Lucille's Smokehouse Bar-B-Que — Restaurant in Tempe

So I'd like to start out by saying I have been grilling and smoking meat for over 11 years now and cooking since I was about 10, I'm 26 now.

I had stopped in this place for a late dinner and was excited to try this place as my bother had been raving about this place for a couple of years especially with knowing how picky I am about Barbque. I had odered the build your 3 meat dinner combo that consisted for me of 2 beef ribs, tri tip, brisket burnt ends, Mac and cheese and garlic mashed potatoes.

The first thing I'm gonna talk about is the utter disrespect of how this tri tip was cooked. The only way I can describe it was if you were to fuse old leather with the bark of a birch tree. It was way over cooked and just down right not enjoyable to eat. Even if you are cooking at tri tip to well done it should still have some juiciness to the meat this was so dry it was asking to borrow water from the Sahara.

Next worst item I had was the burnt ends. Now I don't mind a little beef fat, as a matter of fact it's somewhat enjoyable to some extent but in terms of burt ends it was not the case. When I think of burnt ends I'm thing of a nicely charred cubbed cut of beef with a little bit of fat on it for flavor. These were missing the char and meat part. When I took a bite into it, it was just a glob of fat that was just barely done enough to be edible.

Now I actually don't have many bad words for the beef ribs. They were surpringly good and edible after the other 2 meats were not. Could have been a little more meat but you can't always control that. The only criticism I'd give it, is to pull off the membrane on the back to make it more tender all in all one of the better beef ribs I've had.

On to the Mac and cheese, if I had been blindfolded and ask to do a taste test on it I honestly wouldn't have been able to tell the difference between this one and KFC Mac and cheese. You could tell it was frozen and reheated.

As far as the service goes I was sat in the bar area so it was a decent amount of attention paid to us but the bartender that was waiting on us just seemed like he did not want to be there and never once asked how I was liking the food. All in all the only 3 good things about this place was the atmosphere, the iced tea and the mashed potatoes. I'm willing to give them another shot.

P.s. if Lucille's needs a real pit master let me know and I'll teach everyone in the kitchen how to properly cook and...

Well I used to come here a lot and I really love this place. It is gone downhill dramatically. The service was extremely slow in every aspect. Someone came and took our drink orders fairly quick and other than that everything was very slow and we had to ask multiple times for everything. Before we could order we had to ask the server if he could please check to see if any of the oils or other things they had at any corn products in them cuz one of our party was allergic to corn. It took him a very very long time before he finally came back around and remembered that he had forgot to go ask about that. We finally got around to placing our order for food. Eventually when our food came out I would say that it was not the quality that I remembered and was way overpriced for the quality we were getting. The person in our party who was allergic also got her dish with some of the things she was allergic to in her dish and had to send it back. The others in our party we're almost completely done with our food before she actually got her corrected dish. I got the brisket and have to say it was really boring and very dry. No one was very happy with their dish. Other people in the party had also been here before a long time ago and really loved it but this was just not the same place at all. One of the people in the party was going to take some of her dish home and asked for a box. Well it took quite a while before she actually got a box and we ended up asking someone who wasn't even our server if they could go get a box for us. We had told our server when we first placed our order that we were probably going to want to order some Beignets but he never came back to check if we wanted dessert. One of our parties saw him walking by and got up to go after him to tell him we wanted to order the Beignets but then he disappeared she finally ran into the manager and got the manager to place the order for us. I will say one of the reasons I'm giving them one star is because the Beignets were out of this world good. Other than the company I was with the Beignets were the only bright star out of this whole meal. We all seem to agree that none of us were going to be coming back to this place and just write it off as a lost cause at this point because it...

Edit: the reply to this review by the owner doesn’t make sense. I haven’t received any sort of email communication about this yet. Checked my spam as well - nothing.

All the negative reviews are absolutely correct. Do not eat here unless you want to be ripped off for bones and rubber brisket.

It was the first time my husband and I ate at Lucille’s and it will be the last. We arrived today around 2:15 to have lunch. Our waiter was great and we put in our food order. It took over 45 minutes for our food to get to us, which is absolutely unacceptable.

We were willing to give this place a chance because our waiter apologized profusely (not their fault) and told us that they had two large parties and the kitchen was backed up. Again, not their fault.

After waiting that long for food, we were really disappointed with both the quality and amount in what arrived. I ordered the lunch portion and my much larger husband ordered the dinner portion which we did confirm with our waiter. His plate looked exactly the same size as mine somehow.

His ribs were mostly bones and had no meat on them. The pulled pork was totally flavorless and the mashed potatoes to be honest tasted like instant ones. Both our food was cold - nothing was hot. The brisket was totally inedible- it was hard and rubbery. I had to pull to bite a piece off. Lukewarm at best was the okra. My fountain soda also tasted very off - I didn’t drink most of it. This is a chain so we didn’t expect much and expectations were very low walking in, but inedible and cold food after a 45 min wait is a not okay for any place. I swear I’ve had better BBQ at Texas Roadhouse or Famous Dave’s …

While our waiter was kind enough to come by to apologize for the wait, not once did a manager come by to apologize or ask us if there was anything we could do. We were about to just ask for our check right before our food came, honestly I regret not doing it because with our tip included we spent almost $100 on totally inedible food. I did not finish my plate. To have to wait that long and the food be a total rip off and cold,...