Opening times are the easy part. The more useful question at a barbecue restaurant is when in the day the food is actually good — and because Famous Dave's is a full-service restaurant with a bar rather than a counter-service smokehouse, the answer is different from most of the chains it competes with. Here is both.
The standard week
| Day | Opens | Closes |
|---|---|---|
| Monday to Thursday | 11:00 AM | 9:00 PM |
| Friday | 11:00 AM | 10:00 PM |
| Saturday | 11:00 AM | 10:00 PM |
| Sunday | 11:00 AM | 9:00 PM |
Those are the typical hours across the roughly 130 restaurants. Nobody opens for breakfast — 11:00 AM is the chain-wide standard, and the doors close an hour later on Friday and Saturday. Franchised locations, and restaurants attached to casinos, airports or arenas, run their own schedules and can be several hours off in either direction. Confirm the specific restaurant before driving.
Lunch or dinner?
Because this is a table-service kitchen, food is fired to order rather than pulled from a holding cabinet, so the drop-off you get at a counter-service place late in the evening is much less severe. What does change through the day is the smoker cycle.
- 11:00 AM to 12:30 PM. Quietest hour of the day. Everything is available, service is fast, and the ribs have just come off. If you want a Big Slab without waiting, this is the window.
- 5:30 PM to 7:30 PM. Peak. Full dining room, longest wait for a table, and the hour when the kitchen is most likely to run down on a single item.
- After 8:00 PM. Calm again, but this is when the odds of hearing "we're out of burnt ends" are highest.
What runs out, and when
Three items on this menu are genuinely finite on a busy night, and they are all things that come off a rack rather than out of a bag.
- Southside Rib Tips ($16.99). Rib tips are the strip trimmed off a spare rack to make it a St. Louis cut, so the supply is capped by how many racks got trimmed that morning. This is the first thing to disappear on a Saturday, and it is the best value on the menu.
- Burnt Ends ($24.99 as a platter, $16.69 as an appetizer). One brisket point yields a limited amount. Late Friday and Saturday are the risky slots.
- Baby Back Ribs. Less common, but a Big Baby at $37.79 can sell through before a Big Slab does.
If you are set on any of these, phone ahead or order for pickup earlier in the day. Our walkthrough of ordering ahead at Famous Dave's covers the timing.
Bar hours and happy hour
Famous Dave's has a full bar, which is the main thing separating it from counter-service barbecue. Bar service generally tracks restaurant hours, and where a location runs a weekday happy hour it usually sits somewhere in the 3:00 PM to 6:00 PM band with discounted drinks and a reduced appetizer list. This is entirely a location-level decision — many restaurants do not run one at all. Given that Dave's Sampler Platter is $27.79 at full price, a happy-hour appetizer list is worth asking about before you order starters. The rundown of Famous Dave's specials and deals has more on what recurs weekly.
Holidays
Expect most locations to close on Thanksgiving Day and Christmas Day, and to run shortened hours on Christmas Eve, New Year's Eve and New Year's Day. Easter and July 4th are mixed — some restaurants open normally, some close.
The holiday worth planning around is Thanksgiving, because the chain runs a pre-order holiday feast program that is collected in the days before the restaurants shut for the day itself. Deadlines and pickup windows are covered in the Famous Dave's Thanksgiving guide.
The short version
Go at 11:30 AM on a weekday if you want the rib tips, the shortest wait and the freshest slab. Go at 6:00 PM on a Friday if you want the atmosphere and do not mind either. Avoid arriving after 8:30 PM expecting a full menu, and never assume a franchised or casino location keeps chain-standard hours. Prices for everything referenced here are on the full Famous Dave's menu.