New 4 Rivers Smokehouse opens

It was a bittersweet day for John Rivers as he helped serve the last customers to come to his barbecue restaurant along Fairbanks Avenue in Winter Park on Saturday. The line was still stretching into the parking lot at closing time, as dozens of devotees to 4 Rivers’ famous brisket waited to eat their final fill at picnic tables outside of the former auto shop-turned-culinary icon.

But it was time to go, he said.

“We’re calling it the last supper,” 4 Rivers Smokehouse's founder and owner said, refreshing an ever-present smile.

It was going to be a long weekend. Within 36 hours of closing the wildly popular Texas-inspired restaurant’s original location, he would be opening its spiritual successor a little more than a block east on Fairbanks Avenue, in a space that was formerly J&W Landscaping.

Growing Pains

Two and a half years ago, after long hickory smoke-filled hours in his garage cooking for his family and events at Summit Church, Rivers leaped into the epicurean unknown.

4 Rivers Smokehouse's new location, formerly occupied by J&W Landscaping, is located at 1600 W. Fairbanks Ave., Winter Park, FL 32789. It opened for business on Monday, July 30. The new eatery dubbed “Winter Park II” features 4 Rivers’ second in-house bakery, The Sweet Shop. The first bakery is located at the Longwood location.

The mottled, weather-beaten finish of the old Just Brakes garage rapidly transformed into a packed first-time experiment in the restaurant business for Rivers, who had worked in health care up to that point. Short on experience, he had a knack for getting the word out.

“I laugh because I had to have my son help me out to get us on Facebook,” he said.

“At the start, our only fans were my family and our employees. I remember thinking, wouldn’t it be amazing if we had 100 fans?”

Founding partner Jeff Palermo said that it was a gamble from the start.

“We had no idea how it would go,” Palermo said. “We used to talk about having a bell the customers could ring when they came in, just in case we didn’t see them.”

After the first day, they never thought about the bell again. It would have been ringing constantly, Palermo said.

“We opened with 15 employees and probably doubled that within a month,” Palermo said.

From that point forward, it wasn’t the usual restaurant struggle to get customers and make a name in the community. It was a struggle to adapt and grow. The same went for the customers.

The tiny location originally meant to fix brakes for a few cars at a time was easily overwhelmed by the smokehouse’s regulars, Rivers said, as they packed the parking lot and had to at times park a few streets away. The line out the door became an iconic symbol in itself.

Katrina Boyd, the general manager for the Winter Park location, said she had seen the lunch line on a Saturday stretch all the way into the neighborhood along Formosa Avenue, more than 150 customers long.

“It’s kind of an appeal — people drive by and they see the line,” Boyd said. “I think that attracts people. The line has become our thing. I think people enjoy waiting in it. It’s kind of weird.”

Eventually the growing pains got to be too much, Rivers said. Customers were parking in neighbors’ yards, so rocks started showing up along the edges of the road to stop them. The lines persisted, even under the hot summer sun. But the location stayed popular due to a rabid fan base that would also flock to new locations in Longwood and Winter Garden.

That’s when customers started mentioning something he hadn’t thought about before: In the Longwood location, they said, the indoor line seemed to move much faster. So he stood there with a stopwatch, watching customers gradually snake their way up to the front of the line, and compared it to the Winter Park location.

“They took the same amount of time,” he said. “But (in Longwood) they get all the sights, the sounds, the smells. In Winter Park you’re separated by all that. It’s funny. It’s people’s perceptions. But it’s those perceptions that count.”

Chalk that up to a lesson learned from the company’s dizzying first years as it's boomed to more than 1,000 customers per location on Saturdays. That’s something Rivers said he can’t really explain, though he still feels like it’s a small company.

“I still wave to everybody who has a 4 Rivers sticker on their car,” he said. “They used to all recognize me. Now when I do it some of them give me this look like, ‘Who’s that nut?’“

He said he’ll still wave at every customer, no matter how big the chain gets.

