Drive down LA-311 near Polk Street these days and you'll see a slab and steel frame rising where there used to be open lot. It's easy to miss if you're not looking for it, wedged between the everyday commercial stretch and the kind of highway shoulder most of us tune out on the way to somewhere else. But that frame belongs to Big Mike's BBQ Smokehouse, and what's going up there is bigger than a bigger kitchen.
Big Mike's broke ground on the new location on September 30, 2025, with about 40 people gathered to watch. When it opens this fall, the building will run roughly 7,700 square feet, more than triple the size of the Barrow Street restaurant Houma has known since 2008. That much is public record and easy to find. What's less obvious is what the move actually says about where this town gathers after dark, and it's not the story you'd expect from a barbecue joint expanding its footprint.
From a 12-Seat Cafe on Barrow Street
Owner Mike Lewis didn't start out chasing square footage. He packed up his life in Tampa in 2007 and moved to Houma, his father's hometown, mainly to spend time with his dad. The restaurant came a year later, at the corner of Tunnel Boulevard and Barrow Street, in a 12-seat cafe built around a Lang barrel smoker and a family recipe for 14-hour oak-smoked brisket. Big Mike's has occupied a handful of spots since, including a stint near what's now a Walgreens, before settling into its current Barrow Street home. A second location opened in Thibodaux in 2017.
Here's the timeline as it actually happened:
| Year | Milestone |
|---|---|
| 2007 | Mike Lewis moves from Tampa to Houma |
| 2008 | Big Mike's BBQ Smokehouse opens at Tunnel Blvd. and Barrow St. |
| 2017 | Second location opens in Thibodaux |
| Sept. 2025 | Groundbreaking on LA-311 flagship, near Polk Street |
| Fall 2026 | Flagship location targeted to open |
Eighteen years is a long time to run the same idea in the same neighborhood. That's part of why the LA-311 project reads less like a business expansion and more like a bet on where the next version of that idea belongs.
What Tripling in Size Actually Adds
The current Barrow Street location employs about 90 people. When the new building opens, Lewis plans to move that staff to LA-311 and hire roughly 35 more, a real jump in one restaurant's footprint on the local job market. But the headcount isn't the interesting number. The floor plan is.
The new building isn't just a bigger dining room bolted onto the same menu. Plans call for a dedicated indoor stage sized for small bands, a bar guests can walk up to from outside, and an outdoor lawn meant for family gatherings, not just overflow seating. The kitchen gets more back-of-house space too, enough for the team to test new dishes and keep weekend service running later than the current location allows.
None of this comes out of nowhere. Big Mike's already hosts live blues on Friday nights at the Barrow Street spot, a tradition that's grown into a modest but loyal following. The LA-311 flagship formalizes that into what Lewis and the coverage around the project have called a "micro-venue," something between a restaurant patio and an actual concert stage.
Lewis put it plainly when the project was announced:
"This was always the vision. I've gotten a little older, a little wiser, and have more resources than we once had. It's allowed us to complete the vision, basically."
That's not marketing copy. It's a guy describing a decade and a half of running toward the same idea before he had the money to build it properly.
Why the Highway, Not Downtown
If you've been paying attention to downtown Houma's recent run of new restaurants and later closing times, you might expect the next big gathering spot to land there too. Big Mike's didn't make that bet. It planted its flagship on a highway corridor instead, and the people watching the local business scene closely think that's the point.
When the Houma-Terrebonne Chamber of Commerce spoke at the groundbreaking, the framing wasn't just congratulatory. Officials and business advocates have pitched the flagship as a catalyst for the LA-311 corridor generally, with more restaurants and retail expected to follow as the highway's redevelopment continues. That's a specific claim worth sitting with. It means the corridor most of us think of as a drive-through stretch, useful for getting somewhere else, is being treated by the people who track this stuff as the next commercial growth zone in Terrebonne Parish.
Downtown Houma still has the older buildings, the walkable blocks, the built-in charm that comes from more than a century of foot traffic. LA-311 has none of that history. What it has is room to build exactly the kind of space a restaurant needs if it wants a stage, a lawn, and a parking lot that can hold a Friday night crowd without spilling into the street. Big Mike's didn't choose the highway because downtown failed. It chose the highway because the highway had the acreage to finish an idea eighteen years in the making.
What Changes for Your Thursday Night
Right now, if you want Big Mike's live music, you show up to Barrow Street on a Thursday or Friday between 8 and 10 p.m. and hope for a table near the small stage area. That's the whole system. It works, but it's small by design, because the building was never built to be a venue.
Once the LA-311 location opens this fall, that changes. A dedicated indoor stage means bands aren't sharing space with dinner service anymore. An outside-access bar means you can catch a set without committing to a full meal. A lawn built for family events means birthday parties and weekend afternoons get an option that didn't exist before, somewhere between a backyard cookout and a public park.
It's worth being honest about the timeline too. "Fall 2026" has been the target since the project broke ground almost a year ago, and as of this writing that window is still holding. Anyone planning around an opening date should watch for updates from Big Mike's directly rather than assuming a hard date, since construction timelines on a project this size can shift by weeks even when nothing goes wrong.
What won't change is the food. Lewis has been clear that the point of the bigger building was never to reinvent the brisket. It was to build the room the brisket always deserved.
The Second Node, Not a Replacement
Houma isn't choosing between downtown and LA-311. It's getting both. Downtown keeps its density and its walkability. LA-311 is picking up something different: room to build bigger, and a business owner with almost two decades of trust in this community willing to bet on it. If the chamber's read on the corridor holds, Big Mike's flagship won't be the last new build out there. It'll be the one people point to when they explain how it started.
For now, the frame on LA-311 near Polk Street is just steel and concrete. By next fall, it's supposed to be the place your Thursday night runs through instead of around.
If you're keeping an eye on how Houma's neighborhoods are changing, block by block and corridor by corridor, that's exactly the kind of local read Good Earth Realty tracks for the people who call this parish home. Let's find your next home, start your search with a local agent.
