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Feature article
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Dream Pit serves smokin’ good barbecue
By Fred Sauceman
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Phil’s Dream Pit
LOCATION: 534 Eastern Star Road
Interstate 26, Exit 10
Kingsport, Tennessee
PHONE: 423-349-6437 |
Phil Pipkin’s dream is going up in smoke. And he’s glad about it.
Traveling for Exel, a third-party logistics company, he sampled barbecue wherever he could. He especially admired the dry-rub ribs at Charlie Vergos’ Rendezvous in downtown Memphis.
Phil had dabbled around the periphery of the barbecue world while he was in high school. Around 1976 or ’77, he worked for Abe Bosquez at a nightclub called the Mad Mexican, where the House of Ribs is now located in Johnson City. Abe’s versions of barbecue were oven-baked chicken and ribs.
Ever since that time, Phil kept a thought in the back of his mind: to cook real barbecue. Not oven-baked but rather wood-smoked.
On Feb. 11, 2008, he and his wife Dianna opened Phil’s Dream Pit on Eastern Star Road in Sullivan County. They leased the building, at a country crossroads, towed their 4,500-pound rig onto the parking lot, and began smoking ribs, bone-in pork butts, beef brisket and chicken.
When he was building his menu, Phil not only remembered those good restaurant barbecue meals from his business travels, he also recalled jaunts around Washington County, Tennessee, with his father, James L. Pipkin, who was the county agent. One of their stops was the Bowmantown School.
“A lot of people probably remember the barbecued chicken from there,” Phil said. “I use that recipe today. It’s an old one, developed by the University of Tennessee 4-H, probably in the 1940s. It’s vinegar, Tabasco and Worcestershire sauce. You make that sauce and marinate the chicken in it for about two hours, and then you smoke the chicken.”
To create the restaurant’s table sauces, Phil turned to an old friend, Keith Howze. They’ve known each other close to 50 years. At first, Phil admits he relied on Kraft for a sauce base. But he and Keith went back to the basic elements: water, vinegar and tomato paste.
“It’s a two-phase process,” Phil said. “It’s cooked and cooled and then we add more stuff.”
The result is what Phil calls his “sweet sauce.” The hot sauce follows the same formula, with the addition of crushed, dried habanero peppers. The vinegary sauce incorporates touches of brown sugar, red, white and black pepper, and Tabasco.
Even more inventiveness is applied to hot dogs at Phil’s. He buys all-beef wieners and smokes them. A Dream Dog Deluxe is dressed with Phil’s house-made baked beans, along with coleslaw.
“We started out with these little hot dogs because we wanted a kid’s menu — $2 for a hot dog and chips — and one of our employees, Larry Gilson, made a Dream Dog out of this little hot dog,” said Dianna. “He sat down to eat it, and one of our regular customers came in and said, ‘I want one of those,’ and the very next person through the door said, ‘I want one of those.’ So we had to upgrade the hot dog to make it adult.”
As far as barbecue technique is concerned, Phil says his “quest” over the years has been keeping moisture in the meat. His rigs are made by the Pinnacle Manufacturing Company in Indianapolis. There are two large steel containers in the fireboxes. Keeping those filled with water, Phil says, helps maintain moisture in the meat as it’s cooked slowly over hickory and charcoal.
If you get the sense from this column that Phil and Dianna listen to their customers and employees and heed the advice of their friends, you’re right. One day a customer came in and told them they needed to serve pickles with the barbecue. That’s a combination often found in Alabama. It wasn’t long before a bowl of pickles appeared at the beverage station.
To cook good barbecue and get it to people fast. That was Phil’s dream. The sign out front says it all: NOW SMOKING.
--------GoTriCities--------
Food writer Fred Sauceman, author of the book “The Place Setting: Timeless Tastes of the Mountain South — from Bright Hope to Frog Level,” is senior writer and executive assistant to the president for public affairs at East Tennessee State University. E-mail him at sauceman@etsu.edu.
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