Bigs BBQ says bye-bye

Pour out a little barbecue sauce and say good-bye to another purveyor of pork.

January 7, 2015; 9:40 AM • by Richard Hayes

I went to Bigs BBQ (931 W. Grace St.) once and thought it was decent barbecue but at the time what I noticed more was the lack of a lunch crowd. I wrote it off to being summer and students not being around. Looks like the lack of crowds wasn’t a fluke, as of New Year’s Eve Bigs BBQ has shut their doors.

Bigs first started slinging pork in September of 2013 so managed to stick around for little over a year.

Karri Peifer of Richmond.com talks with Bigs BBQ owner, Rob Weaver about his closing and the struggles of running a restaurant in that spot.

“The lack of parking and the constant construction makes it hard for people to come there,” Weaver said, noting that those restraints mean restaurants are forced to rely on students and VCU faculty and staff to be the bulk of their customers.

“I’m not being critical of VCU at all,” he said “but it’s landlocked. If one of your friends said, ‘let’s go down to Grace Street,’ you’d say no. So you get stuck with foot traffic. There are 40k students down there – and they eat fast food.”