- Fans line up for Friday, Saturday and Sunday lunches at Belly Barbecue in Folsom.
- Marcus Randolph opened Belly a quarter-mile from Intel’s campus, where he worked as an engineer.
- Randolph makes Texas-style barbecue, including the flagship brisket smoked for 12-14 hours.
You smell Belly Barbecue before you see it, and you see it before it opens. People regularly line up outside the restaurant in Folsom Corners shopping center for scant tastes of next-level brisket, hefty beef ribs and more.
Belly Barbecue is only open a maximum of 11 hours per week, a Friday-Sunday lunchtime spot until sold out. But after a year in business, it may well be Sacramento County’s best barbecue restaurant.
Brisket ($18), the star of the show, comes coated in a peppery bark with beautiful smoke rings and a rich flavor. Juicy spare ribs ($15) fall off the bone onto wax paper-lined trays. Macaroni and cheese is infused with an herby, garlicky seasoning mix almost like pesto.
Belly is the result of a decade’s worth of tinkering from Marcus Randolph, the owner and pitmaster who regularly makes time to glad-hand the dining room throughout service. Born and raised in Georgia, Randolph came to Folsom to work as a software engineer for Intel. His restaurant now sits a quarter-mile away from the tech campus’ entrance.
It was an Intel manager who, by encouraging Randolph to find a hobby outside of work, sparked his barbecue foray. He began using an offset smoker in 2013 and kept going, even while working full time and remotely earning a master’s degree from Vanderbilt University. Neighbors such as Ty Dussell, who’s since become Randolph’s right-hand man at Belly, got to taste the progress along the way.
Randolph registered Belly as an LLC in 2018 and began looking for a location but held off on its launch due to the COVID-19 pandemic. He opened in the roughly 1,500-square foot space in September 2024, with an assembly line leading customers toward red Solo cups by the water jug and rolls of paper towels at each table.
Meats cooked Texas-style, low and slow
The meats are cooked Texas-style, low and slow, with Randolph taking some liberties along the way. Brisket comes from premium supplier Creekstone Farms in Arkansas and is smoked over local cherry and white oak woods for 12-14 hours. Even with its limited hours, Belly sells out of the 70-80 briskets it makes each weekend.
Squares of twice-smoked pork belly ($16) come with a bourbon-pear glaze that cuts through the layers of fat. He uses gochujang in the glaze for his spare ribs as a nod to eastern Sacramento County’s sizable Korean population, and he deploys a few other secret ingredients to make people feel at home.
“There’s a lot of things that you don’t see in the menu that I don’t talk about,” Randolph said. “But given the population and where we are … our menu caters to just about all the demographics. We want everyone to feel welcome here, right? We want everyone to feel like they want to have a taste. And people they eat it, they say, ‘This tastes so familiar.'”
Sides span the South, with a couple of nods to Randolph’s Georgia roots. Belly is the region’s only restaurant serving Brunswick stew ($6/eight-ounce cup and $12/pound), a regional dish made here with ground turkey, brisket and pork as well as tomatoes, corn and barbecue sauce. Pickled Vidalia onions, a South Georgia varietal that grow sweet in the sandy soil, accompany meat platters with slices of white bread.
Premier barbecue joints often have limited hours due to the craft’s time-intensive nature — Snow’s BBQ, home to legendary pitmaster Tootsie Tomanetz in Lexington, Texas, opens once a week at 8 a.m. and sells out around noon.
Keeping Belly’s hours limited allows Randolph to keep a close watch on the restaurant’s quality, aggressively trimming meats to ensure consistency. Even when Belly is closed, staff are stuffing housemade sausages or simmering bone broth for collard greens.
“In his eyes, it’s quality over profit any day. He works really hard to make sure that the product is consistent,” Dussell said. “We don’t skip any steps, cut any corners. Pretty much everything on the menu is a multiday process to make. And I just think that that’s something that California has been missing for a while, and so I’m glad that he was able to bring that over here.”
That model means low overhead, too. Randolph and Dussell do prep work throughout the week, along with Randolph’s wife Katie and employee Evan Briggs. Other staff only need to be paid Friday-Sunday. Consolidated hours also help Randolph greet customers as his best self, and go home with a smile.
“You don’t do a good job when you’re tired or you’re angry or you just don’t have control of the situation,” Randolph said. “It keeps me happy. I can go home and see my son and my wife. If I’m not happy, what’s the point of doing it?”
Belly Barbecue
Address: 1760 Prairie City Road, Suite 120, Folsom
Phone: 916-673-9917
Hours: 11 a.m.-2 p.m. Friday, 11 a.m.-3 p.m. Saturday and Sunday, closed Monday-Thursday. Arrive early, as popular items sell out each day.
Website: bellybarbecue.com
Vegetarian/vegan options: Well, it’s a barbecue joint. But Mylapore, a stellar all-vegetarian South Indian restaurant, sits next door.
Drinks: Coca-Cola products
Reservations: No, but call ahead for big orders
Benjy Egel is the senior food editor at Abridged. Born and raised in the Sacramento region, he has covered its local restaurants and bars since 2018. He also writes and edits Abridged’s weekly food and drink newsletter, City of Treats.