs on a four-word promise stenciled across the menu: "We feed the mountains."

What makes the story land is that he kept showing up. Lush's started small and mobile, a trailer pulling into Kamas and the Silver Creek corner near Park City, the way a lot of Utah's best barbecue is born — out of a smoker on wheels and a pitmaster who refuses to cut corners. As of spring 2026, Richie made a bet on Kamas itself. He shuttered the Silver Creek location in April and consolidated everything into the Main Street spot in Kamas, closing for renovations and reopening in May. It's a move that says he's done chasing the resort crowd and is planting his flag in the valley that actually adopted him.

What to Order at Lush's BBQ

Here's the thing about real Tennessee barbecue: it lives and dies on the meat, and Lush's meat holds up. The move is the three-meat plate — pulled pork, ribs, and brisket — which lets you see whether a pitmaster can actually do all three, because plenty can't. One Facebook reviewer ordered exactly that and didn't hedge: "Absolutely amazing and easily the best bbq in Utah. Got the 3 meat plate with pulled pork, ribs, and brisket." Even Salt Lake Magazine, which has no reason to gush about a trailer in Kamas, came away converted: "When the meat's just coming off the smoker, you'd be hard pressed to find better ribs, brisket or pulled pork anywhere. Not in Kansas City."

The brisket is the bellwether. Done right — and at Lush's, coming straight off a smoker that's been running most of a day, it usually is — it carries that deep bark and the kind of give that only patience produces. The pulled pork is the Tennessee heart of the menu, pork-shoulder territory, the meat Richie grew up on. And the ribs round out the holy trinity for the people who like to gnaw a bone.

Then there's the supporting cast, which at a lot of barbecue joints is an afterthought and here is not. The sides skew Southern and a little playful: jalapeño creamed corn that shows up again and again in reviews, slow-cooked beans, collard greens, slaw. And do not skip the sauces. The homemade hot sauce has its own small fan club — that Yelp reviewer practically begged people to try it — and the house barbecue sauce is the kind of recipe a pitmaster guards. Not every sauce will be your sauce; one honest local noted the house sauce "wasn't my thing" even while praising the greens and beans, which is exactly the sort of real-world calibration you want. Order a couple, find your lane.

A practical note born from the food itself: barbecue this slow runs out. When a place is smoking for 16 hours, there's a finite amount of brisket at the end of it, and the best stuff goes early. Get there on the early side of service and you eat like a king. Show up at the tail end and you're negotiating over what's left.

Why Lush's Matters to Utah's Food Scene

Utah's barbecue scene has quietly gotten serious over the last few years, and a lot of the credit goes to operators exactly like this one — out-of-state transplants who brought a regional tradition with them and refused to water it down for the local palate. Lush's isn't doing "Utah barbecue." It's doing Southern Middle Tennessee barbecue at 6,500 feet, and the specificity is the point. In a state where the default BBQ reference is usually Texas or Kansas City, having an honest-to-goodness Tennessee pit in the Uinta foothills fills a real gap.

It also matters where it is. Kamas and the surrounding Summit County backcountry are a recreation corridor — the staging ground for the Uintas, the Mirror Lake Highway, the fishing and the hiking and the dispersed camping that pulls Wasatch Front families east every weekend. A place that "feeds the mountains" is feeding all of that: the tailgate before the trailhead, the carload coming back down sunburned and starving, the local ranching crowd that was here long before the skiers. Richie's decision to plant himself in Kamas rather than the Park City resort bubble is its own small statement about who he's cooking for.

Planning Your Visit to Lush's BBQ

Lush's BBQ is at 1 North Main Street, Kamas, UT 84036, in the heart of the little downtown grid — an easy stop coming or going from the Mirror Lake Highway. You can reach the shop at (435) 333-2831, and the catering line runs through Nadine at (215) 901-3020. @lushsbbq

Because the operation just consolidated and reopened in its Kamas storefront in May 2026, call ahead to confirm current days and hours before you make the drive — the trailer years ran a Thursday-through-Sunday rhythm, and the new brick-and-mortar schedule may differ. What to order: the three-meat plate (pulled pork, brisket, ribs) if you want the full tour, the jalapeño creamed corn on the side, and at least one of the house sauces — the homemade hot sauce if you like a little fight in your food. Come hungry and come earlyish; slow-smoked meat is a finite resource. Follow @lushsbbq on Instagram and Facebook for the day's hours and the inevitable "we're sold out" posts that mean they had a good day.

The Bottom Line

Lush's BBQ is a "this is why we live here" kind of place — proof that you can find legitimate Southern barbecue in a Utah mountain town if you know where the smoke is coming from. Richie Lush left Tennessee but brought the whole tradition with him: the 16-hour fires, the pork-shoulder gospel, the belief that the table is where friendships get made. As one customer's praise put it back to him — and as he framed it himself — "Every time a customer tells me Lush's is the best BBQ they've ever had, it feels like winning the Grand Championship." Make the drive to Kamas, order the three-meat plate, and find out why the mountains keep coming back to be fed.