Mr. Powdrell’s Barbecue closing its Albuquerque Central Avenue location after 50+ years

Mr. Powdrell’s Barbecue House is closing its Central Avenue location in Albuquerque at the end of this month after more than 50 years at that Route 66 location.

Albuquerque Business First (subscription required) reported the restaurant at 11301 Central Ave. NE will close on Sept. 30.

Mr. Powdrell’s second location at 5209 4th St. NW will remain open and retain its Route 66 roots. That site is on the 1920s to ’30s alignment of Route 66.

Joe Powdrell, president of the restaurant, told the newspaper that the profitability of the Central Avenue location declined during the COVID-19 pandemic. The restaurant also encountered difficulty in hiring staff.

The Central site has been put up for sale for $800,000.

Powdrell said the company will look seriously at bottling more of its barbecue sauce and distributing it to a wider region to diversify its revenue stream. (I personally can attest to the excellence of its sauce; I once bought a case of the stuff.)

Mr. Powdrell’s website has this brief history of the restaurant:

During the beginning of the 19th century, the legacy began near Baton Rouge, Louisiana. It was there that Mr. Issac Britt, the grandfather of Mr. Pete Powdrell, would give birth to both a culinary recipe for a tangy barbecue sauce and a natural technique for slow-smoking meats over an open pit fired by pure hickory wood. It would be in the 1940s that the baton of this legacy would be passed on Pete Powdrell. The legacy traveled from Louisiana to East Texas where he started his family and ended up in Albuquerque, NM, and Pete, his life and business partner Catherine, and their eleven children would follow the tradition of family, and employ this recipe for goodness wherever they went.

Here’s a good interview by a local TV station with Mike Powdrell from a few years ago:

It is the second historic restaurant to close on East Central Avenue this year. Griff’s Hamburgers abruptly closed there in July.

(Image of Mr. Powdrell’s Barbecue House on Albuquerque’s Central Avenue via Yelp)