The best day of the year began for me last Saturday at 3:45 a.m. My alarm went off. I put on sweatpants, a long-sleeved running shirt, a Shut Up ‘n Eat dad cap, and a camping headlamp. I made coffee and poured it into a thermos. Then I doused myself in bug spray and walked three flights down to my Brooklyn backyard. The pig roast was about to begin.

In the corner of the yard — a cement-and-gravel space shaded by large cherry and redbud trees — sat my Yoder Durango. It’s a half-ton of quarter-inch-thick steel that functions as both grill and offset smoker, with a barrel capable of holding two 50-pound pigs and a tower with four shelves for racks of ribs or sides of salmon. Inside were two chimneys stocked with newspaper, firestarters, and charcoal. Below it sat enough hickory and cherry logs to keep the smoke going for days. I pulled the trigger on a lighter and touched it to the chimneys. Smoke began to rise. I found a chair, sipped my coffee, worked the New York Times crossword puzzle. It was now 4:29 a.m. I had a long, long way to go.

For nearly two decades, I’ve lived at this apartment in a four-unit coop at the edge of Boerum Hill and Gowanus. And for most of those years, my wife and I have hosted cookouts of varying sizes in the building’s shared garden. We started small, cooking steaks and pork chops on the kind of Char-Griller you can pick up at Lowe’s, but about ten years ago my neighbor Jeff and I invested in the Yoder, and soon after the cookouts began to culminate in an annual blow-out — a whole-hog extravaganza hosted in conjunction with our street’s block party, held the second Saturday in September. These cookouts are — I hesitate to use this word, but it’s the right one — epic, with 75 to 100 people, friends as well as total strangers, devouring piles of smoked meat and raiding our gargantuan coolers for beer, good wine, and, increasingly, nonalcoholic options. From late afternoon until after the sun has gone down, there is constant activity — and a self-perpetuating cycle of happiness. The vibes, as they say, are immaculate.

This year was no different, except perhaps better organized than last year. And because I feel like I’ve finally gotten the order of events well in hand, I wanted to lay out everything that goes into making this day what it is, so you can get a head start on running your own pig roast — if you dare…

About ten days before the party, I walked into Paisanos, the 66-year-old butcher shop in my neighborhood, and ordered the pigs. Once upon a time, I was a single-pig guy, but as I ordered ever-larger animals, I began to worry they might not fit into my smoker, or might take too long to cook through. In 2024, I settled on two 45-to-50-pounders¹ as the maximum I could handle.

Paisanos makes this process sooooooo easy! I give them a deposit ($200, out of ~$900 total) and a delivery date (the day before the party), and they cheerfully handle the rubs as well, saving me from having to wrangle and season the pigs in my own small kitchen. Those rubs, I’ve learned over time, are both essential and inconsequential. That is, it doesn’t really matter what you use, as long as you’ve got salt, pepper, and some kind of ground chilies in there. After 12 hours of smoking, the pork is going to taste like, well, smoked pork more than anything else, and a precise calibration of brown sugar, coriander, thyme, espresso, or whatever else you rub in is going to get lost in an overwhelming wave of meat, fat, and juices. This is a good thing! It means I don’t have to worry or overthink the rub.

Storing the pigs overnight, however, is a serious concern. My refrigerator can’t handle that much meat, and the stairs into our basement are too narrow for our coop to install a chest freezer down there. Instead, I’ve set up two 150-quart coolers in the yard — one Igloo, one Coleman² — and before Paisanos delivers the pigs, I load them up with enough ice to keep them fresh overnight. (The pigs are double-bagged to prevent cross-contamination.) As long as the raccoons don’t figure out how to open the coolers, we’re good.

Barbecue professionals spend a lot of time pondering wood for smoking. Mesquite or hickory? Cherry or apple? Logs or chunks or pellets? Each of these woods imparts a slightly different flavor to the meat, and each burns slightly differently. The debate is eternal.

But I am not a barbecue professional. I need wood that tastes good and burns well. This year I ordered it from Woodbourne, a new-to-me company in Long Island City that supplies both firewood and cooking wood. Via their website’s chat, Woodbourne recommended I get 1/10th of a cord of hickory, which burns hot and long, and cherry, which is cooler and sweeter. It’s $220, and they deliver it free two days before the party. It’s way more than I need!

Although I’m not fussy about the flavor of the wood, I’ve chosen hickory and cherry for a very specific reason: To barbecue these pigs successfully, I will need to maintain a fairly constant temperature of 225°F–275°F for roughly 12 hours straight. This is perhaps the toughest part of the pig roast. The Yoder’s controls are basic at best. The offset, where the wood is held, has a vent you can open and close, to let more air in (and make it hotter) or restrict the airflow (and make it not-hotter). At the other end, a damper atop the tower controls both how smoke escapes from the Yoder but also how air is pulled through the smoker, with similar effects. So for a full half-day, I’m going to use those two “devices” to keep the temperature steady. Generally, there’s one log in the firebox at a time; when one side of it burns through and the temperature starts to drop, I flip it over (with welding gloves) and soon after add another log, blowing on the embers (sometimes with an electric bellows) until it catches fire. Then I wait, watch the temperature gauge, adjust the vent and the damper, and wait and watch some more.

