- 6 hours ago
How does a self-built smoker in a Texas driveway become the world's first Michelin-starred barbecue restaurant? At LeRoy & Lewis in Austin, co-owner and pitmaster Evan LeRoy has spent years redefining what barbecue can be. Follow Evan through three days of whole-hog barbecue, from the arrival of the pigs to the 4 a.m. fire-up and a 14-hour smoke before service. Along the way, he shares the philosophy behind his "new-school barbecue," where every part of the animal is celebrated—from pulled whole hog and pork hop sausage to pork hash and rice, cornbread enriched with hog lard, and a pork smash burger.
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LifestyleTranscript
00:02Right now it's Tuesday about 5 30 in the evening we're waiting on Sloan who's our pig delivery
00:10man. Pig's here. We set out to be different in barbecue. There are people who come in here and
00:18tell us this is not barbecue. It's not even close. What time did you guys get here? I don't even
00:22remember. It was a little after 8 30. They just brought out a sample of the burnt ends for being
00:28first in line. It's it's phenomenal. It was great. I've just been following them on social media ever
00:33since got the Michelin Awards. This is where I keep coming back to. When you think about Texas
00:42barbecue you're mainly thinking about brisket, beef ribs, beef sausage, but pork ribs are a huge part
00:49of the Texas Trinity and pork is the most barbecued meat everywhere else. We are going to have a
00:57barbecue plate with pulled whole hog with pork hop sausage. We're going to have our pork hash as a side
01:07dish. We're going to have some cornbread on the side as well. Our hog fat cornbread which gets all
01:13the rendered lard and a pork burger. Using different parts of the animal to make one complete plate. Full
01:21utilization, creativity, classic methods. That's new school barbecue. Every single part of the pig is
01:32good to barbecue and we have done a lot of different other dishes but these are just kind of what
01:37we've
01:37settled in as the things that we can sell, things we can execute, things that make sense. If we're cutting
01:44for the case we would be you know bandsaw, cold room, making sure that everything is like trimmed up,
01:51very very particular, very spec like you see at the grocery store. But this is for barbecue so we are
01:56just cutting down the big pieces. We're keeping bones in, we're keeping fat on. It's a big huge piece
02:01of meat like this with bones in it with a ton of connective tissue with a ton of fat still
02:05in it.
02:05That's going to barbecue amazing. It's going to make it so succulent and delicious. It's going to pick
02:10apart perfectly. Very excited. The shoulders will go to whole hog as well as the middles if those don't
02:20go to bacon ribs first. The hams go to sausage. Normally when you go to restaurants that are doing
02:26kind of whole animal stuff and breakdown stuff, a lot of them use the shoulder muscle for sausage
02:31because it has a good meat to fat ratio. These are heritage breed hogs so they're extra fatty.
02:36So we use the ham which itself is a much leaner meat and then the exterior of it has hard
02:42fat
02:42that's really good for making sausage and so when we separate those and then bring them back together
02:47in the correct ratio, that's the perfect ratio for sausage. And then this skin will go into our stock
02:55pot. It's going to give our pork stock a lot of collagen and gelatin and then that is going to
03:01flavor
03:02and thicken our pork hash. This is at the very core of what we do. We've been breaking these hogs
03:11down
03:11in this exact way since our very first day in business about nine years ago.
03:18Yeah, so these hogs come from Peaceful Pork near Corpus Christi, which is near the coast. This is the
03:25first purveyor that we ever had when we started as a food truck. We met the rancher, his name is
03:31Loncito Cartwright, at a Willie Nelson concert. Started buying his pigs, they would deliver them just
03:35like this at our food truck, my pickup truck. We didn't have a commissary when we very first started
03:40and then I would do this in my garage basically break it down to fit the pieces in the little
03:45fridge.
03:48We were a food truck from 2017 to 2023, so we were in there about seven years before we opened
03:56this
03:56restaurant. The first trailer that we have out there is the original pit trailer that we had at
04:01the food truck. That has a 500 gallon offset that I built in my driveway. I think that there is
04:08a lot of
04:09street cred you get from starting a truck, from building your own pit, especially in Austin.
