Molly McNeal
A rack of ribs from Salt Pepper Oak.
Nestled inconspicuously in a smokehouse on Baton Rouge’s Exchequer Drive—in between businesses like Lonestar Electric Supply, Veritiv Office Supply, and Lipsey’s Firearms Distributor—are two hand-hewn, twenty-foot-long offset smokers named Too Phat and Lottie Mae. And they’re turning out more than six hundred pounds of meat a day.
The smoldering hearts of Vincent Hunt’s live fire barbecue joint, Salt Pepper Oak, Too Phat and Lottie Mae resemble something more akin to the mysterious steel machinery of their neighbors’ Industriplex operations than barbecue pits. They run on an almost-constant rotation of oak-wood fires, tended by a series of automated doors that control airflow to reach pinpoint precise temperatures. Impressive as they are, what the smokers do is simple: they pull the smoke and heat across briskets and shoulders and ribs and bellies hot and fast, artfully rendering fat and infusing the meat with the intrigue of smoke-as-flavor. When the cuts come out, ready to rest, they’re right there in the spirit of what Anthony Bourdain, chewing on a piece of American Royal Hall of Famer Aaron Franklin’s brisket, once described as the finest version of barbecue he’d ever had: “Salt, pepper, oak, period.”
If you find smokers like Too Phat and Lottie Mae in another restaurant, know that they are their siblings. The original design and fabrication are Hunt’s twin brother, Andrew’s. “I can’t say we own the patent, as they aren’t exactly patentable, but they’re ours,” said Hunt. “And I feel like they give us a leg up on everybody.”
Molly McNeal
Too Phat, one of Vincent Hunt's (pictured right) two custom-built offset smokers.
The smokers came about in a leap of faith the brothers, natives of Pearlington, Mississippi, took together in 2022. Hunt was living in West Baton Rouge at the time, working as an operations manager for a locally owned business, when he got word that his brother had a brain tumor. He dropped everything, took a leave from his job, and relocated with his wife, Anna, and small son to Pass Christian, where his brother was living. “It was just the thing to do,” he said.
After months of treatment, Andrew emerged from the ordeal tumor-free. But neither he nor Vincent had a job.
Since the pandemic, Hunt had been sitting on an escape from the corporate machine, a vision for how he might make use of his twenty-plus years of restaurant experience with something that was his. He had the business plan for Salt Pepper Oak ready to go, had even presented it to potential partners in Baton Rouge years before and been turned down.
“And now we just had this moment, this catalyst,” he recalled. “I said, ‘Let’s jump, let’s go head-first into this.’”
Andrew was two weeks post-op, the stitches still in his head, when he started welding, with assistance from their father. The brothers named the first smoker, Lottie Mae, after their maternal grandmother, who was “the original cook of the family”—a lifelong line cook from Pearlington known for her burgers. And as a ‘thank you’ for his help, they let their dad name the second: a tribute to a beloved old dog, Too Phat.
They opened their doors in a leased building on a remote corner of Pass Christian’s Diamondhead community in spring 2023. It started with Saturday-only lunch counter service and a no-fuss menu of brisket, sausage, pork belly burnt ends, turkey breast, beef and pork ribs, sandwiches, and house-made sides—all sold by the half-pound or the plate. Pre-orders would come in all week long, to be picked up first thing on Saturday morning. But customers who came in to dine got to meet Hunt himself, ordering directly from the meat station and receiving their barbecue cut to order.
Molly McNeal
In addition to briskets and ribs and other classic barbecue fare, Salt Pepper Oak also has a lively menu of smoked wings, with a variety of sauces.
