San Bruno’s Late-Night BBQ Spot Is a Temple to Hip-Hop and Smoky Brisket

The Midnight Diners is a regular collaboration between KQED food editor Luke Tsai and artist Thien Pham. Follow them each week as they explore the hot pot restaurants, taco carts and 24-hour casino buffets that make up the Bay Area’s after-hours dining scene.

San Bruno’s hip-hop-inspired late-night barbecue joint doesn’t simply play rap music while you eat your ribs; the actual name of the restaurant is Hip Hop BBQ Shack. Nearly every inch of the place is crammed full of assorted knickknacks and memorabilia, including a corrugated “Wall of Fame” that’s lined end to end with old vinyl and framed photos of hip-hop luminaries, both local and mega-national: Tupac, Kendrick, Mac Dre, Keak Da Sneak and, for some reason, Justin Bieber.

Waiting for our brisket plate, we fiddle with an NBA Jam mini arcade machine — itself an object of mid-’90s nostalgia. Over the speakers, Kid Cudi is off-key rap-singing about lonely loners.

It’s all a little on the nose. But the formula seems to work, mainly because the barbecue itself is so solid.

It turns out that Hip Hop BBQ Shack is a fairly recent rebrand of The Famous Rib Shack, a longstanding Peninsula destination for ’cue, with the old sign still lit up out front. For the last few years, Chef Mae, the one-woman force behind San Francisco’s popular (and now-shuttered) Hyde Away Blues BBQ, has set up shop, slinging a barbecue menu that’s slightly fancier and more newfangled than your typical old-time joint. The mac and cheese has truffle oil in it here; the sauces are boozed up with bourbon or whiskey.

Late on a Friday night, we cobbled together a plate of hot links and brisket, and found both to be legitimately tasty. The links were plump and fatty, bursting with juice, and had that good snap you look for in a sausage. The brisket was chopped into big chunks rather than sliced and seemed to have some of the burnt ends — that crunchy, well-blackened Kansas City innovation — mixed in so that you might get several different textures in a single bite: the crisp, peppery bark; the tender, pleasantly smoky meat; the little nubs of fat.

Note that this is the style of barbecue that comes slathered with a lot of sweet sauce — two kinds, in this case: a red, bourbon-based barbecue sauce that was slightly spicy and another one that was gold and mustardy. (A 49ers theme, maybe?) You can, of course, ask for the sauce on the side. I just wished we’d been given some plain white bread to help sop it up.

Meanwhile, the collard greens might have been the most flavorful version I’ve ever had — slow-simmered in ham juices until they were loaded with savoriness and umami.

This is the kind of restaurant that sells out when it sells out — sometimes as early as 8 p.m., we were told, especially if there’s a big game on. If that’s the case, does it even qualify as a late-night restaurant? All I know is we arrived at close to 11 o’clock on a Friday night, and apart from a few side dishes that had sold out, the kitchen was still turning out big plates of ’cue. Call ahead if you want to be sure.

The Shack is also the kind of place where at the end of the meal, after we eat our fill and bob our heads to a steady stream of ’90s and 2000s rap classics, Chef Mae encourages us to consider throwing our next hip-hop-themed birthday party here. “You just have to wear all Adidas,” she says.

I don’t know if I have that on my 2024 bingo card. But if I’m hungry for barbecue on the Peninsula late at night, now I know exactly where to go.

Hip Hop BBQ Shack is open at 223 El Camino Real in San Bruno, Friday through Sunday from 6–11 p.m. (or until sold out), and Wednesday to Thursday 6–10 p.m. (or until sold out).