BBQ Sandwich (Global Export)

In the summer of 2011 two men named Tom Adams and Jamie Berger sold smoked pork in buns from a truck under Hungerford Bridge on London's South Bank, and by most accounts the queue ran down the riverside through the season. The truck was Pitt Cue, and its pulled pork bun is where the pulled pork bun begins its overseas career: shoulder cooked over wood until it shreds, piled into a soft roll, topped with sauce and something cold and crunchy. The menu around it also carried ribs and brisket. What a crowd on a London pavement bought, though, was a bun that could be eaten standing up in the drizzle, warm through the bread, with the vinegar of the sauce cutting the fat as it ran toward the wrist.

Everything in the build is portable except the hours. A smoker holds a shoulder for most of a day, and a brisket for longer, so the sandwich is assembled from meat that was finished long before the order came in. That shifts the work to the early morning. Bark has to be dark and slightly crackling at the edge, the interior has to give under a fork, and the fat has to have rendered enough to be silky. Held too long, pulled pork dries into threads; sauced too early, it turns the bun into wet paper. The kitchen abroad fights the same two failures as the pitmaster at home, with a bun bought from a local bakery and a slaw shredded to taste.

Tokyo has a documented case of the whole undertaking. A Texan mechanical engineer named Craig White moved to Japan in 2011 and opened White Smoke, where brisket came out of a custom-built pit after up to about fifteen hours and was sliced under a salt-and-pepper bark. Early on, customers were reportedly unsure what to make of brisket and ribs. A fire later forced a change, and White shifted toward packaged smoked meats sold across the country; the restaurant is now listed as closed. A chain arrived on a different schedule: Dickey's Barbecue Pit, based in Dallas, opened its first Japanese location in Shinagawa on 12 May 2021 with brisket, pulled pork, and cheddar sausage on the menu. One cook sold a craft, the other a format.

Seoul's version came with a regional accent. Linus Kim, an Alabama native, sold pulled pork and brisket at pop-ups in Itaewon before opening Linus' Bama Style Barbecue there in the summer of 2014. Alabama sauce is tangy and vinegar-based, and in a city where kimchi and pickled radish already sit beside fatty pork, that sharpness lands on familiar ground. The pork is reported to smoke for up to sixteen hours, and the brisket sandwich shares the menu. A bite goes tender and juicy first, then bright with vinegar, and the bun gives way just before the sauce reaches the plate. The sandwich took the local table's habit of acid beside fat and gave it a smoked centre.

The bun does the economic and social work abroad. A rack of ribs or a platter of brisket asks diners to understand an unfamiliar regional canon, with its ordering of lean and moist cuts, its sauce quarrels, its sides. A sandwich asks for a hand and a few minutes. That is why a small room can introduce smoke to a city one sandwich at a time. Pitt Cue's original Soho room, which opened on Newburgh Street in January 2012, had 18 seats downstairs and eight stools at a bar above, and its kitchen doubled as prep space between services. Pulled pork became the dish people associated with it, the cheap shoulder carrying the reputation while the dearer cuts shared the board.

Pulled pork dominates export menus for a practical reason. Shoulder is forgiving, comes in generous weights, and holds in its own juices for an hour or two after the pit, so a kitchen with a modest smoker can serve it through a lunch rush. Brisket demands a whole packer cut, a long fire, and a cook who knows when the point and the flat finish at different times. Seeing the two side by side in a bun, the shoulder tends toward sauce and slaw, the brisket toward a plain slice of beef with pepper bark, and a kitchen's choice between them says what it believes its customers have already eaten.

Hungerford Bridge to Newburgh Street

No single opening can be named as the start of American barbecue abroad, and the London record shows why. Trade-press accounts put the Big Easy in Chelsea in 1991, and Bodean's opened its Soho smokehouse in 2002, both ahead of the truck. Barbecue sauce and ribs were already on London menus before 2011. What the truck changed was the object being sold: a smoked sandwich handed over a hatch, priced for a lunch break, with the pit as the draw.

The sequence after the truck is documented in the trade press. Pitt Cue went from the Hungerford Bridge trailer in 2011 to a permanent Soho restaurant in January 2012, and its success is often credited with reigniting London's appetite for barbecue and with prompting other kitchens to follow. Tokyo's White Smoke started in 2011, and Seoul's Linus' Bama Style Barbecue in 2014. Each began with one cook and one smoker.

The Newburgh Street site closed in mid-January 2016, four years after it opened. Its successor in Devonshire Square in Spitalfields seated 80 to 100 and was planned with a menu that dropped pulled pork, the sandwich filling that had made the truck's name. In 2016 the pulled pork bun that began under Hungerford Bridge in 2011 had no place on Pitt Cue's menu.