Restaurant guide

The Dallas, Texas BBQ Pitmaster who received the most Readers Votes for the DFW area "Pitmaster of the Year 2016".

We do everything authentic as possible including our large smoker and cooking with hickory logs.

We have both. They are different and we like each one for different purposes.

A nasty looking Noodle Hot Dog and a few other food fails.

A $169.00 hot dog! It’s the world’s most expensive and comes with wagyu beef, foie gras, truffles and caviar.

We were 100% REAL BBQ.

Reality ~~

We closed Johnsons Smokehouse BBQ in Great Bend, Kansas and Monday had a Business Liquidation Auction selling out for pennies on the dollar after owning and operating a successful BBQ Joint for 4 years for many of the same reasons in this article. We were a top rated restaurant on Google, TripAdvisor, Yelp and others in our town with about 40 eating establishments. We were an authentic BBQ smoker building a hickory wood burning fire early every morning. The very small profit margins were due to high food and employee costs, due to excessive government rules & regs and taxes & fees. I worked without any salary for 4 years always reinvesting any extra money to improve what we provided our customers. We had a few failed attempts from buyers interested in keeping Great Bend's only BBQ Joint open, but even making offers you could not refuse none of them worked out ~ which indicates to me how bad our country's business climate actually is. The amount of government (local, state & federal) rules, regulations, forms and fees are crazy. They pretend to be regulating businesses (or may actually believe they are) but every agency that required forms and fees served primarily to just register business to be able to keep track of all of the taxes and registration fees they feel owed from businesses. They did very little to protect the public and seemed to just enjoy picking on people running businesses and making their jobs more difficult. Staffing and employees were the biggest problem. Today's American work ethic sucks and indicates a horrible future. Young people are the worst and their job and doing it well are no longer a high priority. It was hard to get them to show up or work their actual schedule and cell phone addictions are out of control with everyone of them. After catching multiple employees over the years stealing substantial amounts of money, food and equipment or just giving it away to their friends and not thinking they did anything wrong became to much. When the City of Great Bend did road and main water-line construction work making it very difficult to get into our restaurant the past 2-3 months caused us to not make enough sales to pay the bills, so we closed and now 10 more people are unemployed and I lost money. We would like to Thank all of you who came to eat with us, made all of the kind and flattering comments and we did have some excellent employees who I truly enjoyed and will miss. This was not intended to be a complaining rant but on honest explanation (to those we feel deserve one) as to why we chose to quit doing business. However, life is good. We were fortunate to buy a vacation rental home ~ Chalet Rio Hondo - Taos House. Please "Like" or Facebook page, click on this link. It is a beautiful mountain home right on the Rio Hondo River in Taos Ski Valley, New Mexico. You can rent it through ~ www.Airbnb.com / www.VRBO.com / www.HomeAway.com (David)