Young entrepreneur co-owner of new slow-smoked BBQ restaurant open in Kinsman
“Never stop learning.”
That’s the motto Nicholas Pieper goes by, and it’s what inspired the name of the restaurant he co-owns with Sam Byard.
“No one’s ever really a master of anything, and everyone is an apprentice no matter what, because everything is changing,” Pieper said. “We find out new ways to do things. In my mind, you can’t ever be a master or anything. So I brought that philosophy into name.”
Pieper and Byard are the owners of a new restaurant in Kinsman called Apprentice BBQ, which opened in November.
“I’ve always liked food, and I’ve always eaten a lot of different cultural food. My family’s big on Japanese food, Korean food and everything, but we love smoked meats,” Pieper said. “Eventually I reconnected with [Sam] because he was my stepdad’s friend originally, and he asked if I were to move out here, what’s my dream? What do I want to do? I’ve wanted to have a restaurant, because I just like cooking, so I came out and I’ve learned a lot of more culinary along the way.”
Byard is a family friend of Pieper’s who previously ran Maggie’s Donut in Kinsman.
“We had Maggie’s for a little over a year, and it was losing money,” Byard said. “We started bringing the smoked meats in, and that’s what was carrying us. We decided to go with the food, because the profits we made on the food was going to the donuts we were throwing away...we’ve already got people asking us to do big orders for weddings and stuff like that.”
Community members are invited to stop by and try Apprentice BBQ during the weekend of their ribbon-cutting on Feb. 20, with a special deal on pulled pork sliders for $1.
“I met with a guy named Rob Williams after we made a post about wanting to do board games and he came in with some smoked meat,” Pieper said. “We became close friends, and I’ve spent six months learning from him. I had a general idea about smoking, but he’s basically a master smoker. We had a lot of the same interests and I naturally learned barbecue from him any free time I could get.”
The smoking process takes several hours depending on the type of meat, going low and slow.
“There are many types of smoking, but we do pellet smoking. Roughly, it takes eight to eleven hours for brisket to get done because I’m waiting for it to hit around 150 degrees,” Pieper said. “But you also want to judge by the bark; then I wrap it, let it finish cooking, and rest it overnight so it can reabsorb all the juice. Making sure it rests the meat is the biggest thing, too. I make my own seasonings.”
Apprentice BBQ is open from 10 a.m. – 7 p.m. Monday through Thursday and 6 a.m. - 7 p.m. on Friday and Saturday at 6442 Kinsman Nickerson in Kinsman.
“We opened in November,” Byard said. “So far, we’ve outsold every week before. A lot of people are very happy; we get a lot of return customers.”
To pay tribute to Maggie’s, Apprentice BBQ also has breakfast items available on the weekends.
