Meier's BBQ & Catering of Holladay: The Salt Lake Pit That Started in 1947

Holladay sits in the bench above the Salt Lake Valley, a few miles east of the Salt Lake City line, where the foothills start to rise toward Big and Little Cottonwood Canyons. It's the Wasatch Front's middle ground — older than the southwest valley sprawl, quieter than Sugar House, with enough money in it that the Holladay Village Plaza gets the occasional new wine bar but enough rooted-family business that the same families have been running shops on Holladay Boulevard for generations. About a mile north of the village, on the east side of Holladay Boulevard, there's a low brick storefront with a discreet sign and a smoker out back. That's Meier's BBQ & Catering, and it's been there longer than almost everything else on this block.

The business is 79 years old this year. Meier's Meat opened in 1947 as a Salt Lake butcher shop. The catering arm spun out in 1990, when the family pivoted the operation toward what was at the time a pretty quiet niche — full-service BBQ catering for the kind of large summer picnics that big Mormon-network family reunions, ward parties, and Wasatch Front corporate events have always required. The catering side now runs the business — the storefront on Holladay Boulevard handles walk-in pickup BBQ Monday through Saturday, and the bigger operation runs catering events that the company says can scale up to 10,000 guests with their trained staff. Most of the time it's somewhere between those two — a Tuesday Holladay walk-in for a half-rack of baby backs and a side of beans, a Saturday corporate event for 400 in Sandy, a Sunday wedding (booked separately) with a brisket and chicken station.

"Best ribs in Salt Lake City," wrote a customer named Boyd D. on the company's testimonial wall. Another customer, Carlie Y., flagged the annual event that's become a Holladay BBQ destination in itself: "Yummiest BBQ ever! Ribfest is our favorite!!!! Best comfort food around, including ice cream cones!" The Google rating sits at 4.8 stars across 99 reviews as of May 2026. The Yelp listing is a smaller sample — 15 reviews and 35 photos as of last month — but the average tracks the same direction. The Restaurantji aggregate carries 85 reviews and 52 photos. The pattern across every platform: ribs and chicken get the headline, the catering operation gets the steady professional praise, and the regulars come back for the pickup window.

Carolina Ribs, Dutch Oven Chicken, and the Salt Lake Crossover

The menu is a deliberate hybrid that almost nobody in Utah is doing the way Meier's is doing it. The headline is Carolina's Finest Smoked Baby Back Ribs, the kind of slow-smoked pork rib you'd order at a North Carolina BBQ joint — bark-edge dry rub, the smoke sitting deep in the meat, the rib held together but pulling clean. Carolina ribs are the unusual move in Utah; most local pit operations lean Texas-style brisket or Kansas City sweet-sauce. Meier's has been doing Carolina baby backs long enough that the kitchen has the technique dialed and the locals expect it.

Then comes the Dutch Oven BBQ Chicken & Ribs — and this is where Meier's reveals its Utah identity. The Dutch oven is the Utah pioneer cooking vessel. Mormon settlers carried Dutch ovens west on the trail, used them as the primary cookware in the early settlements, and built a Dutch-oven competition culture that still dominates Utah church-supper, scouting, and family-reunion cooking 175 years later. Most BBQ operations would never put Dutch oven on the menu — it's church-supper cookware, not pit cookware. Meier's puts it on the menu and pairs it with the Carolina ribs, and the result is a menu that signals both BBQ technique and Utah heritage to the customer who knows what they're looking at.

The marinated BBQ chicken is the third leg. Pulled from the marinade after a long sit, grilled with the marinade's caramelized edge, finished with the house sauce. Dirt-simple, perfectly executed, the kind of chicken that disappears off catering platters before the brisket gets touched. The pickup-menu version runs the same protein at a smaller scale.

Behind the headline meats: BBQ shredded beef ($6.98/lb), BBQ shredded pork ($6.49/lb), boneless pork ribs ($2.75 each), full racks of baby backs at the catering rate for the parties that are doing the rib-handout obligation. The sides run the catering-BBQ standard rotation — beans, potato salad, coleslaw, corn — and the salads page on the website is explicit that they're built from scratch with fresh ingredients. Ice cream cones show up at Ribfest and a few of the bigger summer parties.

