New Lake Norman BBQ restaurant combines grandma’s recipes with chef-owner’s know-how
The menu at James Hettinger’s new Chefry’s Blue Smoke BBQ restaurant in Mooresville combines the executive chef-owner’s lifelong love of garden-grown food and his decades running the kitchens of top hotels and restaurants in Florida, Colorado and North Carolina.
As a boy in Lansing, Michigan, he grew his food in his family’s garden and spent hours making pickles and canning vegetables, Hettinger told CharlotteFive recently.
He opened Chefry’s Blue Smoke May 9 in the former Salty Caper pizzeria at 134 Mooresville Commons Way, in the Lowes Foods center off Brawley School and Williamson roads.
Those early years enjoying homegrown food, including his grandma’s coleslaw and other recipes, inspired his culinary career, he said. The 46-year-old Hettinger obtained his bachelor’s degree from Johnson & Wales University, studying at its campuses in Providence, R.I., and Miami.
Everything at Chefry’s is made on site, “from the peanut butter to the ice cream to the french fries to the sweet potatoes,” he said. “Everything is done here.”
“All of our meats are seasoned 24 to 48 hours in advance, so they sit there and build up the crust on it,” he said. “That’s why the brisket, for example, is unique, our pulled pork is unique.”
“There’s places where you get pulled pork and you get a big old huge chunk of fat in there,” Hettinger said. “Ours, because of the way the crust is and the way it gets cooked and pulled, you’re not able to even tell the fat’s in there. The turkey, the chicken, we do the sweet tea marinade for one or two days, and it sits with the seasoning for another day or two on top of that.”
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The brisket “is our hands-down No. 1 customer favorite,” he said. “All of our meats are smoked in hickory and cherry wood. And we’re a true made-from-scratch restaurant. I live here in Mooresville, and I’m trying to give people as much as I can from scratch. I do the same thing in my house for my family, so why not for the town the same way?”
Featured sauces include Old School, Lip Smackin’ and Big Boy Blue.
Hettinger describes Old School as “a simple red-based sauce with a lemon twang to it.”
“Our Lip Smackin’ Barbecue Sauce is your North Carolina-style, but it’s just tightened up and the base is apple cider vinegar,” he said. “Our Big Boy Blue Barbecue Sauce has fresh jalapenos, fresh blueberries, and it’s a chunky, semi-spicy sauce. You can actually see the blueberries in there and taste the jalapenos.”
He developed the sauces “for fun” at the beginning of the COVID pandemic.
“I started playing around with the sauces, and a lot of friends and family in the area said we need a barbecue place on this side” of Interstate 77 in Mooresville, he said. “I can do French cuisine. I can make sushi. But once I started doing stuff for fun during COVID, I just didn’t look back.”
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‘Nowhere else’
Two main things “you’re not going to find anywhere else” are, under the menu’s Wood-fired Plates section, the Backwoods BBQ Popover, and, under the Sides section, the Black Eye Pea Hush Puppies, Hettinger said.
“We make popovers from scratch, cut ‘em in half, basically making popover pockets, and we put in our house-made chorizo, brisket and pulled pork, tossed with our Old School Barbecue Sauce and smothered with smoked gouda, aged white cheddar and manchego cheese.”
The hush puppies are lighter on the inside than the traditional variety and have an earthy finish, he said.
And the Cajun Remoulade sauce for the hush puppies? “It should just make your curls toe,” he said. “It’s not super spicy, it just has a little zing, jazz to it.”
Hettinger thought better of it when he originally intended to leave chips off the menu. “And then I always forget about how sweet potatoes and Granny Smith apples were born and raised here,” he said.
The Grandma’s Coleslaw, however, is his mom’s mom’s recipe from Michigan. “Every day that I remember, she ate it,” Hettinger said. ”She used to grow her own cabbage, and down the road in Michigan, she had a peanut and an apple farm. And that’s how she did it. She just made coleslaw and put peanuts in it and had to be Granny Smith apples.”
“Us grand kids will eat whatever she tells us to eat,” he recalls about scarfing down his grandma’s homemade meals and sides.
Geoffrey the Giraffe
The name of the restaurant blends the word “chef” with the name “Geoffrey,” as in 7-foot-tall Geoffrey the Giraffe, the Toys R Us mascot, Hettinger said.
Hettinger is 6-feet-11-inches tall. He said he’s the second-tallest active chef in the U.S., next to a 7-foot-2 chef in Chicago.
A top chef resume
After culinary school at the Johnson & Wales campus in Miami, Hettinger worked as a chef for years in Florida and Colorado hotel resorts.
He was the opening chef of The Ritz-Carlton Sarasota in 2001; and a chef over the decades at The Broadmoor hotel resort in Colorado Springs; the Omni Amelia island Resort in Fernandina Beach, Florida; The Boca Raton (Florida) luxury resort hotel; and Loews Portofino Bay Hotel at Universal Orlando.
He later worked at the Embassy Suites in Concord, where he built its famous 10-foot-tall gingerbread house, and most recently at Sun Up Cafe in the Langtree at the Lake community on Lake Norman in southern Iredell County.
“We lived in Cornelius for a couple of years,” he said. “When we started looking for houses (in Mooresville), we just fell in love with the house we have here. We’ve had it for about seven years.”
He and his wife, Megan, have a 5-year-old daughter, Constance. The couple has been married for 16 years and dated for three years.
“Me and my wife say that we built a restaurant here for the town we live in, the town we have a little girl in,” Hettinger said. “It’s just basically cooking for friends and family, the friends and family that are Mooresville. It’s all about the town.”
Chefry’s Blue Smoke BBQ
Location: 134 Mooresville Commons Way, Mooresville, NC 28117
Cuisine: Barbecue
