Bringing the smoke

OKLAHOMA SMOKE BBQ

t’s almost 5:00 AM on a Thursday morning as I pull into an industrial park on the west side of Oklahoma City. The street lamps’ glow lights up the unmistakable shape of BBQ pits in the lot. I am greeted by the crew of Oklahoma Smoke BBQ, energy drinks in hand, as we all try to get our bearings this early in the day. The garage bay door opens, Strurgill Simpson is turned on the speakers, and firewood begins being loaded into the “Johnny Cash”, a 500-gallon smoker named after the song “One Piece at a Time”.

“I got it one piece at a time and it didn’t cost me a dime, You’ll know it’s me when I come through your town"

Oklahoma might be known for its onion burgers and chicken fried steaks, but the crew at Oklahoma Smoke is putting a very Okie spin on Texas BBQ. Like any good idea coming from our corner of the country, it starts with a group of friends at a bar.

“Well, this thing started back with me and Brent (Quintero), I think three years ago. We met at Mooney's, a bar down in Norman, where all our good ideas come from. It came from a glass of Jack and Coke and an idea,” Ean Kampmeyer shares with me.

Brent had built a reputation among his friends as an incredible chef. I was lucky enough years ago to stumble upon an afternoon lunch break over at Boxcar Woody’s where Brent was working on fabricating tables. To this day, it is still some of the best carnitas tacos I’ve ever had. “I’ve got pictures when I was three years old cooking,” Brent shares. While most people think of pitmasters as some lifelong dedication, Brent found smoking BBQ as just another extension of his passion for food.

“My dad had won a smoker at the post office in a raffle. Interesting story there, he actually just won a shotgun and I was over at his house visiting. He said he won the shotgun, and a guy wanted to trade him a smoker for it. What did I think? And I'm like, you've got 14 shotguns, you know? Yeah, it's a no-brainer.”

Brent tried to smoke a few things over the years on the pit with some mentoring from a coworker. But it really began to take off once the owner at Mooney's asked Brent and Ean to smoke for an upcoming show they had at the bar. “We were welding on that thing, like that night. We named it Johnny Cash because it's just all kinds of crap that I had laying around,” Brent shares.The pit might have been thrown together, but the brisket was anything but.

After that first event, Ean and Brent began doing more shows and even going to different bars. That is where they met the third partner in Oklahoma Smoke BBQ, Jared Hunter.

Jared’s girlfriend, Kaci Quintero, brought home some of the BBQ Ean and her dad, Brent, made at an event. “I was like, ‘I'm gonna be in business with your dad one day.’ I told her that that night in my house, and I said, ‘These ribs are phenomenal.’”

It took over a year, but those words became a prophetic vision for what would become Oklahoma Smoke. While Ean and Brent were smoking up meats for events at Moonies, the Montana Mining Club, and local VFWs, Jared was running a nutrition shop out of a space in Moore, Oklahoma. “I had On Point Nutrition over in Moore, which I've had for ten years, and the business had just gotten so slow. I had been trying for a year to figure something else out to do in that location, besides just what I was doing, you know? I mean, I'm not stuck on one thing, but I have a location. I have a full commercial kitchen, so, I'd try a few different ideas. And then, like you said that time, when it was time to put up or shut up, you know, I just went to him and said, Guys, I'm either doing something now or I'm shutting this place down, you know, I've got to do something.”

It didn’t take much convincing for Brent or Ean. “Let's do it.”

The first weekend they bought a few briskets, a slab of ribs, and made a half tray of mac and a half tray of beans and began selling it out of the nutrition shop. It sold out.

“We made $280 that first night. And we spent $350 at the bar celebrating,” Jared said. “And from then, it's just been non-stop growth.”

Before Oklahoma Smoke, making amazing BBQ was never about the money. In fact, the idea first started as a non-profit. “We decided we were going to become a non-profit organization, and, to be honest, to make money and help people at the same time,” Brent reflects. “We did a few events at Montana. We did a few events like the VFW one. They had a struggling bar. We went over there and we made barbecue, we hired a band for them and everything to get them going. I think that last time I went by, it was still packed.”

The crew would take the earnings from these events and help out people they came across or heard about at the bar. Whether it was teachers, veterans, or families in need. “We didn't want to just ask for money. So we decided we were gonna just sell barbecue to raise money.”

Now, as the team and locations grow, the same vision for community drives what they do. But now, there are employees to look out for and bills to keep track of. Despite a new approach, that neighborly, community approach still is deep in the bones of what keeps Oklahoma Smoke going and what gives it a unique flavor compared to traditional pits across the country.

BBQ is often revered, especially in places like Texas where pit masters fight over sponsorships, placements in Texas Monthly, and competition trophies. The pit is sacred ground. People travel long distances to come to these shrines and taste a piece of what these creators made. And often, the personalities can reflect that too.

When you step into Oklahoma Smoke, you will find incredible dino bone ribs and melt-in-your-mouth brisket. But you also might get shot by a Nerf Gun from the crew after you’ve cleaned off your plate.

