Find some of South Florida’s best barbecue at this hidden stand in northeast Miami-Dade
Raheem Sealey tells the older couple it’ll be 20 minutes before the pork spare ribs are ready.
They sit patiently at a picnic table under a tent outside this northeast Miami-Dade house, sipping from a pair of cold bottles of water. They understand barbecue is about waiting.
Bob Marley’s “One Love” pours from a boombox rotating reggae. A cooler offers free cans of cold Modelo beer and bottles of Topo Chico mineral water. A breeze blows through a canopy of mature oaks to the shaded barbecue spot under a grove of Australian pines at the dead end of this street. A plume of gray-blue Florida oak smoke with the scent of toasted all spice, caramelized jerk seasonings and the thick anticipation of slow-cooked meat elicits hunger pangs.
And when Sealey announces the ribs are ready, there is a crackle of quiet euphoria.
This is the atmosphere that Sealey, the head chef at the upscale Wynwood restaurant Kyu, is trying to create at The Drinking Pig, a new weekend pop-up he quietly started with his partner, Mark Wint, and his wife, Yohanir Sandoval, during the pandemic.
“We’re just a couple of kids from the Caribbean trying to do something great,” Sealey said. “God gave us these hands, and we have to use them.”
While Kyu (pronounced “cue,” as in barbecue) was closed, Sealey got the blessing to pursue this passion project from Kyu founder and close friend Michael Lewis, who taught him the fine art of barbecue during their 12 years as friends and colleagues. “And we’ve been family for 10 of those years,” Lewis said. Together, they had built a restaurant that was named a 2017 semi-finalist for the James Beard Foundation’s Best New Restaurant in the country.
Sealey, a native of St. Croix, tagged Kyu sous chef Wint, a native of Jamaica whom he calls “my brother,” and the Venezuelan-born Sandoval, whom he met at Kyu as a line cook. Together, they merged the all-day, relaxed nature of going for barbecue with their shared, casual Caribbean vibe to cure the languorous anxiety of this pandemic.
“The pandemic shook the ground beneath us,” Sandoval said. “So we started to look at our talents and what we could do with them.”
Miami-Dade has seen several new barbecue options, from Alapattah’s Hometown, a Brooklyn import that sticks to traditional salt-and-pepper seasoning and East Texas styles, to Little Haiti’s Bon Gout, which injects Haitian flavors to its grilling.
The Drinking Pig mixes the best of those worlds.
During Sealey and Lewis’ many trips from East Texas to Birmingham, Alabama, to study barbecue, they knew there was an opportunity to fuse traditional slow-cooking barbecue techniques with South Florida flavors. Those flavors were right alongside Sealey at Kyu.
Wint’s father had been a chef in Jamaica and his mother, whose specialty was curried chicken among her home-style cooking, owned a pair of local restaurants. And Sealey, who was raised on a farm with his grandparents, grew up helping them in the kitchen as they cooked food that they sold to other local families.
“I want to do our barbecue. I wanted flavors that we grew up loving from our childhoods in the Caribbean,” Sealey said.
So without leaving their jobs at Kyu, they started their experiment. Sealey bought a massive off-set smoker, parked it in front of Wint’s house, and set up picnic tables, tunes and a canopy for shade. Barbecuing brisket begins late Thursday night so they can start serving at noon Friday.
The flavors are callbacks to their youth. Jerk seasonings are rubbed on the spare ribs. The aromatic woodsy flavor of all spice shows up in everything from the fall-apart brisket to the baked beans for a truly unique and special flavor. The heavily spice-rubbed smoked chicken rivals even the exquisitely flavored and tender brisket.
And even the traditionally Southern dishes — like the mac and cheese Sealey grew up making with his grandmother for St. Croix Thanksgivings to the tender collards — have their own brand of spice flavors.
Sandoval rolls the meats tightly in butcher paper soon made translucent with juices — and a finishing spray of apple juice that helps the meat keeps its moisture. She packs it with homemade sauces: their Caribbean take on a mayo-based Alabama white sauce with Scotch bonnet peppers, a caramel red sauce with sesame oil that calls back to Kyu, and a North Carolina vinegar-mustard glaze that you’ll want to slather on everything, including the moist, sweet cornbread dusted with salt flakes.
“This is about fulfilling a dream,” Sandoval said. “I told him, ‘You have the passion. You have the imagination. Your hands are blessed hands.’ My role is to support him to make sure he succeeds.”
Most customers over the last five weeks have ordered their barbecue to go, Sealey said. They send out the barbecue pit’s location only after an order is paid for. But a handful have taken them up on the offer of a cold beer under the breezy canopy as they await what is, quite possibly, South Florida’s truest celebration of barbecue, from flavor to vibe.
The Drinking Pig
Hours: Noon until sold out, Friday through Sunday.
More info: Orders are taken via Instagram, @drinkingpigbbq, and must be paid ahead of time with Venmo, Zell or Cash App.
This story was originally published September 15, 2020 at 6:00 AM.