Working his way down the line, which sometimes ran out the door, Hunt’s energy was warm and unceasing—cracking jokes, making conversation, slicing meat. “What’s up brother? It’s a beautiful morning! What can I get you?” He and Andrew decided to start setting up a camera behind the counter and letting it roll, livestreaming on TikTok. “People loved it,” he said. The repetition of the process was satisfying, Hunt’s Southern sociability entrancing, the meat mouthwatering. Mississippi accents melded with the enthusiasm of lunch-hour appetites, and the ongoing thrill of gorgeous cut after gorgeous cut, revealed with quicksaws of Hunt’s practiced hand. “We were getting thousands of new followers a week,” he recalled. “Once, we had like eight thousand viewers at once.” They had gone viral.
The growth was quick: more days a week, catering gigs. They were serving people traveling from out of town to try the TikTok-famous brisket. “We knew we had something good,” said Hunt. But Andrew wasn’t a restaurateur—he was far more interested in fabricating pits and was building his own social media following in that arena. He eventually stepped away from Salt Pepper Oak to start his own commercial smoker business, Double Barrel Smokers, which today has more than 35,000 followers on TikTok.
“And I started hiring employees,” said Hunt. “We were growing, and it was like ‘How fast can we grow?’ ‘Can we keep this scalable?’” And finally: “How do we get this to Baton Rouge?”
After his brother’s recovery, Hunt’s growing family had moved back to the Red Stick, which meant he was commuting two hours each way between home and the restaurant in Pass Christian, often hauling a car-full of meat with him. “I slept in the restaurant a lot during those years,” he said.
“I’ve never been gung-ho about being the pit master myself. What I enjoy doing is teaching, consulting, interacting with customers—not actually sitting out here trimming twenty briskets and cooking them. Now, we found someone, our pitmaster Tim, and he barbecues on his days off. He’s someone who really loves it. And we are able to give him an outlet for people to tell him how good his barbecue is.” —Vincent Hunt
Baton Rouge was always the end game, and in 2025, the door finally opened. Hunt convinced the owner of the the Industriplex site—which was for sale at the time—to lease it to him.
To the average diner frequenting Baton Rouge’s trendy Overpass District and Mid City hubs, the location might seem an odd choice. But, like most of Hunt’s decisions, it was all strategic. Formerly City Pork Kitchen and Pie, and before that Samuel’s Restaurant—the building, as Hunt points out, has been outfitted for fast-casual dining since the late 1980s. “We mapped it,” he said. “There are 875 businesses in this industrial area. It’s a tremendous, ready-made lunch crowd.”
These days, at the height of the lunch rush, Hunt’s team is putting out around seventy-five orders over the course of an hour. They’re working in a space about four times the size of their previous one, are open six days a week, and have now expanded their menu to offer breakfast and dinner options.
Molly McNeal
Salt Pepper Oak's famed brisket, along with a selection of house-made sides.
Like in Pass Christian, the system is quick-service—though Hunt himself is rarely chopping meat behind the counter anymore. “I’ve never been gung-ho about being the pit master myself,” said Hunt. “What I enjoy doing is teaching, consulting, interacting with customers—not actually sitting out here trimming twenty briskets and cooking them. Now, we found someone, our pitmaster Tim, and he barbecues on his days off. He’s someone who really loves it. And we are able to give him an outlet for people to tell him how good his barbecue is.”
Even so, the recipes, the methodology of the cook—that’s all Hunt’s. “This brisket has taken us years to develop,” he said, gesturing to a slab of chopped meat on a tray, glistening in tallow. “And it’s as good as it ever has been these days. It’s on a piece of paper now, I can hand it to you. There’s no more guesswork.” The borderline scientific balance he’s striven for, of just-tender-enough texture and a flavor that disseminates across the tongue, is evident in the bite.
The secret, he says, is in the rendering. “It has to be perfectly rendered, seasoned just right,” he said. “It can’t be overcooked, can’t be undercooked. You’ve got to hit just the right spot.”
You won’t find Busch’s baked beans here, but a bright assortment of Southwestern/Southern-inspired dishes the likes of fire-roasted corn eloté, creamy maple napa slaw, basmati chimichurri rice, and smoked gouda grits (from local Bonnecaze Farms) with Creole sauce. The dirty rice draws from the Louisiana lunch plate, the borracho beans a pointed rejection of the expectation for Busch’s.
