LCBO Food & Drink Summer 2016

BY CYNTHIA DAVID  •  PHOTOGRAPHY BY JAMES TSE MICHAEL PARSONS, HUNGRY HOLLOW SMOKEHOUSE AND GRILLE, GEORGETOWN, ONT., HUNGRYHOLLOW.CA. FIVE qUESTIONS WITH…

W hen customers ask about the name of his six-year-old restaurant, Michael Parsons knows they’re visitors. It seems Georgetown residents all know about the lean times at George Kennedy’s sawmill in the 1830s, when the town’s namesake called the area a “hungry hollow.” Today, the aroma of succulent beef, pork and chicken cooked low and slow per- vades Parsons’s cosy 35-seat hole-in-the-wall in a nondescript plaza, where the genial host ensures nobody goes hungry.

How did you go from private investigator to pit master?

bine his two favourite meats, pulled pork and beef brisket. I top the meat with homemade coleslaw and pimento cheese, a blend of cream cheese, mayo, spices and chopped pimento peppers, and serve it on a pretzel bun. You have to hold the thing in two hands and open your mouth as wide as you can. Then there’s the Redneck Poutine… Do you have a secret sauce? Our sauce recipe comes from my inlaws’ restaurant in Kentucky, where they served it in squirt bottles at the table. I tasted it years ago and loved it, but getting the recipe wasn’t easy. My wife’s mother had to talk to her sister and they made sure I knew the history of the sauce before giving me permission to use it. When’s the best time to come? Since word got out that John Catucci was in town last fall film- ing us for his Food Network show “You Gotta Eat Here,” weekend lineups have stretched to over an hour. And that’s before the show even aired! We were told to hire more staff and brace ourselves for food orders to double or triple. Our regulars already call in their weekend orders for pickup.

My wife, Laura, is from Evansville, Indiana. We met in Florida in 1980 and I proposed 13 days later. She moved to Georgetown but by 1985 she was homesick for her large family so we moved to Evansville, where barbecue is a religion. For five years I talked to pit masters and learned what I could. Back home in George- town I soon had three smokers in the backyard and was feeding the neigh- bourhood. With my passion for BBQ, opening my own place was a natural. What’s smoking in your open kitchen? I’ve got a stainless steel Cookshack model #FEC300 out of Oklahoma fu- eled by hickory wood pellets. The FE stands for Fast Eddy, the nickname of the gentleman who designed it, and it holds up to 300 pounds of meat rotating on 15 racks. We smoke pork shoulders for 20 hours, briskets for 16 hours, ribs for four hours and chicken up to four hours. If custom- ers are interested, I’ll bring them back to take a look inside. What’s Hungry Hollow’s signature dish? The porksket sandwich was born when a regular suggested we com-

The signature porksket sandwich requires two hands to hold and for your mouth to open as wide as it will go!

164  FOOD & DRI NK SUMMER 2016