From catered soirees at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum to Route 1 barbecue, Peter Crowley has a full plate

Boston Globe

4 days ago

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We're calling it a roadside barbecue joint. Our tagline is 'Texas-style and classic vibes,' although we certainly have plans to do more interesting and varied types of smoking and barbecuing down the road. It's quite casual; it's counter-service.
Why barbecue?
A very good friend was always encouraging me to do something barbecue. I've been interested in barbecue for my whole cooking career. I was doing it on the weekends and for friends and family. Post-2020, I became even more interested in it.
Over the years, he would say, 'This place is available for rent,' but there was always a reason why I didn't want to or didn't think I could pull the trigger.
About a year-and-a-half ago, I remember it very well, he called me and said, 'I just drove by the Red Wing Diner on Route 1′ — which, of course, I had driven by a million times going to Gillette Stadium — 'and there's a sign up saying it's for sale.'
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I thought: You've got to be kidding me. What a spot. I finally thought, he's right. This is actually an amazing location. Let's see a realtor. Let's go talk about it. The next thing you know, we were on our way to opening this cool roadside joint.
It was originally a Worcester dining car, built in the early '30s, and then over the decades, a dining room was attached to the side of it. Then a kitchen was added on, and another wing, with a little walk-in area. It expanded over the years, but it was very well-known in its glory days. I hear stories of people waiting in line out front for their fried seafood.
When you walk in, you enter this old dining car where you can easily imagine there was a short-order cook behind the counter, and there were stools in front. Now, you can see the menu, talk with the staff, get an idea of what we're doing. You can peek into the kitchen through a couple of windows in the car and get a beer, a glass of wine, a cocktail, a soda, go to the dining room, and we deliver your barbecue in a very traditional manner on a platter with butcher paper. It's meant to be very easygoing, no drama, good for families.
How did you get into the food business? Was this a lifelong passion or a midlife detour?
It's both, actually. I've been in the restaurant business my entire career. I went to culinary school in the last Ice Age, and I got out in 1990 and moved to Boston shortly thereafter from the Washington, D.C., area.
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My wife and I met in culinary school at the Culinary Institute of America. I joke when we went there that it was more like a reform school compared with what it's like now. It was very spartan. The two of us went to Paris, and we had family friends who lived on the edge of the Alps and let us stay in their house.
If you wanted to be a serious chef, one great way to try to accomplish that was to work in Europe. That was something that a lot of people were trying to do. And incredibly, we just took a shot at a blind phone call at a hotel in a ski resort in the Alps. It was like something out of a corny movie. The day that we called, the chef had quit, and they had guests coming and said, 'Why don't you come up here? We'll see how it works out.' And we ended up staying there for almost two years, working and skiing and traveling back and forth. It was just an unbelievable life experience, an incredible way to start our marriage.
We came back to Boston, and we were kind of honing in on the idea of a prepared foods store.
We were spinning our wheels. And one day the broker called and said, 'I just got a call from the Gardner Museum, and they are looking for someone to take over their little café. Are you interested in that?'
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I had stars in my eyes. I thought we were going to do something in town. At that time, the café was in the actual museum, and it was so tiny. It had four electric burners and one little electric stove and about 20 tables. I think it was 22 seats, maybe. But we looked at it and thought: What an unusual opportunity.
My wife was the brains of the operation. All of the smart things that happened in my career are due to her. She said, 'Let's be honest here. We've never opened a restaurant.'
This was a relatively low-risk proposition, because everything was in place: the tables, the chairs, the ovens, the visitors, the clientele. We've been at the Gardner Museum, running the restaurant and catering operation there, for 23 years now.
Barbecue feels like a bit of a departure
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I can't think of a concept that's more different than the Gardner Museum. One night, we could be catering a three- or four-course seated dinner in the museum. The next night, we're serving sausage on a tray with butcher paper. That's actually part of the fun challenge for us.
Why Texas-style?
That's a great question. When my kids were younger, we decided that we were going to travel the country, rather than going to the Caribbean or something. We went throughout the South. We went to Nashville, we went to Texas, we went to Detroit. That was one of my favorite places.
Inevitably, much of our travel revolved around food and restaurants and markets, because of our career and our interest. We often found ourselves at different barbecue restaurants, and it was fun to compare the different styles, rate them, and rank them. It very organically became a talking point in our house.
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I was cooking, in my yard, on different types of smokers throughout the year, just for really friends and family. I became very interested in Texas barbecue, a style that focuses much more on the technique of simple seasoning, the quality of the meat, the cooking technique and the smoke, without reliance on sauces.
I started to really get enthralled with my offset smoker. It's basically an old propane tank that has a firebox attached to the end of it. The offset means it's low. The fire is lower than the chamber of the cooker, and it's totally analog. There is no gas, there's no propane, there's no fans, there's no electricity. It's a primitive, very simple way of cooking. It's so pure, it's incredibly challenging, and the end result was just mind-blowing.
