New Riverfront BBQ Joint Is Smokin’

Smoke billowed out of the barbecue pit as Steve Streeter lifted one of the lids on his massive outdoor smoker.

Two racks of bright red lobsters emerged from of the hickory-scented haze. Honey-coloured back ribs, shimmering with glaze and dripping with fat, awaited diners.

“No one smokes lobsters. Only us,” said Streeter, who at 61 years old still speaks with the frenetic energy and excitement of a teenager. ​“The lobster meat is so porous it absorbs the smoke in such a way that its so smoky when you eat it. Now we sell smoked lobster rolls, I can’t keep ​‘em. We sell so many of ​‘em.”

After a four-month delay due to the coronavirus, Streeter’s Streets Boathouse Smokehouse finally opened on June 29. Diners have been flocking there in the first weeks, Streeter reported.

In two weeks, they have sold 500 racks of ribs. In two days this week, they sold 100 lobsters, which they serve in garlic-buttered rolls.

Streeter placed an order for another 100 on this afternoon; he said he expected it to be gone by the weekend. A local supplier expected the restaurant to need two tanks of soda for the first month; they’ve already gone through nine tanks. ​“Who does that much soda?” Streets said. The smoker has been fired down only twice in the past three weeks.

“I still don’t understand this. It’s just happening so quickly and I just don’t understand it,” said Streeter, who grew up here.

Most of the diners come from the neighborhood. The restaurant is sandwiched between the Quinnipiac River and Fair Haven at 307 Front St. But Street has already had customers drive from North Haven to eat here, brought out by word-of ‑mouth recommendations.

It is a point of pride for Streeter that they burn only real firewood here. The smoker is currently running on a combination of white oak and hickory, fresh-chopped from the backyard of Streeter’s friend Larry.

“Restaurants, because they have indoor smokers, use pellets or gas,” explained Streeter, who said that using real wood gives their meats a better flavour.

Their competition-grade smoker is as big as a truck and shaped like a steam train. Streeter estimates it is worth $300,000. It was given to him for just ​“a couple of dollars” by a friend named Glenn who is active on the competitive barbecue scene.

With it, they smoke baby back ribs and pulled pork and lobsters and chicken cutlets and their signature ​‘Street Balls’, made of different meat cuts wrapped together and smoked.

The whole restaurant is patriotic-themed. Red, blue and white cafeteria-style picnic tables are placed six feet apart by the smoker. The ground is covered by 22 tons of pink granite, sourced from the same Branford quarry that provided the stone for the base of the Statue of Liberty. Streeter has ordered an 8‑foot-tall Lady Liberty and plans for her to join the outdoor diners soon.

Working From Home

All nine of the staff at Streets as well as Streeter himself live in a marina right by the smokehouse, on their own boats. They can see the restaurant from the kitchen windows. If they are late, Streeter could give them a shout, he joked.

Streeter, who moved to the marina in 2013, pays about $300 a month to use the dock space. With no land taxes, sewer charges, minimal electricity bills, and no rent to pay, Streeter said, it is one of the most affordable ways to live. His boat is decorated with a skull head and a small cannon, and draped with an American flag.

The tight-knit community includes a commercial fisherman, who supplies the restaurant with fresh-caught lobsters, a recent Yale Art School sculpture graduate, and a Yale Divinity school student, who both are working as servers for the smokehouse. They meet for drinks on Streeter’s boat and celebrate birthdays together.

“I’m closer to these people than I am to my family,” said Streeter.

So when the Quinnipiac River Marina landlord, Lisa Fitch, asked Streeter to take over the rundown restaurant space in the marina parking lot, he asked his neighbors to join him on the venture.

“Tom said, ​‘I know how to smoke,’ and his wife said, ​‘I know how to cook.’ I said, ​‘Do you wanna do it with me?’ and they said ​‘Yeah!’” recalled Streeter. He sold all his tools and closed his construction business.

The smokehouse has a spacious parking lot lined with flowers and shrubs.

It didn’t always look this way. Old boats, abandoned by their owners, once littered the parking lot. Streeter and the other marina residents spent two or three months cleaning the boats from the junkyard.

He refurbished the old restaurant himself. He cleared out moldy walls, replaced the rotted flooring, painted a yellow stripe on the ground (“It’s a street!” he noted), put an American flag on the wall, and placed a singing, dancing lobster by the front door to welcome customers.