04:15I think the people in Austin are attracted to people who kind of bootstrap it themselves.
04:19Really kind of that DIY culture and so that's really how we wanted to start our business. I met my
04:25business partners through some mutual friends and I ended up building a barbecue pit in my driveway
04:30and we bought the least expensive food truck we could find and we got everything going for less than $50
04:36,000.
04:37The smoker itself was built 2016. I bought the tank and an old trailer for $500 and a welder for
04:47$1,500.
04:48That was less expensive than buying a smoker and I went to YouTube University, learned how to weld.
04:54The original trailer that it was on collapsed on the road, but then we built this one and this served
05:00us at the food truck all the way up to 2023 when we moved it over here.
05:07Hogs basically finished being broken down. The guys are going to finish doing the sausage formula
05:14weighing out. They're going to put some of these bacon ribs on cure. Wes is going to finish pulling
05:18everything off of the smoker. We'll be here tomorrow to put some of these hog pieces on for our desserts.
05:48What's extremely important, it is the main flavor component we're working with. We use post
05:53oak wood and we get it from chief firewood. There's a lot of nuance to the wood so it impacts
05:59the cook.
06:00Just the moisture content of the wood is probably the most important part. If the log is fresh or green
06:07then it has a lot of moisture to evaporate before it will start burning and producing that smoke and
06:14it will kind of choke off your fire and it won't maintain that heat level and smoke level that you're
06:19looking for.
06:24These are looking really good. Keep them rolling.
06:30Last night the hog came off and you can see all the fat that it has collected in there. It's
06:35almost
06:36started to confit in its own juices and David's picking everything this morning. Really trying to
06:40maintain bigger pieces of meat and not completely just shred everything into a homogenous mixture.
06:47The reason we cook these whole hogs is because we like texture in the pulled pork. We want to be
06:53able
06:53to taste strands of belly, flakes of rib, you know pieces of shoulder meat so you can have different
07:00textures when you're eating it. Whole hogs on the menu every single day. This is our signature pork dish.
07:07We don't serve pork ribs all the time because we only receive half hogs and you saw how many hogs
07:12that came in. That was five halves. That would only be five racks of ribs all week long. So we
07:16serve
07:17this whole hog because it stretches the meat much farther and it's a good way to kind of barbecue it
07:22whole and then have a bunch of different textures within one single dish. And then once all the meat is
07:27pulled into large chunks like this we're going to measure out the weight of the meat and then that's going
07:33to tell us how much of this rendered lard, rice vinegar and sambal we need to dress all of this
07:39meat.
07:45Hello Vanessa. We have a total staff of about 70 people and at any one time there could probably be
07:5220 to 25 maximum. On a slower day we could do 400 or so. On a very busy day I
08:03think we've
08:03hit close to 2,000 people here. People come into this restaurant and they're not just looking for
08:10a good plate of food. They're not just looking for a nice little barbecue restaurant. They're looking
08:18for the best barbecue they've ever had in their entire life. I think it's the application of craft into
08:27their barbecue as opposed to just the standard traditional way of doing it. Utilizing those
08:32techniques while also introducing a craft element to make it feel more like a restaurant. There are
08:38people who come in here and tell us this is not barbecue, it's not even close. It felt really good
08:44to be vindicated on our decisions to stick to our sourcing standards.
08:52I was in the auditorium when we learned that we got a Michelin star. It felt really good for the
08:58entire
08:59staff. We told them that we want to make the best barbecue in the world and as soon as we
09:04were named
09:04as a starred restaurant all of them really elevated and pushed and became that restaurant. I don't know
09:12if I believed that we were that when we earned it but we have certainly proved it every day since.
09:23What I really want for success is the success of our team, the success of the people around us. If
09:30they're learning, if they're empowered, if they're proud and happy of the work that they do and we're
09:37making people happy and the restaurant stays open, that's success. Barbecue takes a pretty rough toll on you
09:45as a chef. It's early mornings, it's late nights, but at the end of the day it's a lot of
09:50fun.
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