Courtesy Heavy Smoke BBQ
Heavy Smoke BBQ is making the transition from food truck to brick-and-mortar restaurant, opening its first standalone location in St. Peters in November.
The 6,000-square-foot restaurant will open at 4270 N. Service Road with 30 tables seating an estimated 120 to 150 diners. Co-owner Chris Schafer says the restaurant will have room left over to add additional seating, should the need arise. Brisket, ribs, chicken, and more will be cooked on an “arsenal” of Ole Hickory smokers, says Schafer.
Courtesy Heavy Smoke BBQ
The menu combines Schafer’s credentials as a world champion pitmaster with business partner Chad Brewer’s 20-plus years as a chef in a variety of restaurants.
“We use the same rubs and things like that as we do in competition, to where the diner is getting a high-level experience with the barbecue,” Schafer says. “Then Chad turns that into more amazing dishes." For instance, Heavy Smoke will also offer wraps and homemade nachos, in which the restaurant makes its own chips, queso, and pico de gallo from scratch.
The Heavy Smoke BBQ team has won multiple championships and awards, including first place in the St. Louis BBQ Society’s 2019 Overall Team of the Year league. They’re currently leading Kansas City Barbeque Society’s Team of the Year league. The league is decided by aggregating each team’s 10 best performances in individual contests. Each contest score is a tally of points racked up in four categories: chicken, ribs, pork, and brisket.
Courtesy Heavy Smoke BBQ
Courtesy Heavy Smoke BBQ
Schafer and Brewer started cooking together as teenagers, more than 20 years ago. After pursuing a career outside the food business, Schafer changed course in 2011, when he took part in his first barbecue competition. Over the next few years, competition barbecue gradually became Schafer’s preoccupation, leading to him establish his own competitive barbecue team under the Heavy Smoke BBQ name in 2014. Schafer and the team burnished their reputation with a string of successes.
In 2017, he and Brewer launched a food trailer. Since then, Brewer and Danielle Schafer, Chris’ wife, have been running the business while Chris and his father, Eddie, are frequently on the road at barbecue competitions.
“If it wasn't for COVID, I was gonna do something like 42 competitions this year,” Schafer says. While the COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted those plans, with many of the major dates in the barbecue calendar canceled, some competitions are still moving ahead on a case-by-case basis.
Courtesy Heavy Smoke BBQ
Courtesy Heavy Smoke BBQ
The Porkwich
Schafer says he's always dreamed of having a brick-and-mortar restaurant: “With a food truck, you can only get so busy, and you can't really grow from there, so brick-and-mortar was always the endgame."
The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated plans. “When COVID hit, the food truck really got slow. We made our living on festivals and catering jobs and parking in front of businesses for lunches, and that all went away,” Schafer says. “One of the biggest complaints was that people didn't know where we were; they're always trying to figure out where we were in the city, so we figured we’d get a brick-and-mortar where people can come all the time.”
Courtesy Heavy Smoke BBQ
The food truck’s menu was built around chicken, pork, and brisket. Most of those items will carry over to the new restaurant, including the best-selling STL Cuban Wrap. “We use Provel cheese instead of Swiss, and instead of mustard we use a white barbecue sauce, like a horseradish,” Schafer says. “It's got the smoked pit ham and the pulled pork and pickles like the Cuban, and then we grill on a flattop, so you get that feeling of a pressed sandwich like you get with a Cuban.”
With a full kitchen at Schafer and Brewer’s disposal, however, the restaurant will offer an expanded rounded selection of barbecued meats—think ribs, turkey, and sausages—and an expanded line of wraps. The restaurant doesn't plan to serve alcohol but will offer fountain drinks and potentially local craft sodas.
Courtesy Heavy Smoke BBQ
Schafer says he thinks Heavy Smoke’s brisket is a favorite in the making: “It's not always easy to get a good brisket in most places, and we're going to dial in a process that we can get as close to competition brisket as we can every single day."
If Schafer’s goal is to seamlessly translate the flavors of competition-winning barbecue over to a brick-and-mortar restaurant, the challenge is scaling up while maintaining quality. “In competitions, we cook one brisket and tear it into eight slices for the judges,” Schafer explains. “With the restaurant, you've got to make 30 of those briskets, and you've got to make sure every slice is great and get it out to the masses.
"It's hard to to offer true competition-grade barbecue," he adds. "In competitions, we cook wagyu briskets, and here we’ll cook primes. A lot of places cook choice or select, so primes are even better than that, but it'd be hard to make any money or survive cooking wagyu.”
Schafer says he hopes the restaurant will be ready to launch in November. The Heavy Smoke BBQ food truck is operating on a sparse schedule and will go on hiatus over the winter to allow the team to focus on the restaurant. Schafer says the truck will eventually return but likely on a reduced schedule centered around festivals and other large events.
When he’s not tending the pit, Schafer is exploring the world of competition barbecue on All That For 6 Pieces, the podcast that he co-hosts with Rob Honke of the St. Louis Black Iron BBQ team. In each episode, Honke and Schafer invite a fellow pitmaster onto the show to share stories, laughs, and insights into the competitive barbecue scene. They launched the show at the beginning of the pandemic, and it's steadily gained a following. “The barbecue community is second to none," Schafer says. "The people are great. The atmosphere is great. It's just a fun thing to be part of."
As Schafer turns his attention toward opening his first restaurant, he believes that the values that have driven Heavy Smoke BBQ team’s success will play a key role.
“I love being successful and I love showing up to a competition and people know that I'm one of the guys to beat,” he says. “I want to be able to take that same mentality to a restaurant, to where people know that they they're going to come get a top-notch meal and great service.”
Courtesy Heavy Smoke BBQ
Team Heavy Smoke (L-R): Chad Brewer, Danielle Schafer, Eddie Schafer, and Chris Schafer
