“The third time the Cape Girardeau Fire Department came to put the restaurant out, it dawned on me that there probably should be a better way.”
BBQ Nation · Food & Beverage · September 2026
Knight opened his first barbecue restaurant in 1974, in an 1800s brick building on the Mississippi, at a time when there was no pit technology to buy. He built a brick pit with a damper in a three-storey flue, which turned out to have one dangerous flaw. That is how Ole Hickory Pits began; the company's smokers now ship to every continent, including Carnival cruise ships.
Transcript
That's good. You know, I got some credibility here. You've got some
credibility. So were you a success straight out of the gate? Well, I don't mean first grade in the stone tablets. I mean, okay.
Well, my first barbecue restaurant was a success. And yeah, so right out of the gate, I guess, with some good tootage from my friends and a lot of hard work and so forth. I opened a restaurant here in Cape Girardo, Missouri. And it's right on the Mississippi River. It's called Port Cape Girardo. And it's in a historic building. It was built back in the 1800s. And so to put barbecue into it, I had to come up with a method and there was no technology whatsoever in 1974 when I opened. So the choice was to build a brick bit or use a barrel. And this was a beautiful building. It had three stories high and arch windows and made out of brick. And so it was an easy choice to say, I'll build a brick pit there. And so it was kind of a guess by guessing by golly kind of thing designing. And it had one really dangerous flaw. I had to put a damper in the flu. It was three stories high. And so when you're cooking a lot of meat and it's going up an 18-inch diameter flu three stories high, it can really get out of a handle fast. And the third time the Cape Girardo Fire Department came to put the restaurant out, it dawned on me that there probably should be a better way.
Yeah.
So that's started a long journey to find out better ways of doing it.
But I think that experience, you know, cooking in a brick pit or whatever experience you had just besides eating barbecue probably helped you build that. And I don't mean physically, but mentally in your, in your design, in your mind, I would think.