Local entrepreneur Kevin Woolf is a perfectionist when it comes to barbecue.
The 36-year-old aspiring restaurateur specializes in the American kind. However, for the record, he said “real barbecue isn’t just throwing a couple of pieces of meat on a grill for 15 minutes.”
His catering business in Taipei, Baba Kevin American Barbecue, makes a Texas-style beef brisket that requires 20 hours of smoking and slow roasting in a brick barbecue pit that Woolf built himself. After cooking, his brisket has a darkened ring of smoked flavor imprinted around the edge. He believes brisket that does not have this smoke ring should be tossed into the trash.
Woolf’s dedication to his craft is reminiscent of America’s great pit masters, who occasionally give the public a peek at the source of their mystical powers — their pits — through TV food tours of the American Deep South on channels like TLC.
Even the name of his business, baba, or “daddy” in Chinese, conjures up images of a cuisine that comes from a culture with traditional Southern family values. Woolf is spreading his love of barbecue in Taiwan because his family is here.
He met his wife, Yvonne, in 2005, through a mutual friend after he moved to Taipei to tutor English and do some business consulting after college.
“When I saw her, I thought Taiwan was an amazing place to have such a beautiful woman,” Woolf said. “We became madly in love.”
However, Yvonne’s parents did not share the couple’s enthusiasm at first.
“It’s because he is a foreigner. Every time I wanted to talk about him, my mother would skip the topic,” Yvonne said.
When Christmas 2005 came around, Yvonne thought Woolf and her parents should meet, and turned on the heat for him to impress them. Woolf turned to his roots for inspiration. His father was a fireman and in the US almost every firehouse has a barbecue that firefighters use to cook large meals in between calls.
“Barbecue was from when I was a kid. When my dad took us camping, we would experiment with ingredients we had and made concoctions, and see what tastes better,” Woolf said.
So to impress his girlfriend’s parents, Woolf spent two-and-a-half days whipping up a feast that became legendary in Yvonne’s extended family’s lore — one that -included barbecued pork spare ribs, mashed potatoes, pumpkin pie and vegetable stew.
The centerpiece was a turducken with cornbread stuffing. The nervous beau spent hours de-boning and stuffing a small chicken into a duck, and the duck into a turkey, and sewing up the turkey to hold everything in place. He shuttled the smorgasbord of poultry to a friend’s oven out in then-Taipei County by taxi and roasted it for eight hours.
“Most Taiwanese men don’t cook,” Yvonne said. “My parents were so surprised that he could, they started trusting him.”
As for the meal, they thought the turducken was a bit weird.
“But the ribs were special,” Yvonne said. “My parents thought they were so soft, with such rich flavor.”
He and Yvonne married in 2007 and they now have two children.
The famed spare ribs and mashed potatoes from that meal are on Baba Kevin’s menu, which also features brisket, mesquite-smoked beef short ribs, hickory-smoked barbecue chicken and hot sausage links.
Woolf currently caters for events and also offers frozen delivery, but he hopes to open a restaurant later this year so that more people in Taiwan can get the chance to taste what he calls “real American barbecue.”
His main challenge is finding an affordable space to rent in Taipei — a tall order given skyrocketing housing prices and stringent requirements that many owners have for their tenants. Woolf said most landlords are not keen on having a fire on their property.
However, both he and his wife seem determined to stake their future on his pit-firing skills. While building his own pit, Woolf, Yvonne and their daughter Ellie put their handprints on the cement base as a symbol of the family’s investment. For Woolf, barbecue is where his family began. So naturally, all hands are on deck for his ship to sail to barbecue glory.
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