Anna Miller, who just graduated from a two-year sculpture program at the Yale School of Art, lives on a sailboat in the marina. She told Streeter that if he needed help, she could join the staff. Soon, she was putting in 50 hours a week.

During the four-month-long wait to open the restaurant, they tested out the sauce recipes and dishes on their neighburs. ​“Is it too salty, too dry?” Streeter asked them. The smoker was fired up regularly. Streeter, the restaurant pit master, Thomas Barkley, and the others provided free dinners to the marina residents.

“The restaurant is our front yard. You come down here, you’re at our home. That’s how we feel,” said Streeter. ​“If you think you gotta have shoes on to come here and eat, don’t do that. And you don’t gotta wear a tie. It’s a real laid-back barbecue place.”

The early days of the restaurant have not been without difficulties. They are waiting for the price of beef brisket, which has skyrocketed due to the pandemic-related shutdown, to go down. On the second day of opening, they lost $1800 of fresh meat when the cooler broke down. But they quickly recouped it.

“We may do well here financially but it’s not our motivation at all,” said Streeter, who has put about $50,000 into the restaurant. ​“I have almost paid off all my debt in three weeks for all the meat that was given to us. We paid $12,000 to $14,000 off in meat costs in three weeks. It’s staggering.”

Streeter said he is financially very comfortable, having run successful businesses before.“We don’t need the money. I would rather take a loss as long as you walk away satisfied.”

“Starting Smoking At 3”

Thomas Barkley, the restaurant’s 56-year-old pit master, is from Alabama. He learned how to smoke meats as soon as he was old enough to light a match.

As he tended the smoker the other day, he sat in a boat chair, which the team ripped from an old junkyard boat and installed right by the fire pit. 

He said the secret to a good barbecue is temperature control and keeping a watchful eye on the fire. For bone-in meats, he watches for how the meat is interacting with the bone, waiting for the sweet spot when it pulls away. For seafood, he watches as the shell of the lobster, clam, or whatever he cooking that day changes color.

“In the South, we’ll fry anything,” said Barkley, who grew up eating Alabama-style barbecue and turnip greens and corn and ​“potato every way,” and lots of hot sauce. He has imparted his gift with sauces to the Streets’ kitchen: all their sauces are homemade. Some of the signatures include Alabama vinegar-based hot sauce, and Alabama white sauce, which is unlike most barbecue sauces because it is not vinegar-based or syrup-based or brown-sugar-based, but mayonnaise-based.

The first time Streeter tried Barkley’s Alabama white sauce, he drank it all up. ​“It’s so good. I can’t say what it tastes like,” said Streeter.

Streeter is a contractor by trade. He got his start in the food industry in 1999 when he opened his first restaurant, a deli called Smiley’s on New Haven Avenue in Milford. Unlike Streeter’s Boathouse Smokehouse, the deli took nine months to gain a stable clientele. But when it did, it really did.

Fred DeLuca, the founder of Subway, lived in Milford at the time. Streeter said he used to come to his deli for breakfast. Smiley’s delivered sandwiches — chicken balsamic vinaigrette and fresh roasted pepper subs — to the Subway World Headquarters in Milford.

Streeter closed the deli because his girlfriend at the time thought he was flirting with other women, he recalled.

“She said, ​‘It’s the deli or me.’ So me like a moron, I choose her. I sold the deli, I put my equipment in storage. And six months later, she was done with me,” said Streeter, smiling.

On July 4, the outdoor barbecue area and patio filled with customers. A 75-year-old neighbor, who lives on the marina in a green-topped boat, got ​“the fellas” together and provided the music: his band took the stage and played Dixieland music. The sound of trombones and trumpets filled the Fair Haven night.

Streeter recalled how Glenn, who gave Streeter the smoker unit, came for the event. Glenn told him, ​“You’re going to kill it here. This is the one you’re going to want to keep,”

Back at work, Barkley moved the smoked lobster from the outdoor barbecue to the indoor kitchen, where it was stored in the hot holding cabinet.

With a towel draped on his shoulder, an American flag bandana wrapped around his head, and a red chef’s uniform on, Streeter melted garlic butter into a sizzling pan. In one smooth motion, he pulled the plump lobster meat from the thick shell and added it to the stove. The air filled with the irrestible smell of melted butter and smoked seafood. Then, he stuffed the generous chunks of lobster into two fresh toasted rolls, added a lemon, and presented it to this reporter in a checkered paper boat.

“Now that is a smoked lobster roll that you can’t get anywhere else but Streets,” he said.