This SoCal City Ranked Among America's Top 5 Best For Barbecue

LOS ANGELES — It’s barbecue season and Los Angeles is one of the best places in the country to enjoy this tasty time of year, according to a recent ranking.

Lawn services website LawnStarter compiled a list of 2024’s best barbecue cities in America, with the City of Angels coming in fifth.

To determine the top cities for barbecue, LawnStarter considered a number of factors and grouped them into five categories: access, consumer satisfaction, competition awards, elite barbecue memberships and hosting. The website calculated city scores in each factor and category as well as an overall score reflecting a city's average across all criteria.

Kansas City, Missouri, unsurprisingly, came in first on the list with an overall score of 55.13, followed by Memphis with 47.74 and Houston with 43.95.

Los Angeles scored 36.2 and ranked between Kansas City, Kansas, at 37.98 and St. Louis at 36.06.

With five top-rated smokehouses, Los Angeles had the most. It also had the second-most total smokehouses at 15 and the third-most barbecue vendors at 101.

LawnStarter also noted that in Los Angeles it’s possible to order “The Meat Sweats,” which is on the menu at Moo’s Craft Barbecue.