St. Louis Barbecue: Rib Cut, Pork Steaks and Snoots

Juicy pork steaks sizzling on the grill with a flavorful herb crust.

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“St. Louis-style” barbecue means three different things depending on who is talking: a way of cutting ribs, a backyard habit built around pork shoulder steaks, and a set of neighborhood specialties such as snoots. This overview draws on St. Louis Magazine, two KCUR stories made with the Missouri Humanities Council, St. Louis Public Radio, and the USDA’s Institutional Meat Purchase Specifications.

A Style Named for a Cut, Not a Method

St. Louis Magazine’s dining editor, George Mahe, makes the key point first: in the phrase “St. Louis-style spare rib,” the style refers to the cut, squaring the slab by sawing off the rounded tip, rather than the way it is cooked. He adds that when people say “St. Louis-style barbecue” they most often mean meat that is grilled and then sauced, as opposed to dry-rubbed and slow-smoked.

The USDA gives the trimming an official definition. In its fresh pork specifications, item 416A, “Pork Spareribs, St. Louis Style,” is a sparerib slab with the sternum and the ventral portion of the costal cartilages removed along with the flank portion. Item 416B, listed as “Brisket Bones” and also called “Rib Tips,” is the sternum, cartilage and attached lean that come off. Iowa State University Extension calls the result a uniform, rectangular slab, and adds that Kansas City-style ribs are St. Louis-style ribs with more bones removed.

Who Created the Cut

KCUR’s Jenny Vergara reports that St. Louis meatpackers created the cut to promote their craftsmanship to the rest of the country, squaring off the slab by trimming away the fatty, gristly tips. Customers liked the even shape, and the cut spread to butcher shops and restaurants nationwide. The trimmings became a specialty in their own right: rib tips, which KCUR says many traditional St. Louis barbecue joints serve grilled or smoked and covered in sauce.

Pork Steaks: A Popular Cut With No Single Inventor

Pork steaks are cut from the shoulder, the part known as the butt or Boston butt, according to St. Louis Magazine. Local lore has long credited two origins: a Florissant man, Winfred Steinbruegge, who supposedly asked a grocer to cut them in 1956, and the Schnuck family’s supermarkets, which claimed the invention in the 1950s. St. Louis Public Radio reports that Robert Moss, barbecue editor at Southern Living, searched old newspapers and found evidence of pork steaks about fifty years earlier, and nothing to corroborate either story. A KSDK fact-check cited by St. Louis Public Radio found the Schnucks claim unsupported, and a Schnucks spokesperson conceded it could not be backed up.

What the record does support, per Moss, is that the 1950s is when pork steaks became a hit in St. Louis. His summary: “You can certainly say that St. Louis is the home of the pork steak.” The barbecue writer Steven Raichlen makes the same regional point, noting that many Americans link St. Louis to ribs, yet a typical backyard there has pork shoulder steaks on the grill, sauced with Maull’s, a local tomato-based sauce.

The Sauce

Mahe describes the sauce as basically the same across St. Louis: tomato-based and on the sweet side, thick in some brands and thin in others. KCUR notes that Kansas City and St. Louis, different in many ways, share a devotion to sweet-tangy tomato sauce. In a separate column on pork steaks, Mahe writes that most St. Louisans remember the classic version as grilled, finished in the oven, and sauced with Maull’s straight from the bottle.

Snoots and Rib Tips

Snoots are pig’s noses. KCUR describes the general method, which varies by restaurant: the meat and fat are trimmed from the nose and head, the nostril button is removed, and the meat is cured overnight, rubbed with cayenne and salt, and grilled until the fat renders. The result is crisp, spicy pieces that are sauced and eaten by hand. Mahe notes that snoots and rib tips are as common in St. Louis as the slices of white bread served beneath them.

KCUR singles out Smoki O’s, a restaurant just north of downtown St. Louis opened by Earline and Otis Walker roughly 25 years before the 2021 article, as a tribute to Otis’s late mother, who hosted backyard barbecues. Television host Andrew Zimmern praised its snoots on “Bizarre Foods America.”

Whose Barbecue Is It?

KCUR’s companion story, on Missouri barbecue, interviews Adrian Miller, the James Beard Award-winning author of “Black Smoke: African Americans and the United States of Barbecue.” Miller’s argument, as KCUR reports it, is that Black pitmasters helped build Missouri barbecue and have been pushed to the sidelines as it became mainstream. He says Black “barbecue ambassadors” from places such as West Tennessee brought the cuisine to Kansas City and St. Louis after the Civil War, and he objects to recent authority figures who define barbecue away from an African American aesthetic.

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