By DAVID DUPONT
BG Independent News
Smoking meat for barbecue takes time, the better of a day and night, about 14 hours. At least that’s how P.J. Earl does it.
That slow-cooked barbecue will be the centerpiece when Earl and his wife, Heather, open Porkbelly BBQ restaurant in the Greenwood Centre, 1616 E. Wooster in Bowling Green on Wednesday, May 1.
And like the meat it’ll serve, the new restaurant, an outgrowth the Earls’ catering and mobile kitchen business, took time to get just right.
Heather Earl said they’d secured the space a year ago, and since then they’ve been focused on getting everything set with the food, the employees, the decor, and the law. That included merging two storefronts so they had enough room for a prep kitchen as well as a regular kitchen, and a smoker.
“Everything we do is from scratch with a commitment to quality,” Heather Earl said.
That starts with that slow-cooked meat, seasoned with their original sauces that have been cited for excellence by the Center for Innovative Food Technology.
It includes the sides such as potato salad. Not like your mother’s, P.J. Earl said.
He starts with red-skin potatoes soaked in malt vinegar with chipotle, and then marinaded.
At this point, his wife cautions him, don’t give away the recipe. But the chef’s confident that he’s the one who knows the right proportions.
They’ll make their own corn bread served with a honey cinnamon butter.
They’ll serve ribs and brisket and the other barbecue staples, all done in their own way. Then there’s a bologna sandwich, which P.J. Earl is convinced will make people forget the famous delicacy from Waldo. The bologna from Tank’s Meats in Elmore will be seasoned, marinaded, grilled, and served up on a hearty bun with cole slaw.
Then, there’s the restaurant’s namesake cut, porkbelly. Most people don’t know about the cut. P.J. Earl tells customers “it’s the same cut you get your bacon from.”
The restaurant will incorporate it in several ways, including a gravy and a jam.
In the years of operating the mobile food unit, he couldn’t get enough customers interested in trying it to keep it on the menu.
“If it doesn’t make dollars, it doesn’t make sense,” his wife notes.
Then there were those who tried it and understood that, in the chef’s words: “Porkbelly is a state of mind.”
He’d roll it in brown sugar, paprika, and cracked black pepper and smoke it, and then finish it on the grill. “The customers who were willing to give it a try would chase me down for it,” he said. Now that porkbelly has an address.
That took a while for it to find it’s way there. It all started at Ciao Ristorante in Toledo about 25 years ago. He was a sous chef, and she was waiting table.
But they detoured from the food business — “a mortgage, marriage, and children mean you need a real job,” she said.
P.J. Earl studied business at Owens Community College and started on a culinary arts program to complement years of in-the-kitchen expertise, and Heather Earl got a bachelor’s degree with a focus on marketing from University of Toledo.
The long, late night hours of restaurant work, just didn’t seem the right fit for a family man. He ended up working for 10 years as the contract manager for the purchasing department for the University of Toledo Medical Center.
“If you needed a knee replacement or a hip replacement, he was the guy the doctors called to order the parts,” Heather Earl said.
But as his wife notes, food was always his passion.
In 2009 he bought a $169 smoker. His wife, pregnant for their son, was not thrilled with the idea.
But he got it and started experimenting. His friends were impressed and started asking for him to smoke meat for their parties.
That was time the economy was tanking, and he saw workers around him getting laid off. His food experience would be his fallback, and a way for him to feed is family.
He didn’t get laid off. Barbecue, Heather Earl said, became their “side hustle.”
That $169 backyard grill gave way to a used commercial-grade smoker bought from California.
They first started showing up with their mobile unit at the farmers market about eight years ago, and with suggestions from their customers they expanded to festivals and fairs around the area, including their favorite, the Wood County Fair where they can be found between the goats and the horses. They also do vintage craft fairs and other events held at the fairgrounds.
A few years ago, Heather Earl said, someone came up and said they were getting married and could they cater the reception. With rustic weddings in old barns all the rage, barbecue fit right in.Soon they were booked for 20-25 weddings a year.
At first they worked out of the commissary kitchen at the Northwest Ohio Cooperative Kitchen on Ohio 582. Then they built their own commissary kitchen further down the road at his parents’ place. Charlie and Pat Earl have helped the couple with tending the smoker and taking care of the Earls’ two children.
By 2016, the side hustle was taking up more of the family’s time. Heather Earl quit her job in 2016 to concentrate on the catering, and P.J. Earl left UT in 2017.
The idea to open the restaurant was a natural outgrowth of the mobile kitchen and catering business. Their customers, she said, kept telling them they needed to open a restaurant.
Also, “it rains a lot,” she said.
While he’s happy working his smoker standing in a puddle under an umbrella, she found herself wanting a roof and HVAC.
Now she has that as well as the rustic chic decor that complements the food. Everything will be done in house including desserts. They don’t expect a set menu for the sweets. Rather they’ll offer a rotating selection of specialties like a Texas sheet cake made with Dr. Pepper and a bacon creme brûlée.
Porkbelly has a full bar, including wine. To keep the regional flavor they’ll carry Two Bandits beer as well as the Hicksville brewery’s craft root beer sweetened with honey. That will serve as the base for root beer floats.
For now Porkbelly will be serve dinners only, opening at 4 p.m. Monday through Saturday. It will serve until 9 p.m. Monday through Thursday and until 10 Friday and Saturday. They plan to expand to serve lunches in a few weeks. For now they’ll be closed on Sunday when they’re not allowed to serve alcohol. That would take a vote in November to allow them to have Sunday sales.
Meeting government regulations is nothing new for the couple.
P.J. Earl speculated they were about the most licensed food operation around, since they need separate approvals for every aspect of their business — the mobile unit, the catering, the barbecue sauce, and now the restaurant.
“We’re rule followers,” Heather Earl said. “It’s a good thing.”
While it’s taken time and effort, it has been worth it, she said. “It’s a labor of love. We wanted to do it right.”
