Cafe adds new smoker

The owners of the Hunter Hill Cafe are hoping to bring back the award-winning barbeque that they had served up at a previous restaurant.

The cafe has installed a new stainless steel wood-burning smoker that slow cooks food with charcoal and wood pellets instead of natural gas.

The restaurant’s owners hope the cooker will cut their natural gas bills in half.

David Eilers, one of the owners of the family restaurant at 825 Country Club Road, said they initially wanted to install a concrete barbeque pit inside the cafe like the one they had installed outside at their previous restaurant, the Shrimp Boat on South Fairview Road.

But officials wouldn’t permit the indoor pit inside the cafe.

Instead, Eilers said, they ordered the $3,500 stainless steel cooker that uses wood pellets and charcoal to cook up pork barbeque, chicken and beef ribs. He said the meat comes out similar to that cooked in a pit.

The pit-cooked barbeque at the Shrimp Boat had previously won the Rocky Mount Telegram’s “Best of the Best” award contest in 2005.

Eilers said customers who used to eat the Shrimp Boat’s barbeque have been asking if the cafe could serve it again. He said customers should notice the smoked flavor of the barbeque cooked in the new cooker, which has been in operation for several days.

“We’ve tried not to mention (the smoker to customers) to see if they will say something,” he said, adding that the customers’ unsolicited reaction has been positive.

“It’s a lot different (taste),” he said. “(The food) is cooked with charcoal and wood. It gives you kind of a backyard barbeque taste as opposed to the natural gas (cooker), which has a lot of byproducts and things like that.”

He said popular barbeque restaurants like “The Pit” in Raleigh use similar cookers to the Cookshack wood-burning smoker being used at his family’s cafe.

According to the company’s Web page, Fast Eddys By Cookshack Stainless Wood Smokers are “100 percent wood burning, pellet-fired smokers with Cookshack’s exclusive IQ4 technology for precise temperature control.”

“Cookshack’s proprietary IQ4 electronic time and temperature controller is easy to use, and gives you consistent results with every load,” the Web page states. “When the smoke-cook cycle has finished the controller drops automatically to the hold temperature. Thermostatically-controlled temperature eliminates large heat fluctuations that dry and shrink meat.”

The page goes on to say that burners in the smoker stay on when doors are opened and heat recovery occurs in as little as 10 minutes.

“Some other smokers take up to an hour to bring the temperature back up,” it states.

The Web page also states that professional competitors on the barbecue circuit “love this smoker because it brings them wins!”

Eilers said the smoker also is designed to cook leaner meat.

“It has a drain pan at the bottom where (fat) drips,” he said.

The restaurant owners are also are hoping that the smoker will make at least some dent in their high utility bills.

Some months, utility bills have escalated to $3,000, with $600 of it being natural gas.

Eilers said the cooker should be able to trim the natural gas bill in half. He said it only uses a minute amount of electricity when the timer goes off indicating that more wood pellets need to be put in.

“Depending on demand, we might add one or two more (smokers),” he said. “We kind of wanted to get into it slowly.”