Dinosaur Bar-B-Que at 38: How a Syracuse Mobile Smoker Became a Multi-State Chain (and Came Home Again)

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By Jen Okafor, Staff Reporter

It started in the summer of 1983 with a 55-gallon drum cut in half. A long-haired biker named John Stage hauled the rig to a motorcycle gathering near Albany called the Harley Rendezvous and began selling sandwiches to a crowd that had nowhere else to eat. Five years and dozens of rally weekends later, Stage and his partners stopped moving, took over an old shot-and-beer bar at 246 W. Willow Street between Salina and Franklin in Syracuse’s Armory Square district, scrubbed it out, and on October 11, 1988, opened the first permanent Dinosaur Bar-B-Que. Armory Square in 1988 was warehouses and empty storefronts; the renaissance restaurants now built around the JMA Wireless Dome and the Salt City Market still date their first night in the neighborhood to that October.

That brick building is still there. Thirty seven and a half years later, it is also still where the company is run from, after a long detour through outside ownership and an uneven national expansion that has, in the last six years, contracted back almost to the city where it started. With the announcement this April that the Brooklyn restaurant will close when its Gowanus lease ends, Dinosaur Bar-B-Que now operates five locations, all of them in New York State.

The rally years

Stage was not a trained chef. By his own telling, he had run afoul of the law as a young man and needed something honest to do with his time. Riding bikes brought him into a circuit of weekend rallies where the food was thin and the crowd was hungry. In 1983 he and two partners, Mike Rotella and a man known publicly only as Dino, built their first cooker out of a salvaged steel drum and started feeding the line.

The name came from Dino, with an assist from a Hank Williams Jr. song called Dinosaur about a man returning to find his old honky tonk turned into a disco. Stage has said in interviews that all three founders rode old bikes too, which made the joke land twice. They formally incorporated as Dinosaur Concessions in 1984. Dino left the partnership in 1985. Rotella and Stage stayed on the road through 1988, working out a sauce they would later call Mutha Sauce and learning, the slow way, what real barbecue actually tasted like.

“When you look at all of the books and TV shows and East Coast restaurants focused on barbecue now, it is easy to forget that it just did not exist in the mid eighties,” Stage told the StarChefs profile published on its site. “Of course, when I first started out in the eighties, I was just throwing stuff on the grill and thinking that was real barbecue. So it definitely was not an overnight process to get where we are today.”

That admission matters, because the version of barbecue Dinosaur eventually settled on, dry rub on St. Louis ribs, low heat over wood, a tomato and vinegar sauce brushed on at the end, was not a Syracuse tradition. It was an outsider’s reading of Memphis and the Carolinas, served in a city that had treated wings and salt potatoes as the local protein for a generation.

The Syracuse beginning

The Willow Street building Stage and Rotella took over had been a barroom since the 1920s, most recently the N&H Tavern run by a man named Tommy Hrim. The Syracuse New Times documented the early days in a 30th anniversary feature, including the detail that the brand new restaurant was a single small room serving cafeteria style. There was no full bar at first. That came in 1991. Two private party rooms upstairs, in space that had once housed Andy’s Cycle Shop, came later. In 1990, Nancy and Larry Luckwaldt bought in as investors, which is what allowed the second room and the bar to happen at all.

Inside, the formula was the room itself: barn board on the walls, motorcycles parked at the door, and license plates and old highway signs nailed up wherever a customer could see them. Stage built a roadhouse on a Syracuse city block and kept it that way as the chain grew. To this day the Willow Street location refuses reservations. It runs first come, first served, the way it did on opening night.

The rub, the wings, the bread

The plate that became the Dinosaur signature is the St. Louis rib platter. The ribs are dry rubbed and smoked low for hours, then lightly glazed with the original BBQ sauce and finished with a quick char. Every plate ships with two from-scratch sides and the cornbread the menu calls Honey Hush. The smoked wings get rendered low over indirect heat first, then brushed with Mutha Sauce and finished crisp over coals.

The sauce is the glue. The base recipe published in the cookbook starts with onion, green pepper and jalapeño cooked soft in oil before tomato, vinegar, brown sugar and spice come in. Liquid smoke is folded in off the heat. From that base the company spins variants: Wango Tango, the habanero hot sauce, and several rubs sold under the same label. You can buy Mutha Sauce at Wegmans, ShopRite, Whole Foods, Stop and Shop, Price Chopper, Weis Markets and Giant, plus through the company’s own online store with nationwide shipping.

Cookbook and chain

In 2001 Stage published Dinosaur Bar-B-Que: An American Roadhouse with co-author Nancy Radke. It was named Cookbook of the Year by the National Barbecue Association. Stage said on Heritage Radio Network in June 2024 that the book has now sold more than 175,000 copies, which is real volume for any independent food title and a quiet driver of the brand long after the publication date.

The chain’s second restaurant did not arrive for ten years. Rochester opened in 1998 inside the old Lehigh Valley train depot at 99 Court Street, a stone building from 1905. The Harlem location at 700 W. 125th Street followed in 2004 and became the New York City flagship, sitting under the Riverside Drive Viaduct a few blocks from Columbia. Bill Clinton, by then headquartered in Harlem, became enough of a regular that Stage has cited him publicly as a reason the Harlem restaurant happened in the first place.