In some ways, this is the most exhausting part of the whole process. I may be drinking coffee, scrolling Instagram, or reading a novel, but a chunk of my mind (and my eyesight) is always on that smoker, attentive to every little tick up or down of the temperature needle. At times, it stays steady, and I run inside to have a shower or prep some sides, but the anxiety remains: Am I missing a sudden shift that could ruin my efforts?

While most of my attention is on the pigs, I do make sure to prepare enough sides to at least get things started, while encouraging guests to bring more. We always have a lot of chips — potato, tortilla, pita — alongside several sliced baguettes from La Bicyclette and a platter of carrot, cucumber, and celery sticks. I make a version of the New York Times’ pickleback slaw (with Queen Majesty hot sauce), and a creamy hummus featuring NY Shuk’s preserved lemon paste and dusted with za’atar.

Two other sides merit special attention: One I call “tomato salad with all the herbs.” It is what it is — a huge bowl of gorgeous heirloom tomato chunks, thinly sliced red onion, and nearly every herb from my garden: rosemary, thyme, parsley, mint, Italian basil, Thai basil, holy basil, laksa leaf, nasturtium, and probably some others I’ve forgotten I’m growing. Doused with sherry vinegar and an enormous amount of good olive oil, it is one of the best things we eat all summer long.

The other is tiger-bite sauce, a Hmong jaew adapted from this recipe in Bon Appétit. It contains everything delicious: garlic, shallots, Thai chilies (again from my garden), cilantro, fermented fish sauce, oyster sauce, and — absolutely most important — cherry tomatoes grilled over charcoal. People just absolutely fucking love this stuff, eating it as a bruschetta topping as much as a sauce for the meat. This year I started making it in my ten-inch Lao-style mortar and pestle (which doubles as a serving bowl), and although I’d doubled the recipe, it was gone in minutes. Next year I’m going to have to figure out how to make enough that I actually get to taste it!

All of these sides prove to be quite a challenge, not because any of them is difficult to make but because I’ve got to prepare them while also tending the fire. I race upstairs and downstairs, corral friends and neighbors to watch the temperature gauge, and just hope I can get it all done before our guests start arriving at 4 p.m., eleven hours into the pig’s cooking time.

Simply put, I try to invite everyone I’ve ever met in my entire life. Yes, that means that if I’ve met you, you’re invited to next year’s! Also, if I haven’t met you, you’re still invited! And not only you but whoever you happen to feel like bringing with you: partners, children, old friends, new acquaintances, random strangers. (We had a group of Franciscan monks from Italy show up one year.) What I love about hosting these parties is watching everyone interact — seeing people from different eras of my life collide and connect in unpredictable ways. Two attendees met at an early cookout and eventually got married; they now live two buildings down from us. This year, my old friend Ian realized he knew my dad’s cousin Bobbie from around their Lower East Side neighborhood — only in New York, kids, right? And meanwhile I get to ping-pong around among them, making introductions, finding affinities, and relishing the inescapably happy buzz.

When restaurant chefs talk about hospitality, about the joy of feeding people, I imagine this is what they mean. The food is the occasion, and we care deeply about how it’s created and served. But the point of it all is this human connection, which stays with us all long after the smoke and lard have been washed from our clothes.

And that’s why I’m already thinking about next year. How can I make more? How can I invite more? How can it all run smoother? If you’re interested in finding out — or in helping out — just email me. It only gets bigger from here.

The funny thing about the party is that while I’m laser-focused on feeding and entertaining everyone, I barely get to eat a bite. (I do take advantage of being the pig butcher to nibble my favorite morsels as I break it down.) But on the other hand, there are always leftovers, which means I get to enjoy day-after pulled pork sandwiches like this one — a well-earned treat after many, many hours of exertion:

The dining scene in DTLA’s Arts District has never been better. Between Baroo, Damian, Bavel, OGs like Bestia and Manuela, and The Joint Seafood’s new location, it's a treasure trove of dining. Our producer Matt “Haitch” Herrerro was in town for the Lucas Museum opening party, and I put together a dinner at Bavel with our friends Jason Concepcion and Rosie Knight of X-Ray Vision podcast. It was my first dinner at Bavel in a few years, and the food still hits. The Malawach (buttery, flaky, fried pancake similar to a scallion pancake) has been one of the standouts since they opened in 2018, and we were blown away by the lamb neck shawarma, so tender and fatty. We also had the duck hummus with pillowy soft bread, grilled octopus, prawns, and pretty much any dish that used Bavel’s badass wood-fire grill. Cheers to chefs Ori Menashe and Genevieve Gergis!

Also in DTLA, north of Chinatown and by Dodger Stadium, is a little Korean takeout place called Perilla. Specializing in banchan and bentos, Perilla has been a critics’ favorite since they opened. When I want lighter and healthier fare, I go for the cod bento with rice, and banchan like rolled egg, gimbap with cucumber, avocado, egg, pickled radish, garlic chives, or fermented cucumber with Korean melon. Truly a gem!