Step into Pappy’s Smokehouse and you’ll likely meet owner Mike Emerson, who makes it a point to greet customers at the door. He’s quick to tell you that his new barbecue restaurant near downtown is a joint effort. “We have no titles because everybody here’s on the same team,” Emerson said. “I guess if you look on [forms], then you’ll see that I’m the owner. But I have partners. Brian Scoggins and John Matthews … we all barbecue. We all do it because we love it. We’re just standing back there belly-laughing. It’s like, ‘I can’t believe that we get paid to do this.'”
Give me a snapshot of your barbecue history. Jim Emerson was Pappy. That’s my oldest brother, who passed five years ago. When you went to Jim’s house, there was barbecue goin’ on and there was good times. When he passed … I’d had this idea in the back of my head for a while. Came down the highway one day, had been on a pheasant huntin’ trip, and stopped and talked to Terry Black and Ron Skinner from Super Smokers. I asked them if they could do wild game. Being barbecue fanatics, they agreed. We became friends and I learned a whole new barbecue world there.
Did you work with them? I [was] general manager of the original Super Smokers in Eureka. Met a man by the name of Skip Steele, also one of the founders. Skip would be a brother from another mother I’d say. Built his first smoker when he was 14 years old. When other kids are out there racing cars, he’s out barbecuing. In the past few years, he [invited me] to some of the barbecue competitions. I never headed a team, but I was always a good wingman. I was very observant.
You call this Memphis-style barbecue. I describe it as a dry rub with sauce on the side. St. Louis-style would be more toward grilling than slow smoking and using a tomato-based sauce during the cooking process. It has a tendency to caramelize; it’s a different style. We believe that the meat should be the highest quality you can get and you shouldn’t try to disguise it in any way.
What cut of meat goes into making the pulled pork? A Boston butt, which is actually a pork shoulder. We cook ’em anywhere from 16 to 22 hours on a gas-fired wood burner.
What’s that? A smoker we had built by David Knight out of Cape Girardeau at Ole Hickory Pits. We cook at very low temperatures, around 225, something like that.
That’s really low. With pork butt, there’s a lot of fat to it, and that allows us to render out the fat. It also maintains the moistness we’re lookin’ for. We cook fresh every day, and at this point the biggest complaint we’ve had is that we’re sellin’ out too fast. But it’s not like sellin’ a steak. The fastest thing we do is three-and-a-half, four hours.
Do you have different cooking methods for the different meats? The butts will usually go on around 1 o’clock in the afternoon. The brisket goes on around 6:30 at night. They both cook all night long and then myself and someone else comes in around 7 – I do that “time to make the doughnuts” as I’m drivin’ down Olive – and then we do ribs, we do chicken, we do turkey, hot links.
Tell me about your ribs. In the rib world, you have your spare rib and you have your loinback rib. It’s kind of like your filet and your strip steak –
– Strip steaks have more flavor … Now, we hear that a lot of times about a spare rib. We cook the loinback, which we feel is a meatier, more tender rib. We instill flavor into it through our rubs.
Now your rub, I detected salt and pepper, some sugar, cayenne pepper, a little garlic. You’re exactly right. And we cook with fruitwoods … – when you cook with a hickory, there’s a little stronger flavor to it. What we do is we look for a milder blend, and so you won’t find anything that’s overpowering in our rubs.
You have a sweet sauce, the vinegary-hot and the Pappy’s Original, which is my favorite. There are certain people that prefer the Kansas City style, which adds that sugary flavor. Then there are other people whose taste buds are kicked in by the fact that you’re throwing in a little cayenne pepper that sneaks up on you at the end. With the Pappy’s Original, we enhance the fruitwoods with that one.
And what about the sides? Fried corn on the cob? I was back there messing with the sweet potato fries because that was something I really wanted to do. And Brian [Scoggins] goes, “Try this.” Popped the corn in [the fryer] … I fell in love with it. It gives corn a popcorny flavor. We use a sweet and salty seasoning on it.
And do you top your sweet potato fries with brown sugar? Sprinkle that over the top for a little caramelized glaze.
Barbecue is one of those foods that people get passionate about. One of the best [sayings] I’ve heard is that barbecue is not a menu item, it’s an experience. So I watch as people walk in. The first thing they do is they take in the smell, and I can watch the change come over people. I’ve got a 70-seat dining room, not in my house, but I feel like it is. Nothing makes us happier than when somebody returns with a new person and they’re excited about bringing them here. I’m seeing the same faces three, four times … there’s people that have been here 10 times in a month, so that tells me that we’re on the right track.
This article appears in Apr 1-30, 2008.