DANNY HABERMAN

POK-E-JO’S SMOKEHOUSE
12905 N. Mopac Expressway
Austin, TX 78727
(512) 388-7578
www.pokejos.com

“The only thought I have is that people don’t eat enough Texas barbecue, and I think they should eat some every day.” – Danny Haberman

Danny Haberman and his partner, Doug Boney, have mastered the art of making barbecue both big-time and local.  Doug started Pok-e-Jo’s in 1979, and Danny joined the business in 1986. Customers who frequent the current five Pok-e-Jo’s Smokehouse restaurants in the Austin metro area enjoy the consistent taste across locations and the variety of meat accompaniments, including eleven side dishes, three varieties of cobbler, and an expansive pickle bar.  Danny has been particularly involved in developing and expanding the Pok-e-Jo’s catering business, which now outfits 8,000 events each year, including both down-home and dressed-up Texas weddings.

Listen to this 2-minute audio clip of Danny Haberman talking about the side dishes available at Pok-e-Jo’s. [Windows Media Player required. Go here to download the player for free.]

NOTE: What follows is a portion of the original interview that has been edited for length. To download the entire transcript in PDF form, please click here.

EDITED TRANSCRIPT

Subject: Danny Haberman
Date: August 30, 2007
Location: Pok-e-Jo’s Smokehouse – Austin, TX
Fieldwork Director:Dr. Elizabeth Engelhardt
Fieldwork Team: Lisa Powell

Produced in association with the American Studies Department at The University of Texas at Austin and the Central Texas Barbecue Association.

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Lisa Powell: Today’s date is the thirtieth of August, 2007. This is Lisa Powell interviewing Danny Haberman at Pok-e-Jo’s at 1000 East Forty-first Street, in the Hancock Center in Austin, Texas. So would you first state your name and your age for the recording?

Danny Haberman: My name is Danny Haberman, and I am age forty-three.

Thank you. So, would you mind telling me a little bit about how you got into the barbecue business?

Well, I’ve been involved in the Pok-e-Jo’s concept since I got out of college in 1986. But I have to give credit to the Pok-e-Jo’s concept, to my partner, whose name is Doug Boney. And he got out of college. He went to UT [The University of Texas] here in Austin and wanted to start a business. And my father whose name is Porky and another fellow named Joe, thus the name Pok-e-Jo’s, had a building out in north Austin that they let Doug remodel and turn into a barbecue restaurant. And that’s pretty much how Pok-e-Jo’s got started. I joined up about ten years after they originally started and helped them build their catering business. And we’ve opened restaurants and expanded as a partnership ever since then.

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Could you go ahead and, and talk about what some of the different meats are that you serve and if there is a particular reason that you chose to have that meat on the menu?

Well, Pok-e-Jo’s is kind of modeled after, I think, after the traditional Texas barbecue restaurants, where they have a cafeteria line. And typically the—the primary things you’re selling are beef brisket, which seems to be the most popular item at most Texas barbecue restaurants. We also specialize in sausage. We do a smoked turkey breast. We do chicken. We do pork ribs and beef ribs. Throughout our history, we’ve tried some other pork products like pork tenderloin, pork loins, we smoke turkeys, whole turkeys during the holidays for people. But, primarily, it’s brisket, sausage, and chicken, and ribs, which is what Texans really like to eat when it comes to barbecue. We smoke all of our meats on mesquite. We think that imparts a very unique flavor. And it’s complimented by the sweetness and the heat of our barbecue sauce. I’m not sure where the original recipes really came from. I think they just kind of evolve over the years. And really the barbecue pits and the style of the cooking impart most of the flavor. So, you know recipes and spice rubs aren’t as important I guess as some people make it sound they are.

Could you talk a little bit about the style of pit that you use?

We’ve always used a rotisserie pit. There’s different brands out there, but the end result is that you’re able to put your briskets on it, which is kind of where you start everything. And you can cook them from anywhere from fifteen hours to eighteen hours at a really low, slow temperature. Your other meats don’t need to cook that long, but you need a piece of equipment that will cook the brisket long enough to break it down and make it tender. And that’s something we discovered years ago that those kind of pits seem to work the best. We actually have pits in all of our stores, and we, we cook on location.

Thank you. One thing that I’ve always found interesting about Pok-e-Jo’s is the variety of sides that you have. So, could you list the sides that you offer at Pok-e-Jo’s? And maybe talk a little bit about why you have the variety that you do?

