Chef Christopher Collins Opens Cowboy Seafood, a BBQ-and-Raw-Bar Mashup, Friday in Midtown Phoenix

PHOENIX — Smoked brisket and oysters on the half shell don’t usually share a menu, let alone a restaurant name. Starting Friday, they’ll be sharing both. Cowboy Seafood, the long-awaited surf-and-smoke restaurant from chef Christopher Collins, opens its doors October 9 at Park Central in midtown Phoenix — and it might be the most ambitious thing the Valley’s restaurant scene has seen this fall.

Collins, the chef and restaurateur behind Common Ground Culinary and its concepts The Collins Small Batch Kitchen, Grassroots Kitchen & Tap, The Macintosh and The Neighborly, has been building toward this one for almost exactly two years. The concept is deceptively simple to say and hard to do: competition-worthy barbecue and an elevated seafood program, under one roof, done at the same level of seriousness. Collins calls it the “pinnacle” of everything he’s worked on so far. “I just hope it resonates with the community,” he told the Arizona Republic.

The conceptSurf and smoke, for real

The barbecue side is not an afterthought. Cowboy Seafood’s meats are smoked over a custom dual-spit Santa Maria grill and a state-of-the-art J&R Manufacturing smoker — the same Texas-built equipment elite pitmasters use around the country. Collins and his culinary team traveled to Mesquite, Texas, to collaborate with J&R’s fourth-generation team, dialing in a smoke built on oak, pecan and dried corn husk. The result, he told the Republic, is a “sharp, bright smoke at the start that fades into a long, clean burn.” And he’s not just cooking with it: Collins plans to enter barbecue competitions and festivals, and is developing a mobile smoking rig for off-site events.

The seafood side is equally serious. The Saltwater Saint Raw Bar, an evolving in-house concept within Common Ground Culinary, anchors the program: oysters, shrimp, poke and sushi rolls, plus eight fresh cuts of fish prepared grilled, pan-seared, broiled or blackened. Yes — sushi, from a barbecue pitmaster. Collins’s first-ever sushi menu is one of the restaurant’s quietest gambles and maybe its loudest statement: this isn’t surf-and-turf cosplay, it’s two full programs sharing a kitchen.

The menuWhat to order

The stars of the menu are the barbecue staples: brisket, baby back ribs and whole hog smokes. Seafood options run from the raw bar to seafood towers to crab, shrimp and oysters. But the dish Collins is most excited about isn’t the most expensive or the most technical — it’s the burnt ends mac and cheese, which he called “outrageous.” When a pitmaster tells you his mac and cheese is the thing, order the mac and cheese.

Beyond the smoke and surf, the menu borrows some of the most popular salads and sandwiches from Collins’s other restaurants — the hickory burger, California burger, French dip sandwich and sunbelt salad. His theory, as he told the Republic: “Everything will be someone’s favorite thing on the menu.” It’s a smart move for a 5,000-square-foot room with 80 indoor seats and 80 on the patio: the adventurous table gets the seafood tower, the cautious table gets the French dip, and everybody’s happy.

The spaceA swordfish in a cowboy hat

The room itself splits the difference between the two cuisines. One of the first things guests will see, Collins told the Republic, is two entire walls of pecan wood — “working art,” he calls it: beautiful, but also there for a purpose, since it’s the same wood that smokes the barbecue. Against that, a vaguely nautical theme: navy blue and white subway tiles. And then, the flourish: an eight-foot taxidermied swordfish wearing a cowboy hat, visible through the Central Avenue-facing window — the emblem of the restaurant’s playful duality. Inside, there’s a 12-seat community table, a 22-seat island bar, and booth-lined dining areas that seat 80 indoors, with another 80 on the patio.

The room was designed with Ideation Design Group and developed with Plaza Companies, the same outfit behind Park Central’s revival. Renderings showed a space that blends raw wood textures with blue-and-white tile, glass and neon signage — what Collins calls an elevated dining experience “with a twang.” As he described it: friends sharing a bottle of wine over ribs and sushi. Casual, lively and soulful.

The chefBarbecue is in the blood

Cowboy Seafood is personal for Collins in a way his other openings weren’t. His father, Wally Collins, owned the Texas Longhorn Bar & Grill in Reno, Nevada, and won Best in the West at a national barbecue competition in 1994 with a now-legendary Maui Wowie sauce — a tangy-sweet blend of chili, plum and pineapple that may make an appearance on the new menu. “That was a core memory for me,” Collins said. “Watching my dad work the pit and seeing how food brought people together. That’s the energy I want Cowboy Seafood to have.”

He’s putting the money where the memory is. Collins is treating the smoke program as a competitive pursuit, not a menu gimmick: competitions, festivals, and eventually a mobile rig for catering and events. It’s a second-generation pitmaster finally getting his father’s scale of ambition — with a raw bar attached.

The neighborhoodMidtown’s momentum

Collins chose Park Central because of the liveliness around it: nearby offices, medical facilities, apartments and hotels, with the Arizona Republic and the Valley of the Sun United Way taking space in the complex itself. His ambition is for Cowboy Seafood to become a hotspot for business lunches, neighborhood happy hour and foodie-focused dinners. It’s personal, too — his children go to school nearby. “It feels great taking the boys, dropping them off and cruising down Central to my new midtown restaurant,” he told the Republic. “I just like being around all these big, tall buildings and the action.”

Midtown is buzzing for a reason. Park Central sits in the middle of a corridor with new residential development, a dual-branded Hilton and the growing Phoenix medical and university district — a dense, all-day customer base that supports exactly the kind of lunch-through-late-night operation Collins is building. If the room hits, it becomes the template: Common Ground Culinary has said the Park Central location is the foundation for future expansion to additional markets across the Valley. Vegas, meanwhile, keeps having its own October dining moment — but a BBQ-raw-bar-sushi hybrid is something we haven’t seen on either side of the state line.