Where do you eat with your family when you're not working in the kitchen?
This is going to be a very boring answer. The truth is, my kids are home for the summer, and they're off in college now, so when they're home and we do have evenings free, we cook a meal at home. I grill something. We were able to have dinner as a family, in a very old-fashioned way, almost every night of the week when they were growing up, because the museum's café is a daytime business, daytime hours. I was able to go to their games but also able to have dinner. My wife has this incredible garden in the backyard, and we just kind of freewheel and stay together.
What do you love on your menu?
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Texas barbecue centers around beef brisket, and beef brisket is a notoriously difficult cut to cook. It's two different muscles with two different fat contents, two different thicknesses, and it requires a lot of care, from sourcing to trimming to seasoning to, of course, the cooking. I think we're doing an incredible job of making really top-class brisket.
I also really like our brisket sausage. You know, brisket has a lot of trim, and it's not scrap. It's quite usable; we need to shape the brisket to cook it effectively. We make sausage from that trim. It's garlic and mustard powder and cumin and coriander, and we smoke it, and it's so highly flavored. It's unbelievably delicious. I love it.
I'm loath to say that Northern Virginia is really the South, but maybe for New England purposes, it is. What did you grow up eating?
That's kind of a funny question, only because I feel like when I was a kid, I was not interested. I didn't really grow up in a family that did a lot of restaurant exploration or necessarily talked about or thought about food a lot.
It seems that so many chefs, we're not exactly excelling in school — getting into a little bit of trouble, kind of floundering. That was absolutely my story. But I got a job in the kitchen, and like so many people, it just grabbed me, just the speed: 'Holy cow, I'm 19 years old, and I'm working with fire and knives and up late at night! This is just so incredibly cool.' And someone suggested, well, what if you went to culinary school? You can't work at your neighborhood tavern in Springfield for a career.
Where was your first job?
A little independent restaurant in Burke, Virginia. And then I graduated from there, if you can stand it, to Chili's. Then I went to a restaurant that's actually still there, a place called Mike's American Grill. That was my first real kitchen job, and that's where I saw: 'Wow, there's actually something to this. There are all these different techniques and teamwork.'
Culinary school was great for me, because it really showed me that this could be a legitimate career. At that time, there were no celebrity chefs. There was no Food Network. The idea of becoming a professional chef, at least in my world, was kind of obscure: You're going to do what?
Would you ever encourage your own kids to go into the culinary field?
As it turns out, my daughter is going to college with a hospitality management major. I think that she got infected with the bug. I feel like a lot of careers, their parents say, 'Don't do this.' I know a guy who's a lawyer; he would never tell his kid to be a lawyer. When you're in it, of course, you see all the warts. You don't want that for your kids. But yes, I think it's actually a fantastic career, especially for somebody who likes the fast pace, likes the creativity, likes the challenge of working with and on a team.
What do you think about the culture of restaurants these days? Was it brutal when you were starting out, and has it changed?
There's no doubt that, in the beginning part of my career, that old cliche about the screaming, yelling chef and the pots-and-pans-throwing was absolutely a thing. Over the decades, that's faded away. For good and for bad, there was a reason why that was effective. It's not for everybody, that authoritarian kind of approach to managing a kitchen.
It worked for me. How do I say this without being insulting to the youth of today? It's hard to find cooks who are motivated like I was, and my fellow cooks were, at that time. There are so many options for a food career. You could have a promising cook, and six months later: 'I'm going to be a food blogger. I'm going to do a podcast.' There are so many creative outlets for people now that I do feel that the restaurant kitchen landscape is a little bit thin.
I appreciate your candor. How's the Walpole food scene?
The Walpole food scene is really kind of interesting. Walpole itself is a much bigger town than I thought it was two years ago. And the people, the Walpole residents, are very all about Walpole. They're very proud of their town. I think the food scene can be dominated a little bit by Patriot Place, which is right down the street. That's actually Foxborough, of course.
But there are a couple of restaurants right in Walpole Center — a Greek place, Kosmos, is really great. Generally, they're more casual, more family-oriented restaurants, which makes sense. And that's certainly what we're going for as well. We love it when we see a family come in. We got a lot of that on Sunday, a lot of multigenerational families. Here's grandma, here's the little kids, here are the parents. You can come in and have a very fun, easygoing, not-a-big-financial-commitment meal.
Favorite snack?
I have two, and my kids are going to laugh at me. One is pickles. Anything pickled has no chance of surviving in the refrigerator. Pickles go in, pickles come right out: pickled cucumbers, pickled onions. And this summer, the Wegmans ice cream sandwiches have no chance of survival. There's something in the cookie part of it. You take them out of the wrapper, and usually an ice cream sandwich is soft. The Wegman-specific ones are crunchy.
Is there any food that you just cannot stand?
I'm guessing the answer might be no, because I have to think about it. You know, here's one. I hate truffle oil. It tastes so fake to me. There might be a tiny, little, microscopic piece of truffle in there to give you the illusion that it is actual truffles, but two drops just dominate. It seems very artificial to me. There, that's a strong opinion.
It's like bad perfume.
Right. It just lingers. It's like the party guest who won't leave.
Interview has been edited and condensed.
Kara Baskin can be reached at