Chef-Owner Jon Osburn’s Barbecue at Smoke ‘N Bones is the Stuff of Dreams
by Anna Frost
Slow and steady wins the race and – in the case of Chef-Owner Jon Osburn’s barbecue restaurant – it wins awards. Named in the Boston Globe’s top ten New England barbecue places and Yankee magazine as Best Island BBQ, the Oak Bluffs staple Smoke ‘N Bones has been running since 1997 and ages well.
The restaurant’s interior includes glass cases full of a variety of hot sauces, neon lights and little metal pigs hanging above the tables. Like all great things, though, there is more to Smoke ‘N Bones than is discerned at first glance. A behemoth of a smoker housed behind the restaurant is one of 32 particular smokers on the east coast and can smoke 1000 pounds of meat at a time. With it, Osburn smokes the meat slowly over an all-wood flame produced by oak, cherry and apple wood: 14 hours for beef brisket; 10 hours for pork butt; and three and a half hours for the ribs and chicken.
Osburn takes his time to produce the simple, quality food served at his restaurant from scratch. He bought the place in 1999 and has run it every summer season since. Additionally, he has opened another Smoke ‘N Bones in Key West, Florida and consulted for a certain boy-band-member-turned-pop star’s Manhattan barbecue joint. As he discusses his restaurant on a particularly rainy morning, Osburn speaks in a leisurely tone as he takes long drags of his cigarette.
This Week on MV: Is there anything new going on this season?
Jon Osburn: Not really, we’re trying some different specials just to see how they go, but it seems like most of the people that come in here have been coming in here for so many years that they pretty much know what they want before they walk in the door. The waitresses will try and tell them about the specials and they’ll say, “No, we want the chicken, or we want the beef.” These people came in the other night and we have no idea why they wrote this on a paper towel, but anyway, it’s funny – “dreaming of the chicken for two years.” …That was a nice surprise.
TWMV: Do you have a big emphasis on spicy food here?
J.O.: Not really. This is pretty much traditional barbecue. If you want to make it spicy, we have about 60 different kinds of hot sauce, maybe more, that you can put on it, but barbecue per se is not spicy. We’re a lot more about how the finished product has to have a good smoke taste, but not too much and everything we do is really very traditional. We try to do something from each different barbecue region – we got North Carolina pulled pork, Texas-style brisket, Kansas City baby back ribs, Memphis style St. Louis ribs, we try to cover everything, a little from here, a little bit from there, and it seems to work well.
TWMV: Where do you get all the hot sauce?
J.O.: Well, some of them come from a friend of mine in Florida and some come from West Virginia. There’s some wild ones in there. [Customers] can buy them or we have pretty much samples of everything, they can make it as hot as they want.
TWMV: Are you a fan of hot sauce?
J.O.: Eh, not really. I lived in Mexico when I was a kid, so I’m burned out on it.
TWMV: What’s your favorite thing here?
J.O.: We do beef ribs every Friday night and we smoke them for about six hours and they’re really, really good. It’s two big chunks of meat on the bone, it looks like something Fred Flintstone would eat. It’s good stuff.
TWMV: Why did you choose to have a barbecue restaurant?
J.O.: Well, I’m actually trained as a French chef. The fellow that owned this place before was a good friend of mine and he got Hodgkin’s disease and called me up in Florida and asked if I’d come run the place for the summer for him because he was too sick to do it, so I did. And my wife, son and I ended up really liking Martha’s Vineyard and we got into barbecue. It’s pretty cool. This has led to all kinds of other things: I built a restaurant in Manhattan for Justin Timberlake, which was pretty fun.
TWMV: What is that restaurant called?
J.O.: It’s called Southern Hospitality…they’re doing really well.
TWMV: How did you end up working with Justin Timberlake?
J.O.: A fellow that came in here was a partner in the restaurant with him and – this guy’s been coming in here for years – he called me about two weeks before they were supposed to open and he said, “You know I put a lot of money into this restaurant and I want you to come and look at it because I don’t think it’s gonna work.” [laughs] And he was right, they had a lot of issues that needed to be fixed. It was fun. I mean, I didn’t even know half the people that wandered through there because I’m not a big fan of rap, but the opening night down there was televised on MTV and it was a big deal, it was fun. But this is more fun, I like it up here, it’s more relaxed.
