Bad Wolf BBQ: Award-Winning Modern Barbecue in the Heart of Ruston
Andrew Caskey never expected to help spark a culinary renaissance in North Louisiana. After all, he came from a family of welders, not cooks. But because of his food truck, Bad Wolf BBQ, and its award-winning brisket, the college town of Ruston has become the Louisiana outpost of a modern barbecue movement sweeping across Texas. All it took was some dedication, artistry, entrepreneurial spirit — and weekends off work.
“I always had a love for it in the backyard,” Caskey told me. “Barbecue takes hours, and I would just do it whenever I had time off work — making an event out of it, basically, for myself.” He would sometimes plan out entire days based around cooking whole briskets that take 16 hours or more to cook. “I’m a very slight perfectionist,” he said with a laugh.
But for him, barbecue was a passion project and a creative outlet. “Sometimes I would spend that much time on something, and then realize, ‘Oh, this didn’t turn out that great!’ It inspired me to tinker with my recipes and techniques as a hobby.” In turn, he said it slowly developed into “something that I was borderline obsessed with,” and he became passionate about developing this skill that would improve over time.
Getting time to do it, though, was hard. Caskey worked in the oil field industry, like his brother, father, uncles, grandfather and great-uncles. At the start of his career, he did directional drilling, boring beneath roads and wetlands and such for pipeline construction. It was good work for a while, but when things slowed in Louisiana, he changed jobs so that he wouldn’t have to travel all over the country. He found work as an operator at a salt cavern storage facility that stores liquified petroleum gases.
Whenever Caskey had free time, he spent it at the grill. After getting promoted to safety management, doing hazard analyses and developing programs for mechanical integrity, for the first time he found himself in a job where he worked from Monday through Friday, with weekends off. That meant the freedom to barbecue every single weekend — and he began thinking seriously about a life outside the oil industry.
It was a trip through Texas that pushed him over the edge. He had heard about the modern barbecue movement there, but had never really experienced it. Once he built up some vacation time at his nine-to-five, he decided to explore it. “Eight or nine years ago, a lot of chefs with a lot of experience decided to get into the barbecue world and elevate the dishes. They were making something different and creative and new and modern, and I was really inspired by that.”
He planned a trip through Dallas, then down to Austin and on to Houston, and then back home. Almost immediately, he realized that this was not your father’s barbecue. “Basically, I only knew the barbecue that I grew up with. The newer, modern barbecue that was coming up in Texas was something completely different, though.”
MODERN BARBECUE
A lot of the old-school barbecue that most of us are familiar with is geared toward being an affordable meal with large cuts of meat to feed a large crowd. There’s nothing wrong with that kind of barbecue, Caskey said. But he wanted to do something a little more elevated. “I was already passionate about barbecue before that, but after experiencing other people doing the sort of barbecue I was looking to do, that’s when I knew it was something that maybe I could do — something I had to do.”
He decided to get in the business. He purchased a trailer with the savings he had from working in the oil field; his plan was to cook on the side on the weekend, but to stay in the oil industry. “I didn’t have any experience in the restaurant world, and I didn’t feel comfortable just jumping into the deep end, quitting my job and buying a brick-and-mortar building,” he explained.
Monday through Friday, he worked at the oil field job. On Friday nights, he would start cooking briskets. On Saturdays, he would open the food truck for business.
“If I did sleep at all on Friday nights, I would set a watch timer and I would sleep in 30-minute intervals so that I could wake back up, go refuel the smoker, and cook those briskets all through the night. Then we would serve them on Saturday — and then do the same thing Saturday night to serve on Sunday. And then I would go back to the full-time job Monday through Friday.”
He added with a laugh, “So, yeah, it gets old really quick.”
But the Ruston community’s response fueled his efforts, and he kept at it until he felt confident he could leave his oil career and just barbecue for a living.
Bad Wolf BBQ’s main protein is brisket — a Texas inspiration. Traditional barbecue doesn’t involve much, if any, trimming of the meat, or much seasoning at all. It was just a way for butchers to get rid of cuts of meat that people didn’t purchase, or didn’t want to purchase because of the difficulty in cooking them properly.
But in modern barbecue, he said, “People are doing very aggressive trims on brisket. We get something like a 33% yield of finished product off our brisket, and then we do a 20-hour-plus smoking process on them. So, we’re spending almost an entire 24-hour day on a brisket. Just that smoked meat is already going to be great. But to take that smoked protein and then make dishes with it that are more elevated? This is where modern barbecue shines.”
Caskey set up Bad Wolf BBQ at Heard Freighthouse Food Park in Downtown Ruston, a food truck concept similar to what you see all over the place in Austin and Dallas. The park is the brainchild of Desi Bourgeois, the former executive chef of Google’s dining program in Austin. It was perfect for Caskey, because Bad Wolf BBQ is not the sort of food truck that turns up at conferences or outside bars. In fact, they don’t move around at all.
“Heard Freighthouse Food Park has been a great avenue for us to be able to do exactly the sort of food that I am passionate about,” he said. When he first started the food truck, Caskey and his father did some local events, but realized quickly that those markets were more about feeding large numbers of people. “It’s not a repeat customer base, and I just didn’t feel like I was putting out food that I could feel passionate about.” Instead of quantity and easy money, he leaned into quality: serving exquisite cuisine on the weekends for the locals in the community, hoping to gain people’s trust with passion, and create a repeat customer base. The plan worked. In 2018, he quit his day job and turned to barbecue full-time.
