The story of
Railhead Smokehouse

He and Pilcher didn’t have any hopes it would last this long when they took over a nameless barbecue joint in a concrete block building that now houses the Eskimo Hut daiquiri stand on West Vickery. They ran the beer barn side of the business while they did some work on the pits and renovated the dining room that seated about forty people. “I’ll never forget that first day because the only customers were my dad and my uncle,” Geren told me.

Geren remembers that “it was six or seven months before we got enough business to keep the doors open. It was sucking money pretty good.” Things finally turned around, and they stayed in the old beer barn for nine years, weathering one too many robberies, according to Geren. “One morning at 5:00 some guys came in and made [Pilcher] open the safe, then they put him in a closet and shot through the door,” Geren recalls. “Fortunately, they missed him, but we started looking that day to move to a better neighborhood.”