Pits/Smokers

[Nick]

How did you go about choosing your pits/smokers before you opened? Was there equipment that fit your needs as built, or did you have to have it custom designed and built? Are you happy with it?

Thanks, Nick

[Danny Meyer]

We selected our "Ole Hickory" smokers 100% on the advice of Mike Mills -- our barbecue guru from Murphysboro, Illinois. There are two companies he recommended highly. Southern Pride in Marion, Illinois, and Ole Hickory from Cape Girardeau, Missouri. Not too surprisingly, they're run by (highly competitive) relatives on either side of the Mississippi River. They're both outstanding firms that take barbecue seriously. We first had to figure out how much product we'd be smoking on a daily basis. It takes a lot of organization. It's almost like being in the real estate business, with each smoked product getting its allotted space and time in the smokers. The brisket gets an 8-hour lease every night. The pork butt (shoulder) gets 15 hours. The ribs get 6-7 hours, the chicken 1 1/2 hours and the suckling pig goes for 23 hours. Based on all of those hours, we tried to figure out how much time and space we'd need for each item. For example, 80 racks of ribs take up so much smoker space every 6-7 hours, 6 briskets take up so much space for 8 hours, etc. It became a mathematical equation.

In the end, we understood which dimensions we'd need, and had two enormous smokers custom-built for our kitchen. I'll never forget the day they were delivered. We had to close down East 27th Street, open the entire storefront of what would one day be Blue Smoke, and then get them lovingly moved into the kitchen. We cut holes in the back of the building to accommodate the back of the pits (that's where the wood is loaded). The fit was perfect --- almost too perfect. In fact, there is no more than 1/4-inch between the top of pits and the steel beam that supports the kitchen ceiling. We were incredibly lucky that we didn't have to re-build the kitchen around the smokers.

As I've written in another post, we had lots of problems getting excellent product from the smokers in those early months, mostly related to the enormous updraft from our 15-story smokestack. One night, in an effort to improve our ribs, we shut off the fan on the roof. We ended up with an alarmingly loud fire alarm and an invasion of axe-hauling members of the NY Fire Department. It wasn't pretty. "Ole Hickory" wasn't able to help that much in figuring out our smokestack problems, since they've not had experience with many (if any) urban installations. But once we identified the problem, they were great about helping us install the 3 dampers that have made all the difference in the world in terms of getting smoky flavor and moist meat.

All in all we are quite happy with our choice to work with Ole Hickory.