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   Bill Fletcher says it took nearly two years of feasibility studies and buildout, but his new restaurant is now a reality.
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 dozen full racks of ribs that had been slow cooking for several hours and still had a few more to go before they were ready for prime time.
Fletcher said his days at the restaurant start at 5 a.m. and generally run late into the evening. During that time, he and his team are prepar- ing and then cooking meat, getting appetizers and sides ready for the coming night, and, overall, preparing to welcome guests to what it is in many ways something new and different for the region.
This is the life Fletcher has chosen. Actually, as noted earlier, it chose him as his passion for barbecue moved from the backyard to those com- petitions across the Northeast to the restaurant he opened in Brooklyn.
It was while taking part in those competitions that Fletcher said he learned that barbecue wasn’t just a hobby, and it wasn’t just a business in waiting. It was, and is, as he put it, “community.”
“You go to these different competitions, and you see some new faces, but a lot of old faces,” he explained. “It’s probably anywhere between 30 and 100 teams competing, and you stay up all night. It takes forever to cook barbecue, so everyone is up all night, sleeping in shifts. It was hard work, but we had a lot of fun and collected a lot of memories.”
Making a long story somewhat shorter, Fletcher said he started
“Trying to figure out what the demand is going to be is part of the trick. And that will take us a little bit of time to figure it all out.”
spending more and more of his time at these competitions, to the detri- ment of his ad agency.
“I realized that I was spending all my time thinking about barbecue and not being a good president and leader of my crew in advertising,” he explained. “So I spoke to my partner and said it was time for me to get out; I decided I wanted to make this my career.”
He took the proceeds of his buyout and opened Fletcher’s Brooklyn BBQ in the Gowanus neighborhood of the borough in 2012.
Actually, he was part of a wave of barbecue to hit Brooklyn — three new restaurants opening at roughly the same time — a movement that put his restaurant in the food section of the New York Times within weeks of opening.
“We all opened up within a month of each other,” he recalled. “Pete Wells, the New York Times restaurant critic, wrote a piece about us, say- ing ‘big league barbecue hits New York City,’ and reviewed us all. That was exciting, to be in the New York Times restaurant review in your
first month of being open. That was unexpected, and he had some kind
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  Fletcher
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