Hometown Barbecue Miami – Brooklyn smoke lands on Allapattah's produce docks

Hometown Barbecue Miami fills a vast warehouse bay in the Miami Produce Center, the second restaurant built by Brooklyn pitmaster Billy Durney after his original Hometown Bar-B-Que set Red Hook alight in 2013. Durney opened the Allapattah outpost in September 2019, bringing the same wood-fired, Texas-leaning cooking to a city that had nothing quite like it. It holds a MICHELIN Bib Gourmand, the Guide's mark for satisfying food at a fair price, a distinction every Hometown location has earned. The appeal is direct: a sprawling, open-air hall that spills into old loading docks, an open kitchen watched over by three outdoor smokers, and meat that waits sixteen to eighteen hours over white oak before it reaches the table. Allapattah was still an unglamorous produce district when Durney arrived; Hometown became one of the first restaurants to stake a claim there, ahead of the gallery openings and apartment towers that followed.

01The room and the setting

The dining room is scaled to the produce warehouses around it: an open-air hall with loading-dock seating, a bar running the length of one wall pouring wine, craft beer and cocktails, and a kitchen positioned so that almost every seat has a clear view of the three massive smokers working just outside. Durney built it inside a retail market that forms part of the Miami Produce Center, an eight-acre industrial complex whose later phases include buildings by the Pritzker Prize-winning architect Bjarke Ingels, a scale of ambition Durney has said he hadn't expected when he first saw the site.

02The chef

Billy Durney is self-taught. He began smoking meat on a Weber Smokey Mountain on his own Brooklyn porch, trained at the pitmaster Louie Mueller's in Texas, and opened the original Hometown Bar-B-Que in a former Red Hook woodworking shop in 2013. The Miami kitchen has been overseen by chef Alex Smith, running the same pit-smoked meats and traditional sides that built Durney's reputation in New York. Durney himself was nominated for a James Beard Award for Best Chef: New York City in February 2019, the same year he decided to take the brand south.

Insider tip

Dinner reservations via Resy, parties of 2–10 from 5pm; lunch is walk-in only.

03The cooking

The brisket is the signature: a full cut smoked for roughly sixteen hours over white oak and seasoned with nothing beyond salt and pepper, left until it turns soft enough to pull apart by hand. Durney has said the lack of seasoning is deliberate, since the smoke and the fat are left to do the work on the USDA prime cuts. Beef ribs, sold by weight, arrive with a deep red crust and are almost too large for one diner alone; pulled pork, turkey and spare ribs follow more familiar lines, while a wood-fired side of the menu folds in Oaxacan chicken with salsa verde and mole-dusted smoked wings finished with queso fresco, the kind of cross-cultural touch Durney has long applied to Brooklyn barbecue with dishes like Jamaican jerk ribs and lamb belly banh mi.

04What to order

Meats are sold by the half-pound and pound and are best ordered to share: brisket, beef rib and jalapeño cheddar sausage alongside tacos filled with brisket, pulled pork or Oaxacan chicken. On the sides list, Frito pie and plancha broccoli — charred and dressed with chili oil and poblano cream — are worth ordering ahead of the obvious cornbread and mac and cheese. Two house sauces, labelled Sticky and Hot, sit on every table, and the smoked turkey BLT has its own following among regulars who come as much for the sandwich as the smoked meats by the pound.

05Wine and drinks

Behind the smoke, the bar does work unusual for a barbecue room: a wine list said to run to around 165 bottles, reportedly eight months in the making, sits alongside seasonal cocktails and a rotating selection of craft beers. The restaurant's own description promises wines by the glass and bottle alongside the beer list, a detail that marks Hometown out from the paper-plate barbecue houses it otherwise resembles.

06When to go and booking

Hometown is open seven days: Monday to Thursday and Sunday from 11:30am to 9pm, Friday and Saturday to 10pm. Dinner reservations are taken for parties of two to ten from 5pm through Resy; lunch service is walk-in only, first come, first served, and the kitchen aims to sell out of certain cuts by the end of the night rather than hold food over.

07The neighbourhood

Allapattah was, by the restaurant's own account, a working produce and spice market when Hometown arrived — one of the first restaurants to open in a district still defined by warehouses and loading bays. Three months after Hometown's debut, the Rubell family reopened their contemporary art collection a few blocks away as the Rubell Museum, converting six former industrial buildings in the same Miami Produce Center into 100,000 square feet of gallery space designed by Selldorf Architects. Produce trucks still move through the streets outside Hometown's door, even as galleries, apartments and a slow wave of new restaurants have followed the barbecue in behind them.

For a weekend. For a lifetime.