THIS WASN'T THE PLAN
**
THIS WASN'T THE PLAN **
It started with a cheap offset smoker.
No business plan to be found.
Not a restaurant dream.
Probably won’t ever use the term “Pitmaster.”
THE PROCESS.
I like learning how things work.
Not just the recipe. The reason behind it.
Fire behaves a certain way. Salt does something. Fat does something else. Time matters. So does patience. And somewhere between tradition and experimentation, food becomes your own.
I learned barbecue on a cheap offset smoker that leaked smoke from places smoke had no business coming from. It wasn't particularly good equipment.
That turned out to be useful.
It made me pay attention.
My dad used to tell me, “There’s two teachers, kid: wisdom and experience.”
Usually, he said it after I'd ignored the first one and gotten acquainted with the second.
Barbecue has provided plenty of both.
Study the fire.
Learn the meat.
Screw it up.
Figure out why.
Do it again.
That's still pretty much the process.
I respect tradition. I'm just not particularly interested in being governed by it. Texas doesn't own brisket. California doesn't own tri-tip. Miso can find its way into places where somebody will undoubtedly tell me miso doesn't belong.
Fine.
If it's good, it's good.
Renegade Barbecue Company grew out of that idea.
Take the craft seriously.
Yourself, considerably less so.
THE HISTORY
Very little on this menu started with me.
It came from family kitchens, food I grew up eating, restaurants I still remember, cooks who showed me something worth paying attention to, and dishes good enough to make me wonder how they worked.
Over the years, I borrowed, changed, screwed up, tried again, and eventually made some of those things my own.
Renegade doesn't claim to have invented any of it. This menu is simply where all those meals, people, places, and years of cooking have led me.
Good food has a lineage. I’m just the next cook in it.
THE POINT
I like making food for people.
I don't particularly need to be there when they eat it.
That's part of why Renegade exists.
Do the planning. Tend the fire. Put in the hours. Make the food right. Then hand it over.
Because the point isn't the person who cooked it.
It's the people who gather around it.
Friends. Family. Neighbors. Whoever you've decided belongs at your table.
Good food can make that gathering a little better. That's enough for me.
I make the food.
You make the occasion.