“Well, yes, it took awhile,” owner David Sandusky quips of his second undertaking, but all indications are that when the smoke clears the city’s newest barbecue joint will have been worth the wait. Originally slated to open last year, the multi-purpose BEAST Butcher & Block will open in The Grove on June 15.
“I could write a book on delays,” says Sandusky. “This project has hit every single road bump and landmine it could find.”
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When Sandusky opened BEAST Craft BBQ in Belleville five years ago, the accolades came quickly. It wasn’t uncommon for St. Louisans to trek across the river to experience his artisanal, “all-killer, no-filler” approach to barbecue, a next-level mantra that’s also evident at The Grove location, a project two years in the making.
The silver lining is that the delay gave Sandusky the perfect opportunity to hire an all-star culinary team, including executive chef Ryan McDonald (formerly of Good Fortune and Byrd & Barrel) and butcher CJ Baerman (Paddy O’s infamous “BBQ Madman”). Sandusky serves as lead pitmaster for both locations. Beast Craft’s pit boss Jim Thomas assumes the same role in The Grove and the sous chef is Kelvin Johnson, who worked with Sandusky at prior gigs. Helen Beshel, who worked her way through the BEAST ranks, now directs the operations for both restaurants.
The 6,000-square-foot restaurant seats 95 in the main dining room and 25 on the street-facing patio. Around the side of the building are six smokers, giving Butcher & Block the largest smoking capacity at one location in the area. Sandusky, who brings a fine-dining background to the world of barbecue, feels strongly that different meats should be cooked over different woods: hickory (for neutral meats that need the flavor, such as chicken, pork, turkey), oak (for meats that require a robust smoke flavor but doesn’t compete for dominance, such as beef), and cherry (when the richness of the meat is enough, as with ribs or belly, and a light smoke is enough).
Having a half dozen smokers means every meat can be cooked properly and batched throughout the day, says Sandusky. “We’re not compromising. It’s all on our terms,” he said in a release.
Inside, guests can line up in traditional fast-casual style and place their orders for food and then beverage. There are no visible steam tables and no cutting boards, another nod to Sandusky’s fine-dining roots. All assemblage and plating is done out of sight, in the large kitchen, under the watchful eye of the executive chef. Say goodbye to the lemming line of diners shuffling down a slow assembly line with trays of scoop-and-serve offerings that become lukewarm by the time they’re purchased. At Butcher & Block, runners deliver composed plates to the tables, which Sandusky finds is “just as fast as walking the counter and with way better quality.” He plans to start off with the items BEAST knows well—pork, brisket, ribs, and chicken—before adding some new items.
There’s a dedicated pickup area (with heated shelves), and Sandusky says he plans to handle deliveries internally. “If we can’t control the product from point A to point B, we’re not doing it,” he says. “Simple as that. It’s our best or nothing, that all-killer, no-filler mentality.”
In addition to the restaurant space, Sandusky has created two unique concepts within the business: The Butchery and The Skullery. The former is a small full-service butcher shop offering ready-to-cook, never-frozen meats and prepared meals, complemented by fresh produce, local eggs and dairy, and baked goods. The Butchery also has its own courtyard with seating and a fire pit. Sandusky calls it “a full-fledged butcher shop with a restaurant attached.”
Some of the retail meats sold at The Butchery will also be local. “It’s a quality-over-locality issue,” Sandusky says. “No one who is raising livestock locally—that’s worth a damn, anyway—can supply our volume, so we found the best farms and ranches in the country, visited them, and established relationships. A lot of these guys supply meats for the competition circuit, so that’s another possible revenue stream. Pitmasters will be able to come directly to us and get fresh product, not the frozen stuff they have to settle for elsewhere.”
The Skullery is a cross between a chef’s table and a research-and-development–style kitchen. It serves as Sandusky’s culinary playpen. The focal point in the 36-seat room are two large Argentine charcoal grills, one with a rotisserie (which Sandusky says is like having “a 900-degree campfire right in the middle of your dining room”) that’s capable of cooking large cuts of meat for interactive, family-style carving menu dinners.
“It’s a different experience, one perfectly suited to The Skullery,” Sandusky says. “I see those kinds of things happening a lot.”
The room is a blank slate, he adds, video-equipped and ideal for collaborations with chefs and fellow pitmasters, cooking classes, or event dinners centered around beer, wine, or distilled spirits.
“The restaurant is first-come, first-served barbecue,” he explains. “The Skullery is reservation-only, set-menu, upscale, whatever I feel like place. If I want to do a chophouse one weekend, I can. If I want to do burgers the next, I will. If you don’t like the menu, come back on a day you do.”
Sandusky owns BEAST with his wife, Meggan. The couple says they’re considering ways to offer the ready-made room to up-and-coming chefs as a home base to field test ideas and concepts.
“There might be a guy who wants to do a weekly brunch there, for example” says Meggan. “Besides what we do in the space, we hope this room will help build the restaurant community here in St. Louis.”
“We just want to have fun,” adds Sandusky. “We can all play together in this sandbox.”
Recently completed is a slatted pergola that stretches to the sidewalk, designed to overcome the building’s setback from the street and to create shade. Sandusky also hopes to add an outdoor grill, so he can hawk street food on weekends: “a grilled wrap, meats on grilled bread, meats on a stick—carry-around food,” he says.
Since catering is such a significant part of the barbecue business, Sandusky may use The Grove location as a base for BEAST Catering and Events in the future. “We’ve got five smokers plus one on a trailer,” he says. “We’re ready to go.”
Just when you think that the city is maxxed out on barbecue joints, along comes David Sandusky who’s rethinking whole concept. “For me, barbecue has reached an escalation point,” he says. “It’s time we create a new era.”
It’s likely that aficionados will be talking about BEAST Butcher & Block the way they did when another game-changing BBQ joint burst onto the scene just over a decade ago, by the name of Pappy’s.