THE LOUISIANA FOOD & WINE FESTIVAL
A successful restaurant — whether brick-and-mortar, food truck or pop-up — is a testament to the community that produced it, as Bad Wolf BBQ has demonstrated. It speaks to the local economy, local tastes, local produce and local community spirit. That is one reason why Experience Ruston, an organization that promotes tourism in Ruston and Lincoln Parish, asked Caskey in 2023 to participate in the first annual Louisiana Food & Wine Festival, held in Lake Charles.
The idea behind the festival, according to Jan Gourley, its founding director, was to bring people to Lake Charles so they could see, in person, what the city has to offer. In doing that, organizers hoped to “showcase all the things we love about Louisiana — the food, the music, the people, the culture,” she said. No one could have prepared them for the response, not only from top chefs and rising stars across Louisiana, but also from across America, Mexico and Canada.
“We brought in some celebrity chefs, as well as some great chefs in the state,” she said. “We had a chef from Commander’s Palace in New Orleans, and Dook Chase — Leah Chase’s grandson — with the restaurant Chapter IV. Brennan’s came, and we brought in Chef Tiffany Derry, who is a chef and a judge on the Food Network’s Top Chef. It was just a great mix of local and celebrity talent.” In addition, the festival featured artisans from across the state who create such things as food and beverage-related glassware and cutting boards.
Rouses Markets was the official presenting sponsor of the event. Communities from across the state also found local talent to represent them at the festival. “We had A Taste of Louisiana Alley, featuring several destinations from around the state,” said Gourley. “They brought in culinary talent, and sometimes a brewery or a distillery, to showcase their cities. It just activates the destination a bit more than just having something like a brochure — and anyway, at the Louisiana Food & Wine Festival, people want to taste all of those different kinds of cuisines [from] throughout the state, obviously.”
Bad Wolf BBQ represented Ruston, though Caskey kept expectations in check about his chances in the festival tasting competitions. “There were so many chefs from all over, and especially some great ones from South Louisiana, which is mostly about seafood. But we are from North Louisiana,” he said. “We came mainly for Fire on the Lake, which was a barbecue and pitmaster event of the festival on the first [Friday] evening.”
For that event, Caskey prepared a miniature version of one of Bad Wolf BBQ’s best-loved dishes. “It was a small serving of smoked brisket with something from our region in North Louisiana: sweet potatoes.” The recipe was simple, and relied on technique. With his brisket, he paired three ounces of mashed sweet potatoes, smoothly blended, with fresh rosemary leaves, crushed pecans and cane syrup, topped with his signature Louisiana white sauce.
“Something like that just feels to me a lot more modern and elevated than just traditional meat-salt-butcher paper,” he said.
The next day, the festival’s Grand Tasting was set to be a major culinary event. “We set up and did the whole thing on Friday. And then the next day on the Grand Tasting day, we set up and did it all again.” From what he saw, pretty much everybody there was doing traditional, Louisiana-style dishes: seafood, primarily. He again served the smoked brisket with sweet potato dish.
Caskey was pleased to win the People’s Choice award for Best Meat. But to his astonishment and delight, he also took home the trophy for Judge’s Choice Best Overall Dish for the festival.
“I was extremely surprised when that happened,” he said, explaining that barbecue is not typically what people think of as being a Louisiana dish, let alone one of the top dishes in the state. “People from around the world traditionally associate seafood and things like that with Louisiana. For the Judge’s Choice to choose a barbecue dish was a great win — not only for me, but for barbecue overall. It’s still hard for me to believe barbecue would come out as well as it did at an event like this — in Louisiana! Can you believe it?”
Rouses Markets will again present the 2024 Louisiana Food & Wine Festival September 19-22 in Lake Charles. TK INSERT MARCY QUOTE ABOUT ANYTHING SHE DAMN WELL PLEASES.
WHAT THE RUSTON COMMUNITY IS ALL ABOUT
Since then, business has continued to be great, and Caskey expects it to grow even more. Heard Freighthouse Food Park is expanding, and its owners have even built a stage for local performers to entertain diners. “We have a lot of things coming to Downtown Ruston, and that is one of them.” The food park is located in the middle of Downtown Ruston, at the railroad tracks. “You can’t miss it!” he said.
Bad Wolf BBQ feeds diners Thursday through Saturday for lunch service, from 11am to 3pm. “Right now, we do a lot of prep in the beginning of the week. And we are going to have a lot more expanded hours and things like that as the food truck park develops and starts holding events at nighttime.”
He is proud of what he has built and considers himself lucky. He said that someone interested in taking the same path that he did — following a passion through to a livelihood — can do a few things to set themselves up for success.
“The best advice I have is to just take that first step and do it — but try to do it smart. Try to do it strategically. Don’t do it without thinking about it. But so many talented people get hung up with insecurities.” If you truly have a passion for something, that passion is going to outweigh some of the hardships that you’re sure to face, he said. “It’s going to be worth it. Do it for the love of the thing. If your heart’s in the right place, and if you’re doing it for the right reasons, it’s going to go better than your wildest dreams.”