For Hunt, it’s serious business, his barbecue. An elevated experience is what he’s striving for. “The thing is, true small-batch barbecue is expensive, and people inherently think it should be cheap,” he said. “It’s this idea of using secondary cuts—this commercialization of barbecue.” What he is doing, though, is in line with the specialty live fire tradition coming out of Texas—where barbecue is an art, and a joint is a site of chef-driven quality and experience.
Molly McNeal
Vincent Hunt, holding one of his famous briskets.
To drive this point home, Hunt and Anna have made the effort to compliment the meat of it all with a menu of house-made, creative sides. You won’t find Busch’s baked beans here, but a bright assortment of Southwestern/Southern-inspired dishes the likes of fire-roasted corn eloté, creamy maple napa slaw, basmati chimichurri rice, and smoked gouda grits (from local Bonnecaze Farms) with Creole sauce. The dirty rice draws from the Louisiana lunch plate, the borracho beans a pointed rejection of the expectation for Busch’s.
The menu of cuts is also complemented by barbecue-adjacent offerings: a hot honey chicken sandwich that Hunt eats more often than the barbecue at this point, a popular salad with smoked grapes and house-made vinaigrette, a smash burger that is one of the most popular things on the menu. “It’s not just one genre of eating here,” said Hunt. “We don’t want just your dad coming.”
Other menu items come from the creative melding of high-quality ingredients that occurs in an inspired kitchen: use the brisket in tacos or throw it on top of loaded fries, or in a jambalaya. “We’re thinking about doing a power bowl, with rice, chopped brisket, a cilantro lime crema, pico de gallo—we’ve already got all of those ingredients here,” said Hunt. “Or, a triple dipper, with our pimento cheese, our queso, our eloté.” Tallow, he says, is used in everything, “because we just make so much of it.”
Molly McNeal
Briskets fresh and ready from the offset smoker at Salt Pepper Oak.
Upon the simple slate of meat smoked just right, he sees a future of endless possibilities—pop-ups into different markets, food trucks. One of the already-in-place side-quests are Hunt’s barbecue classes, offered on Saturday mornings. “The idea just felt natural to me,” he said. “To bring our expertise into a format that the average Joe could take away from.”
The classes are small and catered to each group’s needs, he said, whether it be someone aspiring to open their own business, or a group of college friends trying to spend a morning sipping margaritas and learning something new. He recently taught a mom, daughter, and her daughter-in-law spending the day together.
“We just had this moment, this catalyst. I said, ‘Let’s jump, let’s go head-first into this.’” —Vincent Hunt
“We have a conversation at the beginning of class about their goals. Because I could go on a tangent about smoking for forty-five minutes, or I could keep it real simple.” The class starts with breakfast and drinks, continues on with behind-the-scenes glimpses of a barbecue kitchen in action, and then a lesson on trimming, seasoning, and cooking a slab of ribs. “And then you take them home with you, ten bones, a full slab. Bring that home to your wife, or your husband,” he said. And you don’t need a Lottie Mae-scale smoker to benefit. “The strategies we teach work for Green Eggs, Primo Grills, pellet smokers—any offset,” he said.
Whether a diner is leaving Salt Pepper Oak with a rack of ribs in their car, or a belly-full of lunch, there’s a secret worth pausing for on the way out. Beneath the showmanship of the smokers and the bright beauty of a perfectly-arranged tray of chef-made sides and the brisket’s awe-worthy crust—near the cash register you’ll see displayed some of the best cookies in Baton Rouge (ranked second place in The Advocate’s taste test last fall, right after the beloved CounterspaceBR cookie). “They’re Anna’s recipe,” bragged Hunt. “We use dark chocolate chunks, which no one else wants to use because they’re expensive as all get out. And there are like three different flours in the recipe. But they’re phenomenal.”
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