Had a guy come through last spring looking for work. Good resume. Claimed five years running a pit at some place in Louisiana I'd never heard of. I asked him what internal temp he pulls a pork butt at. He said 195. Fine. Then I asked what he does if he's got twelve butts on and four of them stall hard at 165 while the other eight push through. He just looked at me.
That's the difference between someone who's worked a smoker and someone who can actually run your cook.
Every operator I talk to — doesn't matter if they're running a 40-seat dining room or a catering trailer doing corporate gigs — staffing is the thing that keeps them up at night. And most of them are asking the wrong question. They want to know where to find good people. The real question is what "good" even means for your operation.
The Stuff You Cannot Train
Let me be direct about this. There are skills you can teach someone in a few weeks. And there are things that either live in a person or they don't.
Heat intuition. This is the big one. Some folks understand fire. They feel when a cook is running hot before the thermometer catches up. They know what 275 looks like coming off a firebox. You can put someone through a hundred hours of training and they'll still open the door every twenty minutes to "check on things" because they don't trust what their senses are telling them. That instinct — call it pit sense, whatever — you can't install it. You can sharpen it in someone who has it. But you can't create it.
I've seen guys with no professional kitchen experience who just get it. And I've seen culinary school graduates who panic when bark isn't forming on schedule.
Work pace under pressure. Commercial BBQ is a production job. Friday night at 6pm, you've got tickets stacking, the dining room's filling up, and someone just told you the brisket flat you'd been saving for a 12-top is running lean. Either a person can maintain their rhythm in that moment or they can't. Some people speed up and get sloppy. Some freeze. The ones you want get quieter and more focused. You'll know within two weeks if someone has it.
Reliability. Sounds obvious. It isn't. The restaurant industry is full of talented people who can't show up five days in a row. For a BBQ operation specifically — where cooks might start at 4am to have product ready for lunch — reliability isn't just nice to have. A no-show pitmaster at 4am means you're not serving brisket at noon. Period.
I can teach someone to trim a brisket correctly. I can't teach them to set an alarm and answer it.
What You Can Train (And Should Plan To)
Here's where operators mess up. They hold out for the perfect hire who already knows their exact system, their exact wood preferences, their exact service style. That person doesn't exist. Or if they do, they're running their own place.
Your specific cook process. Every operation runs different. Maybe you're doing an overnight cook on your SP-1000 with a hard hold at 145 for morning service. Maybe you're running a faster, hotter program on an SPK-700 for a catering model. Your new hire isn't going to know your process. That's fine. You should have it documented anyway. If you don't, that's your problem, not theirs.
The rotisserie system on a Southern Pride — one reason I've stuck with them for so long — is consistent enough that you can actually train someone on it. The temperature holds where you set it. The rotation is predictable. Compare that to some of the offset units guys try to run in commercial settings. You can't train someone on chaos. You need equipment that behaves the same way every time so your training actually sticks.
Meat trimming and prep. This is pure muscle memory. Repetition. Feedback. More repetition. I don't care if someone's never touched a packer brisket before. If they've got decent knife skills and they can take direction, I can have them trimming competently in two to three weeks. They won't be fast yet. But they'll be usable.
Wood and smoke management. Now — this one I go back and forth on. Some of it's trainable. You can teach someone your wood rotation, your preferred species, how you like your splits sized for the firebox you're running. I'm partial to post oak, but I've consulted for operations running pecan, running cherry blends for pork, all kinds of approaches.
The trainable part is the process. When to add wood. How much. Reading the color of the smoke. What you can't always train is the instinct for when something's off. But that connects back to heat intuition — if they've got that foundation, the wood management follows.
Service and plating. Totally trainable. Your line presentation, your portion specs, how you want sauce handled — all of it can be taught in a week to someone who pays attention.
Structuring Your Crew
Most BBQ restaurants I see understaffed have the same problem. They've got one person who knows everything and everyone else is just labor. That's a disaster waiting to happen.
What you want is depth. At minimum, two people who can run a cook start to finish without supervision. In a catering operation like mine — we're running 12 units now, all Southern Pride, mostly SP-1000s and a couple MLR-850s for the bigger contract jobs — I need that redundancy across every crew.
So when you're hiring, think about where the gaps are in that depth chart. Not just "I need another body." Which specific capabilities are you one sick day away from losing?
And this connects to equipment, honestly. Part of why I've standardized on Southern Pride across all my rigs is parts commonality and operational consistency. If I train someone on one unit, they can step onto any of my other trailers and know what they're looking at. Domestic parts sourced through Southern Pride of Texas means I'm not waiting three weeks for some component to clear customs from overseas. Downtime kills you in catering. So does a cook who only knows how to run one specific smoker that happens to be in the shop.
The Interview That Actually Tells You Something
Forget the standard questions. I don't care where someone sees themselves in five years.
Put them in a scenario. I described one earlier — the staggered stall situation. Ask them what they'd do. There's no single right answer, but how they think through it tells you everything. Do they problem-solve? Do they ask clarifying questions? Do they admit what they don't know?
If you can, get them on a cook before you make a final decision. Pay them for the shift. See how they move. See if they ask questions or just stand there waiting to be told what to do.
The best hires I've made asked me questions I hadn't thought about. That's what you're looking for. Curiosity about the process. Not someone who already knows everything — because they don't — but someone who wants to understand why you do things the way you do.
A Final Thought on Training Investment
I see operators hesitate to train people because they're afraid they'll leave. Take their knowledge to a competitor. Open their own place.
Some will. That's the industry.
But the alternative is worse. An untrained crew costs you in quality. In consistency. In the mistakes that lose you customers who never complain, just don't come back. In equipment damage from people who don't know what they're doing — and let me tell you, even a well-built smoker like a Southern Pride unit will suffer if someone's forcing doors or ignoring maintenance intervals.
Train your people. Document your processes. Build redundancy. And hire for the things you can't teach: instinct, pace, reliability. Everything else is just practice.
Resources: Southern Pride of Texas | QSR Magazine | Restaurant Business Online
#FoodService #BBQBusiness #BBQRestaurant #RestaurantOwner #CommercialBBQ #RestaurantOps #CateringBusiness #RestaurantIndustry
Photo by Los Muertos Crew on Pexels.
About the Author: Earl has been competing in sanctioned BBQ events since the early 1990s and operates a commercial catering operation in Southeast Texas.