WARREN, Ohio — Erik Hoover is not your typical buyer at the Trumbull County Junior Fair. Yes, he’s wearing overalls. Yes, he has a can of chewing tobacco in his pocket and a spit cup handy. But that’s where the commonality ends.
He’s got on bright white glasses and a flat cap and his fully tattooed arms are on display. His right arm is his meat arm, with a rack of ribs, a hog’s head and a knife. His left arm is all veggies.
In his photo with the grand champion hog, which he purchased for $16/pound, he’s got his arm around exhibitor Hudson Miller, and he’s smiling widely. He’s probably the most genuinely happy looking junior fair buyer I’ve ever seen.
Every summer I look at a lot of fair photos of buyers standing with youth and their livestock. Those results you see in the paper? The reporters at Farm and Dairy edit the results and put captions on all the photos.
I’ve seen some cheerful buyers and some, you know, less enthusiastic ones. Erik Hoover, owner of Cockeye BBQ, stood out to me. I had to find out what his deal was.
Turns out, you can judge a book by its cover. He’s genial and open. Even when he talks about growing up without running water on a small farm in Portage County. Or when he talks about how an insult from a southern barbecue pit master inspired the name for his business.
Erik, a classically-trained chef, opened Cockeye BBQ in 2015 on the west side of Warren, as an extension of his catering business. It’s since grown to include an ice cream shop and now a 12,000-square-foot warehouse where he’ll develop the next part of his business.
When we meet at the restaurant on Parkman Road NW, Erik is wearing a short sleeve button-down shirt and tan pants with a baseball cap. It’s his “office day” so he’s dressed up a bit. Tomorrow, he says he’ll be back in overalls with an apron on, working on the line in the kitchen.
The kitchen crew is cleaning up after the lunch rush, and shifts are about to change. The restaurant closes at 8 p.m. but it never really sleeps. Around 7 or 8 p.m. one of the two barbecue pits in the back is loaded with the next day’s big meats, pork butts and beef briskets, that need to be cooked overnight. Those need at least 12 hours.
In the morning, sometime between 5 and 7 a.m., the AM pitmaster comes in to check the first pit and load up the second pit with smaller meats, chicken, turkey, ribs and sausages. Each pit can hold about 1,250 pounds of meat.
The catering team also gets going early in the morning, preparing that days’ orders. The restaurant opens at 11 a.m. for lunch.
Hoover bought the building in 2014 for $15,000 at an auction. It’s been many things in its previous lives, including a fried chicken joint, a pizza shop and a dairy store. It sat empty for several years before Erik bought it. The plan was to fix it up and run his catering business from it. He’d outgrown his garage.
“I did not buy the building to have a restaurant,” he said. “I was just going to cater out of it during the summertime … My wife was like, ‘We should put tables and chairs in here.’ I was like, ‘Nope.’ She insisted. It was one of the major fights we had. She won.”
Erik and his buddies fixed up the building piece by piece.They bought tables and chairs and wrote a menu.
“She was right,” he said.
The restaurant opened in 2015 and it’s become the largest part of their business. Without it, they wouldn’t have been able to grow like they have. He bought the house next door and razed it to expand his parking lot. He added some outdoor seating and built a small building to house their creamery, where they make and sell “super premium” ice cream
What makes it super premium, I ask Erik and his son, Max, who runs the creamery. High butterfat content, low whip and small batches, Max said.
Ice cream must have at least 10% butterfat, according to U.S. Department of Agriculture standards. That’s probably what a typical grocery store brand ice cream has. A premium brand like Ben & Jerry’s of Haagen-Dazs has between 12-14% butterfat. Cockeye BBQ’s ice cream is around 15-18% butterfat, Max said. That’s what makes it “super.”
The other difference is that most ice cream shops don’t have a full commercial kitchen next door where they can make their own inclusions, or the stuff that gets added into the ice cream. Inclusions are hand mixed into each four gallon batch of ice cream.
Their ice cream is also sold wholesale to a number of local stores, where you can buy it by the pint. They make about 400 gallons of ice cream a day, Max said, and they’re bursting at the seams, just three years after opening.
The other thing their success has allowed them to do is give back. That’s where the 4-H animals come in. Erik likes supporting local kids growing local food. He buys a few animals every year, often spending too much, he admits, but he likes knowing where that money is going. He’s had 4-H kids work for him over the years and knows they’re some of the best.
