09/01/2026
“I’ll just go into it—the whole story behind the name. I was such a picky eater growing up, that whenever we would go out to eat, my parents would ask if they could make me a PB&J. A lot of kids say they want to be an astronaut, a cop, a fireman, but when I was four or five, I said, ‘When I grow up, I’m gonna have a restaurant, and on the adult menu, I’m gonna have a PB&J.’
And now I do, even though it stands for something different. One of our sandwiches is called the Infamous PB&J—it stands for pork, bacon, and jam.
So when they say I’ve had this dream since I was a kid. It’s been a long time coming. The first time I really fell in love with barbeque in Texas. We were at Terry Black’s Barbecue, a well-known place down in that area. It’s almost like a cafeteria line: you get your tray, grab your side dishes, then you get to the meats. They cut it right in front of you, you pay an arm and a leg for it, then you sit down and eat.
At first I thought, ‘I just paid 60 bucks for this.’ But then I took my first bite and thought, ‘I’d have paid double.’
We started with a food truck three years ago, and I wanted our place to be a destination. That’s why we used the license plate in our logo. The owners of our previous building were gracious enough to build me a kitchen, and I put all the equipment into it to see if it would work. It did, to the point where our catering business blew up and we needed our own place. For example, one weekend we had a 50th anniversary company party for 300 people, a wedding for 200 people, and another wedding for 125 people—all on the same day.
Beyond that, we love doing barbeque competitions. That’s where all the awards you see come from. We started in 2012, and we have been hooked ever since. It makes us better at what we do and influences the kind of barbeque we serve. A lot of people think ‘barbecue’ is the sauce that goes on it. We don’t serve anything with sauce. We want you to taste the meat first, because if you don’t have good meat, sub-par sauce is just going to cover it up. Competition style focuses on flavor—not Texas style, not smoke ring. We look at everything as an ingredient—from the meat to the kind of wood we use to smoke. From there, it’s how we cook. You’ve probably heard about ‘low and slow’, but we’re ‘hot and fast’ with a really long rest time. A lot of people cook brisket right on the rack. What happens to all the juice and fat? It goes away. But we cook everything in pans. It costs us more to cook it that way, but the meat sits in the juice and you end up with more flavor and more moisture in the meat.
I was in the mortgage business for 15 years—but I love feeding people. I love making people happy. The craft of barbecue—it’s an art form. I didn’t want PB&J to be just another place selling only a two-meat plate. Going back to the PB&J name, our signature sandwich—pork, bacon, and jam. Who puts raspberry jalapeño jam on a pulled pork sandwich? We do. We have a brisket sandwich that has bacon jam. We have another pulled pork sandwich that has crunchy peanut butter and that raspberry chipotle sauce. We of course have the traditional stuff—it’s what people are expecting, what they love, and what sells. But we also want to be different and we want to show people what barbeque can really be.
We recently moved into a building of our own and we love it. It allows us to have an identity. This is our little mountain cabin. People can come in, relax for a little while. We have outdoor seating now. I can hold barbecue classes here if the need arises. The community has really rallied behind us.”
—Bert McLain, PB&J's BBQ
124 Irwin St., Brooklyn, MI 49230