Going big

The smell of fresh lacquer on gleaming wood tables is an odd one entering the expansive dining room in the new 4 Rivers location just a block or two down from the old one. The line to get to the register is now inside, mercifully air conditioned against the summer swelter. Rivers, in salt and pepper hair and still smiling two and a half years after the start of his big experiment, is talking about final decorations to put on the walls.

That’ll be his family’s job, he said, after Friedrich Watkins construction crews clean up on Sunday. Vice President Skip Harker confirms a few details with Rivers before racing off to supervise the finishing touches.

“Once we got the ground broken it all went up pretty quick,” Harker said.

The massive restaurant surrounding Rivers dwarfs the old location.

“You could fit all of it in this dining room alone,” Rivers said. The old location didn’t even have a dining room. And the tiny kitchen was too small to experiment with recipes in, Rivers said. He had to do that at other locations, though he said his neighbors wish he still did that at home in the garage.

“That garage still has the lingering smell of hickory in it,” he said. Walking through a thin metal door into a room filled with shiny polished steel smokers the size of Volkswagen Beetles, the faint smell of charred wood is hard to miss. Days before opening, the smokers are already being tested.

“This is the shiniest you’ll ever see them,” Rivers said. Come Monday, they’ll be black forever, as the room fills with that intoxicating smell customers had chased across town.

They’re chasing it today too. Sitting back down at a table in the dining room, he eyes an SUV cruising slowly through the parking lot.

“They’re hoping we’re open,” Rivers said. “I’ve seen quite a few cars do that.”

It reminds him of when customers would show up on Sunday, the only day of the week 4 Rivers isn't open, after they’d driven sometimes as far away as Jacksonville or the Panhandle. He remembers the elderly couple that arrived from out of town to realize it was closed. They looked distraught, he said. He made food for them anyway, finding what he could in the kitchen.

“You just have to show them you care,” he said. “It’s the little things they remember.”

Holding onto an old feeling

And those memories have kept them coming back.

“They’re just fanatical,” Rivers said of his customers. “They’re great. I’m so thankful for them.”

Just outside the tiny kitchen at the original location, customers sat outside on picnic tables, built by Rivers and his family and friends.

Saturday, as Rivers worked alongside members of the original crew he’d invited back for the last day, along with his family, customers signed their names on one of those tables. On both ends were plaques, one stamped with the restaurant’s first day, the other with the day it closed. It’ll be in the new store, on a patio built to look like the old one.

The original tables will still be there, but they’re joined by more than a dozen extras. A car-sized garage door, a quaintly unique feature at the old converted auto shop, will open up the indoor dining room to the outdoor patio during cooler weather.

“When people walk in on Monday, I want people to walk in and feel like this is the original smokehouse,” Rivers said.

The original pots and pans and decorations he’d taken from the family home made their way to the new restaurant. A 4 R logo pieced together from arranged bottle caps on a corkboard by his daughter adorns a dining room wall.

Big day

Monday that dining room spilled over during the lunch rush, and once again the line to get in was out the door, nearly reaching around the building.

A.J. Tremmello was about to walk inside with a few friends, cooled by a water mist on a fan attached to the ceiling outside. He’s been a customer for two years.

“A lot of my friends told me to come here, and it was amazing,” he said. His estimate is 30 visits so far, but he said some of his friends come once a week. A recent UCF graduate, he’s getting a last taste of the smokehouse before moving to Georgia soon.

“I’ll be coming back here for this,” he said.

Inside behind the counter Rivers moves quickly among more than a dozen employees. Amid the bustle of scores of customers packing the room, he reaches across the counter to shake a familiar hand. He’s probably done that a hundred times in the last few days, as he’s said hi to new faces and old friends.

All of them hoping to catch a little bit of that feeling he hoped he’d kept alive with a smell and taste that came from home.

“This isn’t a business to me,” Rivers said. “I still feel like I’m just cooking out in my garage with my family and friends.”