Feeding the Tribe

With a primal attention to fire, MONROE’S DUKE OF RIBS, RHODA BROWN, has become world-famous for one thing: Barbeque

article by MICHAEL DEVAULT and photography by BRAD ARENDER

here’s something elemental about the transformative destruction fire exacts. Since we first discovered fire, we’ve used it to cook. And, perhaps thankfully, we’ve gotten a lot better at it through the eons. Just ask Rhoda Brown.

A world-renowned pitmaster and owner of the Hog Wash Caboose, Brown has amassed a faithful following over the last decade. Diners at “Rhoda’s,” as it’s known to insiders, are willing to drive – sometimes great distances – for a taste of his creations. For Brown, barbeque feeds a powerful, primal impulse.

“Man has cooked meat over fire since we could walk, more or less,” he says. “It’s ingrained in us, and there’s something very satisfying in charring meat over fire.”

Through Facebook posts and more than a few text message blasts, Brown’s fans – numbering in the thousands — keep track of where he will be slinging the ‘Q. He frequently sets up in “sunny, uptown Claiborne,” and he’s also a frequent participant in fund raisers and business openings. Wherever Rhoda goes, the crowd follows.

“You feed the tribe,” he says. That’s how he thinks of the customers who flock to his window day after day. They’re not just customers. They’re his family, and in this tribe, it’s his job to feed them. “We’re hunter-gatherers.”

That he likens what he does to feeding a tribe of friends and family makes sense, especially considering the somewhat circuitous path Brown took to find his niche in the northeast Louisiana food scene. He never planned on becoming a barbeque champion or, even, a career cook. In fact, his first designs were on a completely different field.

After he graduated from St. Frederick High School in 1988, Brown wanted to be a nurse and work in the medical field. But he knew college would cost money, and so he needed a job. The summer after he turned 18, Brown found that job, working the door with Yvette Jeter at Enoch’s Irish Pub and Café.

“Rhoda was always dependable and smart in the kitchen,” Jeter recalls. “He seemed to just have a natural ability with a grill.
At the time, the pub was located on 6th Street and was a hub both for live music in the evenings and a hopping lunch scene for Monroe professionals. Very quickly, Brown found himself working the line.

“One day they needed help, so I started learning to cook at lunch,” he recalls. “Then, I cooked in the early evening. Eventually, I became a bartender.”

Over the course of six years at the pub, Brown became a familiar face to many of the crowd, who would eventually come to form his tribe. Jeter believes his sense of humor and wit helped ingratiate him to customers.

“He had a very easy personality, but he could get serious real quick, when I needed it,” she says. “Rhoda always had my back, when I was doing the door. He seemed to be able to read a crowd.”

With a natural ability on the grill and the temperament for a service industry job, like tending bar or serving a grill, a future in food seemed like a natural fit. But Brown hadn’t given up on his plans. When Enoch’s moved to Shreveport in the early 1990s, Brown enrolled in college at ULM – then NLU – to study nursing. He also continued working, taking a job as a home health aide for a hospice service.

“After four years of it, I couldn’t deal with the death aspect of the job anymore,” he says. He also was ready for a new challenge. He left college and took a job in master control at KARD. He seemed to like the work and enjoyed the action. The work was challenging and exciting, so he pressed forward, eventually trying his hand at a larger market when he moved to Little Rock.
“I got promoted to supervisor of master control there,” Brown says. Master control in a major metro news channel is a big job, and it could have served as a springboard to even greater career progression through the television industry. However, Fate intervened. “When the terror attacks on 9/11 hit, I got laid off. So, I moved home, back to KARD and KTVE.”

Working six days a week, Brown found little time for much socializing. The time he did spend outside of the control room, he watched television with friends, particularly cooking competitions. Moving back also presented several practical challenges, as well. Particularly, Brown had to do laundry and he didn’t have a washer or dryer.

Every Sunday, he’d schlep his clothes to a friend’s house, throw on a load, and then watch cooking shows. Eventually, he realized he was missing something else from Little Rock. Being in a significantly larger city with a much closer proximity to Memphis, Brown had developed a taste for good barbeque.

“When I moved back from Little Rock, I’d gotten accustomed to eating a different quality of barbeque that wasn’t available here,” he says. “I started tinkering around with it.”

Sundays at his friends’, he’d do his laundry and, on a borrowed grill, attempt to master the art of slow-cooking ribs. The natural affinity at the grill, Jeter had recognized quickly manifested itself as Brown became a skilled hand at the pit. Sunday became a rallying post for people who liked barbeque.

“After a few months of that, a friend dared me to go to a cook-off,” he says. “We’d been watching them on TV for a while, and at that time, when he threw down the dare, I was just drunk enough to take him up.”

The next weekend, he entered the Louisiana State Barbeque Cook-off in Vidalia. Using the same grill he’d been on the whole time, he worked the meat as he’d learned to do. When the judges’ results posted, Brown had earned himself a respectable 11th-place.
“It hooked me,” he says. He immediately built himself a larger pit and traded in every vacation day he had to free up weekends for competitions. “I went to just about any cook-off I could find that had 75 to 100 teams or more.”

That’s not to say he entered the competitions himself. He recognized he still had a lot to learn, and that meant spending time with the teams, who were already competing. Rhoda Brown followed the path trod by myriad chefs before. He traded grunt work for knowledge.

“I’d go introduce myself to people and ask them if they needed help washing dishes, taking their trash out, whatever they needed,” he says. “A couple of teams took me in and let me travel with them. I learned the craft from those guys.”

