Comanche Business Feature: Native Smoke Barbeque
Native Smoke Barbeque is off a main road in Elgin, Oklahoma. Owner Phillip Giles began his food journey in 2015. The restaurant is open for walk-ins on Thursday and Friday from 11 a.m. to 8 p.m.
“We had bought a house, and the previous owner left a smoker there. He didn't want to move it because it was so heavy,” he said. “So, I just started playing with it on the weekends, and stuff and just kind of grew into really enjoying cooking and feeding people, and that turned into doing events like at flea markets and junk sales and then turned into a food truck and then now brick-and-mortar.”
Making a meal begins well before opening hours, and it involves cooking over a fire the way it started, without using gas-assisted equipment.
“To be open Thursday we cook about 15 hours on Wednesday to get ready for Thursday. So, it's a full day just to get ready prior to opening up,” Giles said.
He said it was easier to move from a food truck in 2017 to a brick-and-mortar in 2020, with an expansion in 2022, and he can cook more without limiting the menu.
“The food truck helped us figure out if we really wanted to do that full-time, and still, we're not. It's just Thursday and Friday, so we can still focus on quality and not quantity,” Giles said. “If we're open five, six days a week, it's really hard to keep the quality up.”
He said his favorite part of the job is interacting with customers.
“When somebody tells you how good something was, or we get all the time that people go out of state and go to Kansas City or somewhere and eat barbecue, and they'll come back and tell us that we ruined them eating barbecue anywhere else because how good it is here,” Giles said.
He said their advertising is word of mouth.
“That's the way I would rather not put out commercials or anything,” Giles said. “I would rather somebody tell somebody else how good it is there; how friendly the staff is or grow that way versus trying to push commercials or push advertisement.”
The restaurant was featured in “Discover Oklahoma” and is located at 710 E St.