The Soros years

In 2008, Stage took on Soros Strategic Partners, the investment firm tied to George Soros, as a financial partner. Capital came in. So did pressure to grow. Between 2010 and 2015 the company opened restaurants in Troy (November 2010), Newark (May 2011), Stamford (December 2012), Brooklyn (2013), Buffalo (February 2014), Chicago (April 2015) and Baltimore (September 2015). The footprint hit ten.

It did not hold. Chicago closed in July 2016, fifteen months after opening. Baltimore closed in January 2018. Stage himself stepped into an advisory role in 2014 and lost direct operating control. He has spoken publicly about what that cost him.

“Access to capital and resources is gained,” he told Entrepreneur magazine in describing the deal in retrospect, “but culture and freedom to operate as you did in the past can be lost.”

In October 2018, the month the company turned thirty, Stage bought back majority ownership and ended the Soros partnership. The official company Facebook account quoted him at the time: “It is liberating. I cannot tell you how happy I am about this.” The headquarters moved back to Syracuse. Long tenured employees, some with fifteen to twenty years on the job, received equity in the company as part of the restructuring.

The contraction

The pull back has continued since the buyback. Stamford closed in June 2020 after a COVID era shutdown that never reversed. Newark closed in August 2021. The Buffalo flagship at 301 Franklin Street, which had taken over a former Universal Pictures film vault, shut its doors in early 2025. The replacement, a first ever suburban Dinosaur location at 4245 McKinley Parkway in Hamburg, opened a few minutes from Highmark Stadium and quietly reset the company’s Western New York presence.

Then on April 17, 2026, Brooklyn announced it was closing too. The lease on the Gowanus building was up. The building is set to be demolished to make way for a new apartment development, Crain’s New York reported. CEO Mike Nugent put it plainly to Brooklyn Paper: “It has been an absolute honor to be welcomed into the Brooklyn community for 15 years.” With Brooklyn gone, the chain that once ran ten restaurants across six states will run five, all of them in New York.

What is left

What is left is the part that built it. The five remaining locations are all in New York: Syracuse, Rochester, Harlem, Troy, and the new Hamburg suburban replacement for Buffalo. The Willow Street original still has the same barn board interior, the same first-come-first-served door policy, and the same patio where somebody parks an old bike on a warm Wednesday afternoon. The cookbook is still in print, Mutha Sauce still rolls onto pallets at the Wegmans warehouse every week, and Stage, with his name back on the deed, still works out of Syracuse.

Dinosaur Bar-B-Que has stopped chasing a national footprint and gone back to being the regional outfit it had always been. On a Friday night in late April, the line at 246 W. Willow snaked out the front door past the bike rack and around the corner toward Franklin Street, smelling of woodsmoke from the smoker out back. The crowd did not look smaller than it did a decade ago. With the founder back in the deed and the road map cropped to the cities that adopted Stage’s ribs first, it looks about exactly the size it was always meant to be.

Sources cited in this article: Wikipedia entry for Dinosaur Bar-B-Que; dinosaurbarbque.com Our Story and Syracuse location pages; Syracuse New Times 30th anniversary feature; Brooklyn Paper coverage of the Gowanus closing dated April 17, 2026; Entrepreneur magazine profile of John Stage; StarChefs profile of John Stage; nycbbq.com 30th anniversary piece (November 2018); Heritage Radio Network episode with John Stage (June 2024); Buffalo News and News 4 Buffalo coverage of the Buffalo to Hamburg move (January 2025); Buffalo Toronto Public Media; Dinosaur Bar-B-Que: An American Roadhouse by John Stage and Nancy Radke (2001); company Facebook post dated October 23, 2018. Hero photo by Joe Shlabotnik on Wikimedia Commons, used under CC BY 2.0.

Further reporting

The Hamburg restaurant opened December 3, 2025 at 4 p.m. at 4245 McKinley Parkway, the company’s first-ever suburban location. The building had previously housed a Perkins, the Mexican restaurant La Tolteca, the Titan Steakhouse, and an LOE Trailer Sales. Dinosaur is the fifth tenant on the parcel.

“The same great barbecue. Our pits are fired up in the back, same procedures, low and slow, making sure everything is perfect every time,” Mike Nugent, CEO of Dinosaur Bar-B-Que, told WGRZ at the Hamburg opening on December 3, 2025. “What’s different about what we’re doing here, we have a little more space, we’re able to cater to a different audience. You don’t have to go all the way downtown to come and enjoy our food so we’re looking forward to introducing this to a different neighborhood.”

The Buffalo restaurant on Franklin Street finished its final service on February 2, 2025, after roughly ten years downtown. The Hamburg replacement landed minutes from Highmark Stadium and from the McKinley Mall, in a former Perkins. The chain framed the move as a gain on parking and accessibility for suburban diners over urban foot traffic.

On the Brooklyn closure: Nugent expanded on his published statement, telling Brooklyn Paper, “We’ve had a front-row seat to an incredible neighborhood, and we’re proud of the team who showed up every day to deliver great barbecue and even better hospitality. Most of all, we’re thankful for the guests who kept coming back hungry.” Gift cards will be honored through the final service date, which the company said it will announce on its social channels.

Mike Nugent has been with Dinosaur Bar-B-Que since 2000, according to his LinkedIn profile, originally as Chief Operating Officer and now as Chief Executive Officer, making him the longest-tenured operations executive in the company’s history outside of founder John Stage.