What it is
Joe’s Real BBQ is a counter-service barbecue house in a 1929 brick grocery on Gilbert Road, smoking brisket, pork, ribs and chicken over Arizona pecan wood since 1998. The building was a Safeway Pay n’ Takit when Gilbert had 700 people, and then a storage shed, a movie theater, a lamp factory and a church, in that order, before Joe Johnston bought it from the preacher in 1997 and spent a year taking it back to brick. The Johnston and Peelen families still run it.
The format is Texas by way of a farm town: you line up, order at the counter, pick your sides from a dozen made from scratch, and carry a tray to the dining room, the climate-controlled patio or the picnic park out back, where a smoker pavilion lets you watch the pits work. There is no gas and no electric shortcut in the smoking, which the restaurant says plainly and which you can taste.
Why leave Scottsdale for it
Scottsdale has barbecue, and Bootleggers in Old Town does a proper brisket, but it is a modern smokehouse with a whiskey list. Joe’s is the other thing: a family restaurant that has been cooking the same way for nearly thirty years, in the building that started a downtown. Our what to eat note covers the Scottsdale rooms; this is the East Valley institution they get compared to.
It is also, honestly, the right first stop in Gilbert. Everything else in the Heritage District is within three blocks, Liberty Market is a block south from the same family, and the drive from Old Town is thirty-five minutes down the 101 and the 60.
The practical version
Open daily from about 11 to 9. Lunch on a weekday is the easy meal; a weekend dinner means a line at the counter. Park in the free Vaughn Avenue garage or the lots nearby. Allow an hour, two if the kids find the picnic park.
When to go
Weekday lunch, 11:30. The line is short, the brisket has just come off, and the patio is empty. By 12:15 the office crowd from the Loop 202 corridor has found it.
Weekend dinner is the family hour, loud in the good way, with the picnic park full and the smoker pavilion running. Expect a fifteen-minute counter line at seven.
Season. The dining room and the climate-controlled patio make it a year-round restaurant, one of the few in the district that works in July. The picnic park is for October to April and for summer evenings after the sun drops behind the water tower.
What to order
- Brisket, by the half pound, sliced. It is the reason to come.
- Pulled pork and ribs, pecan-smoked, with the sauce on the table.
- The sides. Twelve, from scratch, and the regulars’ real reason for returning; order one more than the plate comes with.
- Chicken, if someone at the table is not a brisket person.
Sauce is on the table. Dessert exists. The menu is a chalkboard’s worth, not a book, which is the right size for a barbecue house.
With kids
This is the easiest family dinner in the East Valley: counter service means nobody waits for a server, the trays travel, the picnic park has room, and the smoker pavilion holds a six-year-old’s attention for exactly the length of a meal. Our Scottsdale with kids note has the heat rules; in summer, eat inside and skip the park until dusk. Agritopia, ten minutes southeast, is the Johnston family’s other property and the better afternoon, with the farm and the makers’ barn.
The neighborhood
The restaurant sits a block north of Water Tower Plaza, with the lit tower, the splash pad and the rest of the Heritage District’s restaurants and bars south of it. Walk it after dinner; the side streets, Page and Vaughn, are where the newer patios are.
The story
Joe Johnston grew up on a farm at Higley and Ray roads that his father bought in 1960 and farmed in cotton and wheat. In 1997 he drove past a boxy white church in a downtown that Gilbert had mostly abandoned for the freeways, and bought it from the preacher. Under the paint was a 1929 brick Safeway Pay n’ Takit, built when the town was 700 people and the hay-shipping capital of the world, and in the sixty-odd years since the store closed it had been a storage building, a movie theater, a lamp factory and the church. Joe’s Real BBQ opened in 1998 with pecan-wood pits out back and a dozen sides made the way farm kitchens make them. Gilbert had roughly half the population it has now.
What happened next is the Heritage District. The restaurant drew people downtown who had no other reason to be there, the town opened Water Tower Plaza across the street in 2008, Liberty Market opened a block south the same year from the same family, and over the next decade the Phoenix restaurant groups and the Gilbert independents filled in the rest of the blocks. Joe’s was named among the Valley’s best restaurants by Phoenix Magazine in 2002, and critics have kept coming back to it since as the East Valley’s classic barbecue house. The Johnston family also built Agritopia, the farm-centered neighborhood on the family land, with Joe’s Farm Grill in the old family home and the Barnone makers’ barn in the 1950s grain barn.
The Scottsdale connection
Scottsdale’s own barbecue history is thin, which is why the Valley’s barbecue arguments happen in Phoenix and the East Valley. Joe’s is the oldest name in the argument, and the one Scottsdale smokehouses are measured against for consistency rather than ambition: it has done one thing the same way since 1998. If you are in Scottsdale for a week and want to eat the way the Valley eats on a Sunday, this is a better use of an afternoon than another resort lunch.
Getting there
Loop 101 south from Old Town to US 60 east, then the Gilbert Road exit south about two miles to the railroad tracks; the restaurant is on the right at 301 North Gilbert Road, just before Water Tower Plaza. Thirty-five minutes with no traffic, fifty from North Scottsdale, and closer to an hour on a Friday at five. Park in the free Vaughn Avenue garage or the lots nearby. There is no useful transit from Scottsdale; it is a car or a rideshare.