BBQ 096: My Story - a podcast by Yoni

You’re listening to the Best BBQ Show and I’m your host, Yoni Levin. I realized something today. After almost 100 episodes of the show, I’m not sure you all know my story on why this show came to be. I’m not sure you know how I got interested in BBQ to begin with or why I’ve spent two years covering the Texas BBQ scene and all the interesting people in and around it.

It all started when I was a young boy in upstate New York. Now I say upstate because I’m not talking about New York City. I’m talking about way up state. As in almost Canada. I grew up in small city called Rochester, NY. A city that is almost foreign to me now that I’ve been away for two decades.

The only BBQ in Rochester at that time was a place called Dinosaur BBQ. To this day I still like their sauce, but that’s about all that’s good about it. I’ll probably go back the next time I’m up there just to see if they’ve stepped up their game, but I wasn’t impressed back then.

Back then all I had was a weber kettle and a dream. Someone gave me a copy of the BBQ Bible and my interest was peaked. Shout out to Steve Raichlen. I read lots of the recipes, dog eared pages, highlighted, took notes and started my BBQ journey. My favorite method back then was the snake method and it was my foray into slow smoked meat.

I also spent some time on amazing ribs which if you’ve been following bbq long enough is one of the oldest sites on the internet all about bbq and how to cook it. One of my favorite articles is about how the smoke ring is a myth and how you can produce one without any smoke at all.

Now I say slow smoked but I’m embarrassed to admit that I was doing everything wrong. I used cheap charcoal briquettes that didn’t burn very well. I was smart enough not to use lighter fluid back then but I did make some common mistakes. One of them was soaking little piles of wood chips. I soaked those wood chips for hours. I used different kinds, different sizes and I just couldn’t seem to figure out why I wasn’t getting the results I wanted. The one thing I didn’t try was just not soaking the dang wood chips. If hindsight is 2020, my hindsight is clouded with thick white smoke that comes from wet wood.

Luckily, that was merely the beginning of my BBQ journey. After college I traveled the state working for non-profits in politics and the environment. I helped create legislation that saved plastic, encouraged recycling and brought a ton of awareness about homelessness. I also worked in kitchens, bars and served at restaurants between campaigns. I loved the work but it wasn’t the full time gig I had dreamed of.

Then I caught, what I thought back then, was a huge opportunity. There were field organizer positions opening up for a huge new Greenpeace campaign. I would travel the world helping solve major issues on the national and international level. I went to conferences on both coasts and even attended the conference of the parties United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. Long story short, after they sent me to Austin in 2008 I realized there was more politics than progressiveness and decided to stay in this amazing city I had discovered almost completely by accident.

Luck would have it that when I moved to Austin I landed in a small neighborhood just south of the river. A small neighborhood that just happened to have a BBQ trailer in it. A BBQ trailer called LA Barbecue. I had luckily found, what was then,

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