Rick Harrison Might Be Serving You Barbecue, Drinks at Pawn Plaza

All 72 pods for Rick Harrison’s new Pawn Plaza arrived yesterday, ready to be installed and finished for the star of Pawn Star’s new container park dining and drinking destination that plans to open this summer.

"It’s a really neat looking project," Harrison says as he watches pods being lifting off trucks and assembled in the parking lot just south of his Gold & Silver Pawn Shop, where Pawn Stars is filmed. "My wife kind of came up with this color scheme. That’s how we got the Rubik’s Cube. It’s just really colorful. It comes at your eye. It’s different. We just didn’t want to do the whole stucco, boring thing."

But more importantly, "It screams Vegas."

Harrison is teaming up with Rollin’ Smoke Barbeque to open a joint project, Rick’s Rollin’ Smoke Barbeque, with the restaurant taking up three pods on the lower level and tavern on top.

"Rollin’ Smoke, I would say, is the best barbecue on the planet. I was born in Lexington, N.C., the barbecue capital of the world. My dad used to actually have them mail us barbecue. Growing up in San Diego, I was used to the barbecue coming with the dry ice once a month," Harrison says. "I was the only kid in San Diego eating barbecue with cole slaw or a hamburger with cole slaw. It’s all your vegetables that you can scoop onto a burger."

He plans to have live entertainment on Friday and Saturday nights on the giant balcony on the upper level that looks out over Las Vegas Boulevard. Garage doors roll up and down to reveal the balcony.

Chumlee may even get a chance to spin on the wheels of steel. "I guess deejays are considered live music," Harrison says. "I’m old and a nerd. I know the county when it comes to taxes thinks it’s live music."

Yes, you may even see Harrison working in the restaurant. "I had to go through that whole thing to get my health card and my TAM card just so I can bartend and serve barbecue."

So far, the barbecue joint and tavern are the only announced tenants, but expect 16 all together in the 11,000-square-foot, two level Pawn Plaza.

"We didn’t know what was going to lease out," Harrison says. "So far it’s only food on the bottom. We don’t know what we’re going to do upstairs. We have a few spaces left."