From the Phoenix Business Journal
Christopher Collins, the chef and restaurateur behind Common Ground Culinary and its concepts The Collins Small Batch Kitchen, Grassroots Kitchen & Tap, The Macintosh and The Neighborly, will open a brand-new concept next year in midtown Phoenix with a menu that mixes barbecue and seafood.
Cowboy Seafood will open in a nearly 5,000-square-foot space at Park Central — where the Arizona Republic and Valley of the Sun United Way have recently taken space.
Cowboy Seafood will be a first-of-its-kind restaurant pairing competition-level barbecue with an elevated seafood and raw bar program. Breaking norms in the barbecue world, Cowboy Seafood will be a full-service, plated restaurant while still maintaining its “BBQ Belt” style meat.
The seafood portion of the menu will come from Common Ground’s Saltwater Saint Raw Bar, an evolving in-house concept, and will include oysters, shrimp, poke and sushi rolls. There will also be eight fresh cuts of fish that will either be grilled, pan-seared, broiled or blackened.
Cowboy Seafood is expected to open in the spring of 2026.
Collins is very passionate about the project and said Cowboy Seafood will be a culmination of everything he has learned in his career.
“[My other restaurants] all have these elements of seafood and barbecue, and I’ve never called any of my concepts a seafood restaurant. I’ve never called any of my concepts a barbecue restaurant,” Collins said told the Business Journal. “If you take a step back and you look at them, you’d go, ‘Christopher, you have been doing this.’”
Now Collins said he wants to take things he is already doing and make them better then he has before.
The new restaurant is not only a professional achievement for him, but Collins said it has deep personal connections. Growing up, he worked in his father’s restaurant – Texas Longhorn Bar & Grill in Reno, Nevada – and helped his dad win a national BBQ competition in 1994. Collins wants to create competition level BBQ at Cowboy Seafood and use the new restaurant to bring both of his young sons into the business.
“My dad made me work my whole childhood, but it, but those are my core memories. I want those for my boys,” Collins said. “I want to put them over the fire and see what it is like to work hard and to be proud of something. I guarantee they will tell you, ‘I opened up Cowboy Seafood with my dad.’”
Growing the brand is part of the plan
Collins has put so much thought and love into the preliminary stages of Cowboy Seafood, he is already planning on growing the concept to multiple locations — something he has yet to do with Common Ground Culinary.
“I’ve never said this about any of my other concepts, but I want this to be amazing and hopefully we can have more of these in the future,” Collins said. “That’s the mindset right now. This is the pinnacle of my life and my restaurant career. I’m literally putting it all on the table.”
His fervor for the restaurant extends to the design of the space and the specific cooking equipment being brought in. Cowboy Seafood’s kitchen, which will be open and visible throughout the restaurant, will feature a custom dual-spit Santa Maria grill and a state-of-the-art J&R Manufacturing smoker, the same Texas-built equipment used by some of the nation’s top pitmasters.
Cowboy Seafood was designed by Ideation Design Group and will include raw wood textures with blue-and-white tile, glass and neon signage. There will be an eight-foot taxidermized swordfish wearing a cowboy hat, a 12-seat community table, a 22-seat island bar and a patio that can sit 80 guests – the same as the main dining room.
Cowboy Seafood will mark the first restaurant for Collins and Common Ground Culinary in Phoenix’s downtown or midtown areas. Collins imagines the outdoor environment, the cars, trains and foot traffic at Park Central helping with the atmosphere of Cowboy Seafood.
“We are so excited to be in midtown,” Collins said. “With the apartment buildings, the medical schools, the offices and other restaurants … the seasonality [you see in Scottsdale] is not going to be here.”
Not only does Collins appreciate the area, but he also has a personal connection with Sharon Harper, CEO, chairman and co-founder of Plaza Cos., the co-developer of the project.
“Sharon Harper’s younger son Mike went to high school with me,” Collins said. “I remember going to their house and getting food out of their refrigerator.”