08/25/2026
While it’s taking it a bit of time to recover, we’re wanting to put together a post highlighting and thanking those that helped. The quick numbers are that we smoked 660 pounds of pork butts and ended up serving around 1800 free meals. We had dozens of people that stepped up and helped us throughout the whole process that made the whole crazy thing happen.
On Wednesday, Richard was driving home from his temporary work location after we got our power/internet back and he knew it was going to be a while before many would have the same so he started thinking about how he could help now that we were able. At the same time, Emlyn D. Thomas from Operation BBQ Relief reached out about partnering up to cook meals as it would be at least another day before their mobile kitchens could make it to the area.
With our current smoker (as our new ones haven’t been delivered yet to the restaurant) we knew we needed some additional capacity to really make a real difference for the community. After reaching out to a few people, Andrew from drewBBQ & Sausage had one on a trailer that he was able to bring over to really supersize what we could do. We were originally estimating about 1200 meals worth of meat could be cooked between our 2 smokers.
The next big thing was sourcing products to actually cook since every local grocery/restaurant supplier in our area was still without power or without product. Luckily we were able to get 7 cases of pork butts from the Michigan City Gordons along with about half of the other items we needed (containers, chips, fruit cups, etc) to serve the 1200 full meals we were trying to provide. Additionally our parents made trips to other stores in the area to get the rest that we needed.
While Richard was getting the meat for us to cook, Jenelle was reaching out to our friends and family to see who could help us at the actual event as we needed people to help clean up the parking lot so we could set all this up and help to serve the meals. We were extremely blessed that dozens of people were able to come out and help with everything and make the delivery run smoothly. They also helped to fill in the additional items (tents, tables, clean up equipment) we needed to set up properly for serving.
The cook itself was an all night ordeal as I had to have the first batch of food ready for pickup by 10am to be served at the Portage Walmart that afternoon. Luckily our next door neighbors came over and helped season the 62 pork butts that we put on the smokers. Once those were on the smokers, we spent the rest of the night managing the fires in the rain and organizing the other items so it was ready for pickup the next day.
After the OBR volunteers picked up what they needed for their event, we went about getting everything else loaded to take to the old Red Carpet to set up for ours that evening. Everyone worked as a team to set up everything quickly and figure out what station each person was going to help at. We were ready to go right at 4 and a line quickly formed in the parking lot but we were able to quickly move it along because of how well everyone worked together.
We served from 4:00PM till about 7:30PM as the amount of pork we had was more than we originally estimated and the ORB volunteers brought over some more pork that was leftover from their event as they ran out of sides and couldn’t serve it. We ran out and got more sides so we had enough to support all of the extra pork which ended up increasing our original plan to serve 600 meals into 1200 meals that evening and with the 600 served at lunch we estimated we served over 1800 meals total. The little we had left at the end after going through the last of our sides was picked up by Lee Ann Van Curen (Portage Mayor’s Chief of Staff) and delivered to some of the fire and police stations for them to enjoy.
And after being up for over 36 hours straight getting everything done, we crashed hard when we got home. We were extremely thankful for everyone that helped make it possible. We are hopeful that we were able to bring a little bright spot to those who were in need of a meal on that day who were suffering (and some who still are) through this horrific storm. We are not open yet we still recognize that businesses need to step up to support their community. While we hope nothing on this scale ever happens again where this kind of response is needed, we hope that we will be able to help the community if any do in the future.
