Honey 1
In fact Adams’s most faithful customers did come from outside the neighborhood. His fussy, inflexible approach to slow-smoked, meaty ribs first inspired chatter on online food forums about a year and a half ago, and before long print and broadcast food journalists joined the chorus. You could always count on his having a supply of excellent, inexpensive, and filling rib tips, but you had to call two hours in advance for full racks: the neighbors weren’t buying them, and he refused to have big slabs of pork sitting around all day.
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“I would get a big push on the TV from James Ward or something,” Adams says. For a time there’d be a rush, and then it’d die off. “I didn’t have a lot of neighborhood customers,” he says. “You can’t blame them in a way because that was a lower-income neighborhood. When I didn’t have the outside customers it was dead.”
“I always wanted something of my own,” says Robert Junior. “Something that was family.” Two years ago they began hunting for spots. They chose a little place on the 5100 block of West Division because it already had a four-foot aquarium smoker made by Belvin-J & F Sheet Metal. For almost 40 years these Milwaukee Avenue fabricators have been making the tempered glass-and-steel aquarium-style pits you see all over the south and west sides. Though a four-footer is relatively small, it’s much larger than a barrel smoker. “I almost killed myself on that thing,” Adams says.
Two weeks before the September 22 opening Adams was champing at the bit, not at all nervous about smoking in volume on a big new pit. “Nawww,” he said. “I can’t wait to get on that thing.”
