BBQ 066: Getting Fed at the Shed with Brad Orrison

Enjoy this episode where I get to sit down with my friend Brad Orrison who gave me about 4 hours notice he'd be in Ft. Worth, TX for a fantasy football event. He spent the night feeding hundreds of pork sliders to famous football players and their fans alike. He even delivered a special platter to the VIP room as a special request from Michael Irving!

We had a chance to sit down with him and Brendan Lamb before he had to take off back to Memphis. We set up in a secluded corner of the hotel lobby and ended up getting shut down! You'll catch that at the end, but enjoy the episode! I had a great time recording it!

Brad Orrison began his BBQ and Blues journey in 2001. This wild ride has taken him on quite a successful trip. It all began with dumpster diving, using G-Maw’s Lowes credit card, learning to slow smoke meat and put a menu together. When they opened the doors folks simply loved it.

Once there was a guy that spent most of his out-of-class time at Ole Miss scouting out, jumping in, and rummaging through dumpsters and street side garbage piles. The highlight of his week was the “night before trash day.” After graduation, he wanted to move back to the Coast. One sobering morning he surveyed all he had collected over the years. It was everywhere, it was insane: warped used two by fours, old tin roofing, bent nails, ugly windows, mountains of pure, unadulterated junk!

Not knowing what to do with it and not willing to part with a single plastic bucket or warped record, he built a trailer out of the larger parts and loaded the rest on top of this homemade junk hauler and moved back to Ocean Springs.

One evening while dumpster diving on the Coast, the guy, Brad Orrison, knee deep in hardwood flooring had an epiphany: “I’m gonna’ build myself a take out barbeque joint with all this junk!” Brad (24) and his sister Brooke (19) hammered and nailed. They practiced cooking, smoking, and timing meat to perfection. A few weeks after opening, Brother Brett (22) just graduating from Full Sail University in Recording Arts and being the sound engineer for the House of Blues in New Orleans, breezed in with all his knowledge and contacts to set up one of the finest Blues venues in the South. Now, The Shed had all the elements it needed to become a true BBQ & Blues Joint.

I met Brad last year at the NBBQA conference in Fort Worth, TX and we were immediately friends. Over those three days we cooked, drank Texas beer, and even did karaoke together. Since then we took a trip up to Memphis for the World Barbecue Cooking Championships at Memphis in May where they won World Grand Champions after winning in 4 of the 8 categories. After winning it all Brooke told us that we are officially part of the shed family. This means that we'll be covering them as often as we can to get the story of this great restaurant and world champion cooking team.

Brendan Lamb has cooked Texas style barbecue at a few places and now he's creating his own restaurant in Ft. Worth, TX. Smiley's BBQ is still looking for locations but that hasn't stopped Brendan from cooking at pop ups and special events. Brendan is a true Texan in so many ways it's hard to count. One of the most obvious ones was that when we met up with him at the hotel his pick up had a nice stack of post oak right next to the stains from hog hunting!

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