Ten minutes before opening on a warm Wednesday morning, a line is already forming in front of Sanders BBQ Supply Co. in Beverly. Snippets of chatter cover likely orders — succulent rib tips, high-gloss peach tea wings — and mild frustration that the place is cashless. Twenty minutes later, seated at a cherry-red table on Sanders’ secluded back patio, chef/owner James Sanders and pitmaster Nick Kleutsch, 31, learn that the line had already swelled to 40 people.
“I was so angry with Nick when he said we should open on Wednesdays,” laughed Sanders, 50, donning a “Smokin’ Meats Clapping Cheeks” T-shirt. “I thought it would take away from the mystique of the place.”
Lines snaking down 99th Street have been a fixture for months at this counter-service barbecue joint, where unctuous oxtails exhale aromas of hardwood smoke and peppered, toothsome brisket gives at the mere sight of a fork. Wait times have no doubt climbed since September, when The New York Times named Sanders BBQ one of the 50 best restaurants in the country, alongside Mexican fine-dining restaurant Cariño.
“We have customers saying, ‘We drove two hours to come here,’” said Kleutsch. “It still doesn’t feel real.”
“It doesn’t,” Sanders agreed. “To get [named] one of the top restaurants in the country — in Chicago alone! Chicago is a food city.”
There hasn’t been much time to process their whirlwind success in 17 short months since opening. Besides running a relentlessly popular barbecue joint five days a week, Sanders, Kleutsch and their tight-knit crew, which includes partner Ogbanna Bowden, chef Miguel Lopez and operations manager Naurice Cherry, are planning a second — as yet nameless — elevated barbecue restaurant and bar, which will debut in Hyde Park early next year. They’re also growing the Beverly location via an adjacent retail store.
Indeed, over the course of an hourlong interview, Sanders and Kleutsch took turns dashing off to answer calls and texts and put out small proverbial fires.
“It’s like this restaurant is my 10-year-old child and the other place is my newborn,” Sanders said. “Right now I gotta put more emphasis on the newborn, but every day I’m honing this, making it stronger with the team, making it better.”
Until fairly recently, Sanders swore he was finished with restaurants. The East St. Louis, Illinois, native who lives in Beverly, has been cooking since he was 8. Growing up, he watched Julia Child and Jacques Pépin instead of cartoons. He caught the hospitality bug while slinging late-night barbecue in his fraternity house at Southern Illinois University.
“I was always on the grill, probably serving undercooked chicken wings,” he said. “But people told me they loved it. I loved that feeling.”
After culinary school, he worked as a franchisee for Harold’s Chicken, eventually owning 22 locations, until he felt the pangs of burnout. In 2004 he started Fuze Catering out of his home kitchen, amassing a star-studded client list that would include Steve Harvey, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Obama Foundation Athletic Center.
Around six years ago, perhaps against his better judgment, he started dreaming up the kind of barbecue joint that might one day bring a James Beard Foundation Award to Beverly.
“I noticed there was no barbecue in the neighborhood,” he said. “Beverly is a really good, diverse community. I feel like they deserved it.”
Sanders and Bowden gathered the funds to lease and build out the space. As the restaurant neared physical completion in April, however, Sanders thought the menu of ribs, wings, beans and coleslaw needed work. The meat seemed heavy on smoke, and he questioned menuing rib tips, lest the place box itself in as “South Side” barbecue. Then his friend Dave Bonner, partner and pitmaster at Green Street Smoked Meats, introduced him to a Texas barbecue savant named Nick Kleutsch — or as Sanders calls him, “a godsend.”
Kleutsch grew up in Hammond, Indiana, and had his head turned by Texas ’cue in 2016 on a fateful visit to Terry Black’s BBQ in Austin. He spent a few years in the Texas capital honing his craft before moving back to Indiana to start a popular barbecue pop-up series, which gave way to his first barbecue restaurant, Lucy’s, in Lowell, Indiana. It has since closed. Joining Sanders’ team meant Kleutsch could stretch creatively like never before.
“James allowed me to have a lot of freedom to really mess around and experiment, and he pushed me,” Kleutsch said. “Somewhere along the line, we agreed this was going to be South Side Chicago-meets-Texas barbecue.”
Case in point: the beef ribs, which Kleutsch rubs with dried chilies (nodding to Texas) and brown sugar (winking to sweet-toothed Chicago) then showers with salt and pepper before smoking for seven hours until succulent. Kleutsch has a gift for using smoke as a seasoning rather than brash main character. Garlicky house-made Czech-style sausage is barely kissed with its campfire essence, allowing warming paprika and yeasty beer tang to shine through. The oxtails — which Kleutsch developed at Sanders’ urging — are a master class, not just in coaxing taut connective tissue into tender, jiggly submission, but in balancing smoke, garlic and intense beefiness. Any eater will resign herself to licking the bone clean even when well past full.
Cheekily, the rib tips Sanders threatened to exclude from the menu are now the bestseller (closely followed by smoky brisket and cornmeal-fried catfish). These peppered nuggets of tender fat and cartilage get painted with vinegary Central Texas-style barbecue sauce, which cuts through the smoky richness like zingy shrapnel.
Kleutsch’s days begin as early as 2 a.m. and often don’t end until 6 p.m., rhythmically bound by hurrying up and waiting — to trim, season, smoke, paint and wrap hulking pork butts, rib slabs and briskets alongside a small chef crew working on staggered shifts and two rotisserie smokers.
When asked whether the restaurant industry asks too much of people, as Sanders realized all those years ago when he left Harold’s, Kleutsch sipped his ginger ale thoughtfully.
“My dad was a union worker, and my mom was a postal worker, so it’s been instilled in me to work hard,” he said. “It’s tattooed on me: ‘Just work harder.’ The flip side is I don’t have any work, so I’m very thankful.”
By the fall of 2024, Sanders’ interior was routinely so packed that customers didn’t have a place to sit. When the landlord offered up the former architect’s office space on Wood Street next door, a reticent Sanders couldn’t resist the chance to add overflow seating. The restaurant’s interior seats 60. A smallish back dining room with garage-style windows connects to the original storefront via the 45-seat patio.
The forthcoming retail store will peddle rubs, sauces and merchandise and have its own entrance. It will also house Sanders’ staggering to-go operation, which accounts for roughly 40% of business — and contributes to bottlenecks in the line.
Come 2026, the Beverly site will also become the centralized hub for prepping big proteins like brisket, beef ribs and pork — headliners of the Hyde Park menu, which will house a full bar. Sanders is leasing the space beneath music venue the Promontory from the University of Chicago. The design is still in the works, but the menu will mix Sanders BBQ favorites and genre-bending newcomers such as smoked lamb chops, deviled egg flights and smoked beef tallow popcorn.
“Hyde Park is already a food destination,” Sanders said, nodding to the critically acclaimed mini-empire chef Erick Williams has built over the last decade. “We’re going to do some stuff so you can really see our talents.”
Indeed, hard-won as outstanding barbecue may be, it rarely piles up the kind of flashy accolades of fine-dining restaurants — something both Kleutsch and Sanders alluded to more than once during our conversation. That might explain why the recent New York Times nod brought both to tears.
The outpouring was, admittedly, short-lived for Sanders.
“Then I was just like, oh s- – -, back to work.”