The Catering Operation and the 10,000-Guest Number

The reason a 79-year-old family BBQ business in Holladay is also doing events at scale up to 10,000 guests is that Salt Lake's catering ecosystem has historically had two tiers: the high-end fine-dining caterers (Settebello-Caputo's-Hugo Coffee axis, the Cucina-Stanza-Stoneground orbit) and the church-and-corporate volume caterers, and Meier's has been the anchor of the second tier for three decades.

When a Salt Lake company runs a 600-person summer picnic at Sugar House Park, when a Sandy-based tech firm does a 1,200-employee end-of-Q3 BBQ, when a Mormon ward holds a 350-person reunion at Liberty Park — Meier's is on the short list of caterers who can actually staff and execute the event. The reviews bear this out. "Reasonable prices for the quality of food," "prompt delivery, setup, and provision of serving tools and chafing dishes," "consistently friendly, professional, and accommodating staff" — those are not the descriptions you read about a 79-year-old family business that's coasting. Those are the descriptions of an operation that has built and maintained the operational discipline to scale.

The Ribfest is the public-facing version of the catering operation. It's the once-a-year event where Meier's brings the smokers and the rib station to Holladay (or wherever the year's host site is) and runs a community BBQ as both a customer-relations event and a marketing operation. Long-time customers plan around it. The reviews referencing Ribfest as "our favorite" are not hyperbole — for a slice of the Holladay community, the annual Meier's Ribfest is the BBQ event of the year, ahead of the chains and the newer arrivals.

Why a 79-Year Family Business Matters in 2026 Salt Lake

Salt Lake's BBQ scene has been in heavy rotation for the past decade. R&R BBQ opened multiple locations and became the de facto chain. Pat's Barbecue in South Salt Lake established itself as the technical reference. Meier's BBQ — the South Salt Lake operation in the mid-2010s, no relation to the Holladay Meier's despite the name overlap — came and went. Top Pot & K BBQ moved into the Korean-BBQ-meets-American-BBQ space. Burnt Out BBQ, Salt City Barbecue, Hog & Tradition, Ojas-adjacent food trucks — the field expanded fast.

What separates Holladay's Meier's from that field is continuity. Salt Lake gets a new BBQ joint every year. Salt Lake loses a few every year. Meier's has been on Holladay Boulevard since the Truman administration — first as a butcher shop, then as a butcher shop with a catering side business, then as the catering operation it is today. The owner is still working the operation. The menu is still rooted in the same Carolina-ribs-plus-Dutch-oven-chicken hybrid that the family pioneered before "fusion" was a marketing word. The website still uses the phrase "down-home, darn good food (which you can't even pronounce, let alone recognize)" — a deliberate dig at the fine-dining catering competition and a clear statement of the brand's positioning.

That's not a generic family-business plug. It's specifically what makes Meier's the right call for a particular kind of Salt Lake event. If you want a $90-per-head plated dinner with three sauces and a duo of proteins, you're calling someone else. If you want a smoker in the parking lot, a serving line that moves 400 people through in 45 minutes, a rib station that hits the temperature consistently, and a family that's been doing this since 1947 — you're calling Holladay.

Planning Your Order

The address is 4730 South Holladay Boulevard, Holladay, UT 84117. The phone is (801) 278-4653. The website is meierscatering.com. The email is info@meierscatering.com. The pickup window runs Monday through Friday 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. and Saturday 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. — closed Sundays. @meierscatering

What to order on a first visit to the pickup window: the Carolina baby back ribs are the obligation — they're what built the brand. Add the marinated BBQ chicken for the second protein and one of the catering-style BBQ shredded beef or pork sandwiches if you're feeding a group. Get the beans and the coleslaw. Ask what's coming off the smoker today.

For catering: book early for summer Saturday weddings and corporate picnics — the back end of the Meier's calendar fills out by spring. Ribfest dates rotate — confirm with the office for this year's schedule.

This is why we live here. Salt Lake's restaurant scene has a fast-moving present and an under documented past — a lot of the family operations that made the city's food scene what it is have closed in the past twenty years (Lamb's Grill, the original Crown Burger family era, half the old Greek-American spots downtown), and Meier's Holladay BBQ is one of the last members of that pre-Olympic generation still running at full speed. Carolina ribs. Dutch oven chicken. Seventy-nine years of continuous family operation. The smoker out back has seen a lot.