“I bought one of my employee’s turkeys, and I know he bought a nicer truck with some of that money,” he said.
A goat he bought from the fair this year made its way to the menu at the end of July. He smoked and braised it for a Jamaican-style curry, served over rice and beans. Hoover texted me “this is one reason” along with a picture of a thank you note that was laid on his desk shortly after our interview. It was from the 4-H’er who raised the goat, apparently named Jeff.
“Thank you again for buying my 4-H project. I seen Jeff was a clothesline special. I hope everyone enjoyed,” the hand-written letter read.
Erik didn’t grow up doing 4-H but he knows what it’s like to live in the country. He grew up on a 50- acre hobby farm in Paris Township. He calls his parents “hippies but no drugs.” They were self-reliant folks who liked to do things on their own. They raised rabbits, chickens and some goats.
“We butchered them ourselves,” he said. “We grew gardens. We raised three acres of potatoes. We’d trade them with people. We didn’t have running water until high school.”
After graduating high school in 1992, he went to Johnson & Wales University, an “Ivy League” culinary school whose most famous graduate is TV chef Emeril Lagasse.
“I wanted to be a super chef,” he said. “I wanted to be one of them famous TV chefs. Or I just wanted to do it and make a living.”
That’s what he did. He got married to wife, Stacey, and had his first son, Max. He worked as a sous chef at a private dining club in South Carolina. He was on his way to becoming the lead chef, but working long and late hours in a fast-paced restaurant was not conducive to family life.
He moved back home to Ohio in 1998 and began working for his father’s e-commerce business selling fence supplies. After his dad died in 2002, Erik and his brother took over the business and ran it together. After their mother died in 2012, Erik sold his share of the family business to his brother and “retired.”
It was while he was living and working down south that he was introduced to good southern barbecue by a fellow chef. It wasn’t until after he moved back to Ohio that he dove in. He missed cooking and discovered a group called the Kansas City BBQ Society that hosted competitions across the country.
“I got really into barbecue, like really into it, like competed in 50 contests a year,” he said. His family would travel with him. They were his team, most often. “Every weekend, since I wasn’t working, I was learning about barbecue.”
That’s how the name Cockeye BBQ came about. Erik was born with a lazy eye, although he had it corrected in the past couple years. He’s also blind in that eye. At a competition in North Carolina, a southern competitor off-handedly called him a “cockeyed yankee.” At first he was taken aback, but then he decided to own it. The name Cockeye BBQ was born.
At home he was the guy in his social circle who had the barbecue pit trailer. He cooked for his sons’ Boy Scout troops and baseball teams. His wife, who worked in sales, started booking more formal catering jobs. The summer before the restaurant opened, he fed 3,000 people from his house in the month of June.
The restaurant continues to see growth year over year, which is impressive considering the area it’s located in. Warren, Ohio made a list a couple years ago of the 50 Most Miserable Cities in the U.S. It’s economically depressed, with about 34% of people living in poverty, according to the U.S. Census statistics. The average household income is $27,108.
But without Warren, the whole thing might not have worked, Erik believes. Where else could he buy a commercial building for $15,000 and shoestring himself along to get started? Without that, the rest of this wouldn’t have happened.
“Warren is a magic formula,” he said.
After the restaurant, we drove over to Cockeye BBQ’s new warehouse on the north side of the city. As we walk around the space, Erik explains his vision. Perhaps a commissary kitchen here for if and when he expands to a second or third location.
This next room would be a cold room primarily for ice cream production. Instead of one batch freezer, he could have three running at one time. If he buys a reefer truck, he can park it at his warehouse. They can expand wholesale ice cream sales. They’ve got to follow the growth and that’s where it is right now.
Erik started acting as his own distributor, buying items in bulk to avoid supply chain issues and increased costs. He now has the space in his warehouse to keep all the inventory.
He’s definitely going to start canning his own barbecue sauces, something that he outsources right now. He also wants to make his own spice rubs to sell in retail packages.
He’s 48. His two sons are grown and working in the family business. Max, 25, at the creamery. Ben, 22, graduated from the Culinary Institute of America, another top tier culinary school, and works in the restaurant. He wants to keep building out the brand and the business so it can support them as well. In the peak of summer with the catering business, Cockeye BBQ employs about 50 people.
“I don’t even know what we’re going to do yet but I have to have the space to [mess] around and figure it out,” he said.
(Reporter Rachel Wagoner can be reached at 724-201-1544 or rachel@farmanddairy.com)
