Ready for smoked meatloaf or a pork melt? This barbecue place just expanded to Florida
A couple with years of restaurant experience out west is bringing their love of homestyle cooking to Florida’s Gulf Coast.
Their new restaurant, Pork Belly’s Eatery and Catering Co., opened in Bradenton in February. The new Florida restaurant joins two locations in Utah.
Co-owner Kate Meek says she fell in love with Manatee County over the years while visiting her mother.
Eventually, Kate and husband Eddie decided Bradenton was the right place to expand Pork Belly’s.
The restaurant is open for breakfast, lunch and dinner. While smoked meats are big a focus, the Meeks say there’s much more to the menu.
“We don’t claim barbecue at all,” Kate Meek said. “We do smoke the pork and the brisket. We smoke our meatloaf, we smoke our prime rib. But it’s all lightly smoked. We don’t do a heavy smoke on anything, so it’s just got a little flavor in the background of the smoker.”
More than lunch and dinner
Pork Belly’s Bradenton menu features customer favorites from the Utah restaurants, including tacos, smoked meat sandwiches, burgers, chicken, beef, pork and seafood dishes and salads.
One favorite, the Island Taco, includes smoked pulled pork, pineapple, salsa and homemade sauces. Another, the Jacked Up sandwich, contains jalapenos, cheese, bacon and sauces.
And the ribs are a best-seller, too.
“We sell out of our ribs constantly,” Meek said.
While there aren’t any vegan options, there are cauliflower tacos for vegetarians and several gluten-free dishes.
The Florida menu is about 90% the same as the Utah locations, but with a few unique offerings, including mahi-mahi.
There’s also a full-service bar serving beer, wine and signature cocktails.
But the restaurant also specializes in breakfast, with made-from-scratch biscuits and gravy and several varieties of eggs benedict as the highlights.
“I think our name … puts us in a box where it doesn’t seem like we would have breakfast,” Meek said. “The breakfast is a big deal, people are catching on. But again, you don’t go to Pork Belly’s expecting to get scratch-made biscuits and gravy, thick-cut bacon, and seven different styles of benedicts.”
Pork Belly’s owners bring years of restaurant experience to Florida
While they’ve been open less than a month in Bradenton, the Meeks have years of restaurant experience.
They had a successful spot in California before transitioning to smoking meats in a food trailer. That led to needing a storefront.
After 16 years in California, they relocated to Utah. The Meeks opened two Pork Belly restaurants in the Beehive State before planning to move to Florida’s Suncoast.
“So we knew we needed to wait until our youngest graduated,” Kate Meek said. “So when she graduated, she actually moved here a year before us. She goes to college here. And then we moved a year later after everything was sold.”
From Utah to Florida
Kim Meek said they fell in love with Florida because of the people and diversity. In Utah, it was dirt and snow.
Before they left, the Meeks sold their Pork Belly’s restaurants in Utah’s Cedar City and St. George. The new owners continue to operate those restaurants under the Pork Belly’s name.
“They have all the recipes, but they are able to do what they like also,” Meek said. “If they go too far south from what we’re doing, then they would be required to change the name.”
After negotiations on the Cortez Road building fell through last summer, the Meeks moved to Manatee County and began looking for another place to open Pork Belly’s. But then they got good news.
“Our real estate agent reached back out to us and said, ‘Hey, that unit ▪ is available and you don’t have to buy it,’” Meek said. “The tenants left.”
After remodeling to fit their needs, the restaurant opened in February.
If you go
▪ Location: 9516 Cortez Road W. in Bradenton
▪ Hours: Open Tuesday through Saturday from 8 a.m. to 9 p.m. and on Sunday from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. Lunch begins at 11 a.m. and dinner at 5 p.m.
▪ Seating: There are 123 seats inside with an additional 40 outside patio seats.
▪ Website: PorkBellysEatery.com.
This story was originally published March 15, 2025 at 9:18 AM.
