More than four years ago at their Rockville location, Urban Bar-B-Que owners David Calkins and Lee Howard were turning out barbecue with an overtaxed metal smoker approximately the size of a dorm-room refrigerator. It was as much a convection oven as a smoker, a contraption that required employees to fill (and refill and refill) a [...]

Perhaps not honky tonkin' in the Hank Williams sense, but the Sandy Spring location of the mini-Urban Bar-B-Que chain is planning to add live music late this summer, after owners David Calkins and Lee Howard expand their smokehouse. When I spoke to Calkins on the phone this morning, he talked about not only adding live [...]

Urban Bar-B-Que's David Calkins calls his smokehouse version the Two Step Chili because the ingredients come in pairs, sort of like the Noah's Ark of stews. Two different kinds of meat (ground chuck, chopped brisket), two styles of beans (pintos, black), and two sources of heat (chipotle, jalapeno). What Urban's chili lacks in presentation — my [...]

The owners of Urban Bar-B-Que plan to open a third location of their small smokehouse chain in the former Willoughby's Market in Sandy Spring, pitmaster David Calkins told Y&H over the weekend. The lease has been signed, and since the space won't require a massive build-out for the restaurant, Calkins expects to open the latest Urban within [...]

Urban Bar-B-Que: Still not a consistent winner. There must have been a hundred different reasons why I decided to include or pass over a restaurant for this year's Dining Guide. I thought I'd give you a glimpse into a few of the restaurants that didn't make the cut and why: Comet Ping-Pong and Buck's Fishing and Camping: Carole Greenwood's [...]

I stopped by Urban Bar-B-Que's "Saturday Straight from the Smoker" promotion and ordered up enough meats to feed the Washington Redskins' offensive line for a week. Co-owner David Calkins hacked me off a few ribs—which, incidentally, didn't need a drop of Urban's sweet sauce to give them flavor—and sliced me several thick strips from a [...]

David Calkins, co-owner of Urban Bar-B-Que, called this afternoon to tell me that the Rockville location of the two-store chain had just installed a XLR-600 Southern Pride smoker, which is a significant improvement over the joint's previous equipment. The Southern Pride machine can handle about 600 pounds of meat on its self-basting rotisserie racks, but [...]