• Michael Gebert
  • Joe Woodel of Husky Hog Bar-B-Que

A couple of months ago I wrote about the relocation of the only south-side African-American-style barbeque place on the white north side, Honey 1 Barbecue. (They’re still there; the 43rd Street location hasn’t opened yet.) Now here’s the reverse: a north-side-style barbecue joint cooking barbecue in a Southern Pride smoker (the same kind used at places like Smoque), in a style pretty much straight out of Tennessee, with southern sides from collard greens to fried green tomatoes—half a mile from U.S. Cellular Field on the south side.

Joe Woodel: Man, I’m horrible at dates and years. My wife could tell you to the second. I know July we’ll have the food truck for two years, so two years before the food truck we started a competition team called Long Tongs. And everybody thought we were Asian, and I just thought everybody was racist!

I got a friend—because I knew I needed help cutting and cleaning up—I got a friend, José, to help me because he always wanted to go to culinary school but he has a kid, and he just didn’t have time. But he had time to do that for us. So we bought two 18-inch Weber bullets, bullet smokers, and I just started practicing every Saturday. We would do ribs one weekend and shoulder the next, and we would just practice, practice, practice. And I was making barbecue sauces that had way over 30 different components, all the way down to coffee, to Coke, anything you could think of to try to be different, to beat these guys, before we did the competition.

I scraped up all my money over the winter—because I was working at Home Depot—and I flew down to Atlanta and then rented a car and drove three hours and stayed at his house for four days. Just cooking barbecue, from whole hogs to shoulders. And the first thing I learned was, I was overcomplicating things. It was just dry rub, sugar, simple sauces, they just really simplified it. Beef base and garlic powder was their injection for the brisket—man, I was doing fourteen to eighteen different components.

So I guess I moved here, I got my BFA in Columbia and I did that for a while, and when the economy tanked and all the small theaters closed—I was getting shows and stuff, but there was no pay. You don’t make any money starting out. You’ve got to buy your own costumes and your own makeup. How do you make a living doing that?