Well, that’s kind of evolved of the years too. At the original Pok-e-Jo’s—we had what you’d call your traditional sides: your potato salad, your coleslaw, your beans. We’ve always had fried okra and French fries, and when we started out that’s pretty much what we had. But over the years, your customers kind of tell you what they want, and we feed a lot of families. The varieties have been added or the different sides have been added over the years to accommodate the taste of maybe some of our, our women patrons, their children, etc. You know, most men will come in and eat bread and meat. We’ve kind of added the other things for the rest of the world. We’ve added some, I guess, non-traditional things. We do a baked potato casserole, we do a green bean casserole. We do corn. We do a cornbread, jalapeño casserole, we do really nice fresh salads, if somebody wants to be healthy. We just felt like variety is the key to, I guess, making people want to eat here more than once a week. You know barbecue doesn’t necessarily have to be a treat. It can be something you eat every day. And by having all these other sides, you can kind of mix things up. And you can be bad or you can be good. So, that’s why we’ve done that over the years.

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So, you mentioned that you had a number of regular patrons who eat at Pok-e-Jo’s multiple times per week sometimes. Do you find that they tend to eat at the same location or that they switch around and go to different locations?

Typically they eat at the same stores. But, I’m in all of our stores at a fairly frequent basis and I see guys that eat at Hancock Center every day and you’ll see them over at the Round Rock store location on the weekends sometimes. It’s encouraging to us, once somebody eats Pok-e-Jo’s and decides that they like it, they’ll figure out where we are and they’ll make their way to them wherever they are or if they’re in that part of town, they’ll go by there. So, that’s been part of our expansion model—just make ourselves a convenient, neighborhood location for everybody.

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And you did mention that sometimes folks request that more formal catering for weddings. Do folks ever request the just normal Pok-e-Jo’s barbecue for weddings?

Absolutely. And really a lot of times the menu is barbecue. But they want the setup and the presentation to be suitable for their wedding album. So, we can dress it up or gussy it up or whatever you want to call it. We can put flowers on the table and put white linens on the table and do all the things that makes it look good in your pictures so to speak. But they still want to eat good old Texas barbecue and treat Aunt Edna from up North to real Texas barbecue. And so we do a lot of that.

Do you think there’s anything particularly unique about barbecue being a fairly regular part of wedding receptions in Texas?

I do.  To me, barbecues are part of the social fabric in Texas really. Whether you’re going to a church picnic or you’re going to a before-school thing, whenever you get large groups of people together it just seems appropriate in Texas to serve barbecue. And weddings—it makes perfect sense. You’re getting your family and your friends together and throwing a barbecue down is kind of what people expect around here. They know what to do with it. They know what the food is. And we—we laugh a lot of times when we go to events where somebody has requested food that—that people don’t really recognize. You don’t really get as much praise for that type of menu as you do for just the good old barbecue that everybody knows exactly what it is and they get to eat all they want. It’s just kind of a fun, social thing.

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And so, you’ve mentioned a couple of times that Pok-e-Jo’s is in the tradition of Texas barbecue. And so could you describe what you see is the tradition of Texas barbecue or what’s special about Texas barbecue?

I’m not sure if my perspective is the correct one. But Texas barbecue seems to be, or people in Texas seem to really appreciate the taste of the meats and the taste of what they were cooked on. If you go to like southern states or you go to other places, a lot of the barbecue is based on the sauces and the basting processes that they use. Well, Texas barbecue typically does not have sauce on it. It’s typically cooked dry, with just your dry seasonings. Occasionally, there will be a light mop towards the end of the cooking process, but you’re really kind of trying to limit the amount of sauce on something while it’s being cooked. Sauce is usually as a side or, or kind of dribbled on the top of it towards when it’s time to serve it. Most people seem to just like the pure taste of the smoked meats. And that’s what we try to stick to.

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So you told us some about the history of Pok-e-Jo’s over the past few decades now. What do you see as the future of Pok-e-Jo’s?

Well, we’re not real complex business people. We just want to keep feeding folks, and, and making fans for our food and our products. Our expansion has typically been slow. About every two or three years we’ll start looking for another location. And typically we’ve gone into an existing restaurant space that somebody else either left behind or couldn’t make a go of it. That will probably continue to be our growth strategy. We’ll keep looking in different parts of Austin. We think there’s plenty of room for more Pok-e-Jo’s. A lot more neighborhoods, I think, that we could service and make our barbecue more accessible. And then the catering, the sky is kind of the limit there. It just depends how many people we can introduce to that—that service that we give. T here’s lots of people eating barbecue every day or fajitas or something in this town and we are grateful we get our share of it.

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So, is there anything else that you’d like to share about Pok-e-Jo’s or about your own involvement or general thoughts on Texas barbecue? Anything?

The only thought I have is that people don’t eat enough Texas barbecue, and I think they should eat some every day.

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To download the entire transcript in PDF form, please click here.

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