Editor’s note: Rodney Scott's Whole Hog BBQ has removed the meat smokers from the rooftop kitchen because it was not permitted for rooftop barbecuing . The restaurant remains open inside Chief’s at 200 Broadway.
The smoke has a way of sticking with you. It seeps into your eyes, it permeates your pores, it clings to your hair, even after three washes.
Tyler Ashton, the COO of Rodney Scott's Whole Hog BBQ, says the smoke is practically part of him. It even follows him in his luggage when he pulls his clothes out on vacation. He knows the ideal percentage of moisture content in his oak and hickory logs for the perfect smoke ― 20-27% ― and exactly what low, slow wood-fired heat will do to the whole hogs he cooks and trains people to cook.
On July 19, Ashton stood over a hog that had weighed about 200 pounds in the field, now dressed and cloaked in the smoke of the hardwood-driven barbecue pit on the rooftop. The rooftop venue, known as "Hell of a Q," is the crowning jewel of Chief's on Broadway, country music star Eric Church's 20,000-square-foot behemoth bar in downtown Nashville.
What it's like: Cooking whole hog barbecue on a Broadway rooftop in Nashville: Pitmasters for a day
The usually raucous Broadway was dark and subdued when Ashton got to work at his standard 5 a.m. start time. To keep the barbecue rolling out of this 1,100-person capacity venue from 8 a.m. until close is a 24-hour operation. The restaurant smokes a minimum of 15-18 hogs per week, and each takes up to 14 hours to reach completion. Some of that work is waiting, listening and staying attuned to the heat, smoke and flame.
"A lot of folks will come in and say, you know, this is easy work," Ashton said. "I'm like, well, then you're not open to what it is. If you think it's easy work, then you're not getting out of it what you need to get out of it."
Ashton's ear is tuned to hear the fat dripping, hitting the coals with a rhythmic hiss like a metronome, even in mid-conversation. If it drips too fast, he'll lower the heat by moving coals and toggling vents. Like many chefs, he can feel how far the meat has cooked by pressing a finger into the muscle. The skin, increasingly leathery, pulls away from the meat. The hams need more work, he said, pointing at the burnished muscle at the edge of the leg cut. Accordingly, he banked the coals higher under the legs.
He has a natural affinity for barbecue and the process behind it. It's almost instinctual.
That makes him an invaluable part of Scott's team. The restaurant is in growth mode with five locations in four states and three more planned. The secret to its success is not just turning out a craft product but making lots of it. Executing it requires a mix of instinct and knowledge, and that's something only experience can provide. Barbecue culture is about teaching long-held methods, whether that's within families or from one pitmaster to the next.
"The number one most appealing thing about our concepts is keeping those traditions alive," Ashton said. "And from a scalability standpoint, it's finding passionate people to help you do it."
Hardwood and hard data
To make a craft concept scalable also takes hard restaurant data.
"We have really good systems that project sales and product mix, so we know how much to cook each product," said Nick Pihakis, founder of Pihakis Restaurant Group, which partnered with Scott to grow his restaurants into four states.
Knowing exactly how long it will take to cook a whole hog is crucial to Scott's operations. It's a bad idea to run out of pork when "whole hog" is built right into the restaurant's name.
"You can't throw a pig on and five minutes later it's done," Pihakis said. "It's not like a steak or a burger. It takes 12-14 hours. So, you know, you have to calculate it out pretty well."
But even the most experienced barbecue masters can get it wrong.
Scott cooked his first whole hog at 11 years old at his family's restaurant, Scott's Variety Store and Bar-B-Q in Hemingway, South Carolina. Now 53, Scott is an internationally known pitmaster and only the second to win a James Beard Award. But he still remembers the shame of running out of whole hog barbecue his first time.
"It had to be 2011 and it was embarrassing, because it seemed like we weren't ready yet, and we thought we were," Scott said. "And then we had to learn, you know, had to figure out how to do more."
At that time, Scott had just taken over the family business in Hemingway, population 450. Most customers were traveling from out of town to eat food from the pitmaster whose name had become synonymous with incredible barbecue.
"I got called some other names that day," Scott said. "Oh, well. We learned."
As it is with cooking the whole hogs he's worked to master for 42 years, operating a business selling them requires patience, Scott said.
It also takes personnel; two to four cooks to manage the pits and more people to manage the ribs and half chickens that smoke in a fraction of the time. More to manage the a-la-minute cooking, including pork skin nachos and fried catfish sandwiches. And more to manage the food coming out of the downstairs barbecue takeout window, including big pork belly skewers and whole hog-stuffed burritos at breakfast.
'Don't burn the place down'
As of mid-June, Ashton estimated Rodney Scott's Nashville operation had sold almost 4,000 pounds of pork, just seven weeks after opening.
That's even more impressive when considering the detail-oriented work. Turn your back on the smokers too long, and upwards of 70 pounds of product has gone up in smoke.
"We've definitely lost our fair share of hogs over time," Ashton said.
Whole-hog cooking, with its complex variables including fat content and muscle structure, and relatively low yield of 30-45% usable meat per animal, is such an endangered art, few know how to do it. It requires a lot of training and Ashton had to build a team from scratch.
Even an experienced pitmaster would have a lot to learn about cooking on the exposed roof of a six-story building packed with people. That means babying the pit closest to the wind and weather by managing dampers and smokestacks. It means managing the heat of custom burn barrels that blaze 1,000 degrees at their bellies.
"We don't want to set the alarms off, right, so they had to learn about that," Ashton said. "Like don't overload it. Don't burn the place down. That's a big part of what we do every day when we're just focused on traditional whole hog barbecue."
Fire mitigation has always been a threat with open-pit cookery, and it's not unusual to see news of a smokehouse catching fire. Pitmaster Bryan Furman, of B's Cracklin' Barbecue, has twice lost his restaurants to fire .
That's not an option at Scott's, where much of the equipment is custom-built expressly to mitigate that risk.
'A difference you can taste'
On the roof, this latest hog had been stubborn. It took a full 14 hours to cook.
Once it was nearly done, Ashton showered it with a spicy-sweet spice rub and mopped it with a vinegar-based Eastern Carolina-style sauce, then fired it a bit more. Soon, Ashton removed the meat and mounded it in pile of fat-infused, slightly spicy mix of cheek, belly, loin, ham ― the whole hog.
Samuel Johnson's 1755 dictionary defined barbecue as a “hog (dressed) whole in the west Indian manner," split to the backbone and laid on a large iron grid two feet above a charcoal fire.
"That's the exact definition of what we do," Ashton said.
This is the barbecue style the Scott family helped shepherd forward, techniques passed down through generations of pitmasters who probably never read that dictionary entry, Ashton said.
"And now my goal is to make the best barbecue," Ashton said. "How do you do that? You have to evolve with your knowledge."
The menu at Scott's always pays homage to local tradition. In Nashville, there's a hot chicken sandwich on the menu. Alabama, where pork shoulder is king, that's available right next to whole hog. Shoulder used to be a best seller. Now it's neck-and-neck in terms of sales.
"But we're still using the same exact technique that was used at Hemingway, that was used at Charleston, and we've carried it through to every location we open," Pihakis said. "It's swimming upstream. (Whole hog) is really hard to do. But if you learn it, and you do it right, it's a difference you can taste. It tastes completely different than most barbecue because it's not smoked, it's pit-cooked."
This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: SC pitmasters make craft barbecue for Nashville crowds on Broadway: Whole hog on the roof
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