Back home, his reputation was growing, as well. People wanted the barbeque he was mastering. Bob Teague remembers the first time he watched Brown at the pit, early one morning in Teague’s back yard. The local paper had decided to do a story about Brown, and he revealed that the process started earlier than most reporters could have imagined.

“We got up at 3 a.m. in the morning at my house to make some barbeque,” Teague says. At the time, Teague was not only a popular columnist. He was also the proprietor of Cottonport Coffee in West Monroe. He’d known Brown for years, and he saw a potential partnership, inviting Brown to set up the pit outside the coffee house on Cotton Street. “It worked out.”

Sporatically over the next two years, Brown would set up folding tables, fire up the pit and serve barbeque. Teague notes Brown’s following was much bigger than the coffee shop’s.

“It was great for us, because people wanted Rhoda Brown’s barbeque, and people would come out to Cottonport,” Teague says. “What he was doing was drawing so much more attention than what Cottonport was doing.”

Again, Brown’s tribe turned out big.

Monroe physician Terry Tugwell remembers those impromptu barbeque sessions outside Cottonport fondly. He was a long-time friend of Brown’s, having known him since he was a punk-rock inspired student at West Monroe High School. Tugwell also remembers the first time he saw Brown, in the parking lot of Enoch’s, long before the boy was old enough to go into a bar, much less work in one.

“He always had a big smile on his face, and he wore this black leather jacket,” Tugwell remembers. “And on the corner of his jacket, he’d attached a little, stuffed bird.”

It was enough of a whimsy to impress Tugwell that Brown had an affable quality.

“I saw the sense of humor, and I could tell that this was someone I wanted to know,” Tugwell says. By the time barbeque at Cottonport had become a hit, Tugwell and Brown were fast friends. Tugwell’s not surprised at Brown’s success at the grill or with the audience he’s developed.

“He puts so much love and effort into it, and he’s learned form the masters,” Tugwell says. “He’s rubbed shoulders with anybody and everybody that’s anyone in that world. He’s cooked with them, learned from them, and it shows. Then, the best part of going to Rhoda’s for barbeque is getting to see Rhoda.”

By 2005, Brown’s reputation was such that he was a frequent competitor on the cook-off circuit. A competitive team, the Wizards of Que, invited Brown to join their team for Memphis in May. Widely recognized as the “world championship” of barbeque, Memphis in May draws pit masters from around the world. More importantly, the event draws tens of thousands of barbeque foodies to the competition, making the People’s Choice Award one of the most coveted.

“We won People’s Choice for pulled pork in 2005,” he says. In 2006 and 2007, the Wizards of Que placed in the top five. “I entered it myself in 2008, and I won it a second time.”

A world championship under his belt, Brown felt somewhat fulfilled and stepped back from the competitive circuit. He got married, had a kid, and started working full-time at Coda. One afternoon, he got an email from some buddies on the cook-out circuit. TLC was seeking competitors for its reality cooking competition, BBQ Pitmasters, and those interested needed to submit a video. The deadline was days away.

The idea of going on television was enticing, but Brown was unconvinced. His Coda coworkers spurred him along.
“When we got off shift one day, we went home, to my house, and we made a quick video,” Brown says. “We sent it in that evening.”

Brown didn’t expect much. Cooks seeking a slot in the competition frequently spend thousands, even tens of thousands of dollars producing highly polished audition tapes for shows like BBQ Pitmasters. They had filmed the video he submitted in less than a half hour.

A month later, he received word that he’d been selected.

“I was told I couldn’t tell anybody I was on the show,” he says. “I had to arrange the time off from work and go out to Los Angeles to tape the show.”

Season 2 of BBQ Pitmasters was to be filmed on an outdoor set constructed in the desert outside of L.A. That summer, a heatwave struck, and temperatures soared to more than 112 degrees.

“I didn’t have any problems with the cooking aspect of it,” Brown says. “I wasn’t nervous about the competition aspect at all. But the heat, that’s what was so bad.”

With temperatures well-past the century mark, heat from the grills, overhead lighting for the cameras, and all the work that was to be done, Brown began to feel the effects. The heat wasn’t just stifling. It was outright dangerous.

“Halfway through the competition, I suffered a heat stroke,” he says. But he pressed forward, intent to not let a medical crisis end his run. “It probably should have, but I struggled through it and finished the competition.”

He doesn’t remember much of the final hours of the contest. He knows he plated the food, and he remembers turning in his final dish. Beyond that, he has to watch the show to be reminded.

“I put the food on the plate, and I stood there long enough for them to talk to me about it. I don’t remember anything they said or standing there. I was delirious.”

As soon as the competition ended, Brown was in an ambulance. In the years since BBQ Pitmasters – the second episode of Season 2 is still a fan favorite on reruns.

Brown has continued cooking barbeque and raising his daughter. More days than not, the Hog Wash Caboose is set up somewhere in the Twin Cities, and Brown can be found there, tending the pit and greeting people, the part of the business he likes the best.

“I think that’s the best thing about it, the interactions with the people at the service window,” he says. “I learn a lot about my customers, the ones who come back regularly. We build a rapport, and it’s kind of like an extension of that tribe.”

He looks forward to seeing his regulars every morning, catching up with them and finding out how their families are doing. That’s what keeps him coming back time and again, even though he’s put competitions aside, for now.
“The best part about it is talking to the people,” he says.