“That's the kind of style we always had: just fun.”

Whether it was bringing crowds, music, BBQ, and laughs to VFWs and reigniting life into bars on the verge of closing or helping out friends and neighbors, the energy the guys created helped drive the momentum forward as Oklahoma Smoke got underway.

In the Moore location, they would serve BBQ out of the nutrition shop on Fridays and Saturdays. What was normally come-and-go traffic during the day quickly changed as people began sitting down for hours to beat the lines that would build outside the doors for the BBQ. “People would start coming in hours early, just sitting there waiting. Well, they'd start talking to each other. So it was exactly what we wanted people to do: have people meet at the tables down there.”

The demand grew and the writing on the walls became clear, it was time to go all in.

“It was just, I mean, we were doing it from the time we opened at six o'clock to the time we closed. It was just non-stop madness in there, which was fun. I enjoyed the hell out of that.”

They shut the doors of the shop for one week and spent all day ripping out the bar to make room for more tables. The space changed from a nutrition shop to Oklahoma Smoke and was back open by the next weekend.

After opening Oklahoma Smoke, the demand grew fast and the Johnny Cash quickly wasn’t cutting it to meet the growing demand. They tried to overfill it and found the quality of the meat didn’t turn out. So they resorted to selling out, often as early as 6 or 7 p.m. on a Saturday evening. But then they were asked to cater an event.

“Our first catering gig as a company was for 1500 people, and obviously we couldn't do that off of Johnny Cash, so we had bought the 1000-gallon smoker stuff to start building it. Just like the Montana (gig), we finished welding it the morning of (the event). We’d be putting briskets on there, still welding. I stayed up all night pretty much trying to get done. And then he welded the last welds on there at like 11 o'clock.”

With word quickly getting out, Ryan Richardson with Boxcar Woody began talking to Brent about putting a food truck off Agnew near his location. “We were actually a day away from purchasing a food truck because he was gonna allow us to park on his property over there and hook up where his lawn mower shop is. Then, literally, the day before we pulled the trigger, he called and said, ‘Hey guys, they have their own community meeting here. And in that meeting, they said that they would like to find somebody to put in the restaurant.’ They wanted to get it reopened again. And he threw our name out there. And that's how we got the call to come sit down with them.”

Within a year of opening their Moore location, Oklahoma Smoke grew to two locations, or two and a half if you factor in the stand inside the Stockyards Sale Barn. It’s clear none of this could have happened without a community of supportive friends and neighbors, loyal fans of the brand and the brisket. And while the brisket is incredible, it is also clear that the energy this crew creates is the real winning recipe to what has driven so much success.

But opening up two locations within a year has its challenges. On top of that, opening up BBQ for more than just weekends has an entirely different set of challenges. “People that are normally open five, six days a week are doing electric smokers inside their restaurants. Every day is the same. They go home, they put their briskets on their electric smoker, and it does that all day long, all night by itself. They come in and they serve it, it's not… it's not barbecue.”

Traditional pit barbecue is laborious. It is time-intensive. And it is why getting the fires started requires waking up well before the sunrise to see this crew in action. And maybe that’s why there is such a reverence and celebrity status to the pit masters. To do pit barbeque well requires a dedication to the craft that is rare in any field. And that is also why most barbeque is served on weekends only and when it’s sold out, it’s gone.

“We're doing something that most, 99% of people, are not willing to do, and that is to be open multiple days, five days a week, and still doing handmade pit barbecue. Not with an electric smoker. And that is the difference that people taste when they taste our food, and that's why they like our food.”

The barbeque itself is quickly making a name for itself in Oklahoma. The brisket is fantastic, the dino ribs are a huge hit, but most of all, their Carolina sauce is leaving a taste that is bringing customers back for more and more.

“That's my brother's recipe. He's been working on that for probably 15 years now. He's a fireman back home in Florida, and he was serving it at a fireman's barbecue fundraiser, and he had just yellow Heinz mustard bottles. I was like, we have this barbecue thing we're starting up. This would be really good with some of our stuff. So I made it for that one night at the Montana. We had some smoked chicken wings, and then those people, they were just eating it up. They thought it was the best thing in the world,” Ean shares. That sauce became such a hit that Oklahoma Smoke BBQ began bottling it to sell it at their locations.

“We're doing Texas pit barbecue, yeah, in Oklahoma, might as well do Carolina sauce. Oklahoma's a melting pot.”

I believe Oklahoma has long had an identity crisis, especially with food. What is Oklahoma cuisine? Is it just onion burgers? Or is it more? But when you look at its history, you find it is indeed that melting pot. From an incredible Asian district with Vietnamese influences in Oklahoma City to the Mexican taquerias on the south side, there is a wide range of food you can find. And that leads to some incredible fusions of flavors.

Oklahoma Smoke BBQ is just another prime example of how it comes together. An eclectic mix, just like the personalities behind the barbecue. And if there was ever going to be something that represents our state in the barbecue world, it would be just that.

Oklahoma Smoke BBQ