VOLUME 13, NO. 2     NOVEMBER 2000

Clemons '69 sizzles Down East

Manning the fires at the hottest little barbecue joint in New England is Ralph Clemons, a Maine Yankee with a chemical engineering degree and a background as varied as his menu. The dining room crew of Moonlight Roasters Restaurant and Lounge at the Westcustogo Inn in Yarmouth includes Clemons' two sons: Stuart, who graduated from WPI in 1999, and John "J.B.", Class of 2003.

Despite the New England decor, Moonlight Roasters serves up authentic Southern-style barbecue, slow-roasted the traditional way, over an open wood fire. Maintaining roasting temperatures during icy Maine winters is an engineering challenge that only a man like Clemons would take on. He designed a double-wall brick oven that can accommodate a whole pig or 400 pounds of turkey. He had the chimney-like structure appended to the rear corner of the historic inn, which he and his wife, Betsey, bought in 1986.

It was a long road that took Clemons from a lucrative high-tech marketing career to a small, family-run restaurant that cooks the way people have been cooking since the discovery of fire. Clemons started out as an engineer in the paper mills of North Carolina and moved into sales just as computer automation hit the lumber industry. Along with success came the curse of constant travel and the social demands of corporate life. He longed for a simpler life with his family back in Maine.

Clemons briefly partnered with his brother in a commercial fishing operation before he figured out that "fuel costs about as much as fish." Casting about for a new way of life, his thoughts kept returning to a restaurant he'd discovered during his business travels--a humble barbecue shack in Owensville, Ky., called the Moonlight Barbecue Inn. "It was just a little family-run operation--doing something like $3 million a year gross," he says. "It was the place everyone went to get stuffed."

Opening their own restaurant brought the Clemons family back together, with Ralph in the kitchen, Betsey serving as hostess, and the boys working their way up from dishwashers to buffet tenders and then waiters. "Waiting tables is great experience for kids," he says. "My sons are way ahead of where I was when I entered WPI, in their social graces and interpersonal skills."

The "Moonlight" in the restaurants' names refers to the fact that the meat must be put on the barbecue the night before--often by moonlight. "A typical 20-pound turkey is a 10-hour proposition," Clemons explains. "Ribs...we put 'em in at 9 and serve them on the buffet at 5--so that's an eight-hour proposition--and beef brisket is cooked for two whole days. That's the only way you're going to tenderize it, and the only way to make honest-to-goodness Texas-style barbecued beef brisket," he insists. "Sure, it's a lot easier to throw everything into a propane oven, set it at 325 degrees and check on it four hours later--but there's nothing like the taste of wood-roasted meat.

"When you cook turkey, for example, in a gas or electric oven," he explains, "all you're doing is boiling off the juices, and all the good flavors and natural pigments just sort of wick out through the skin. That's completely different from what happens when you cook over a slow wood fire. The smoke and the particulates from a wood fire actually seal up the skin, which preserves moisture and reduces shrinkage. It tastes a lot better, looks a lot better--but it's six times as much work!"

Whenever food critics come through, their mouthwatering reviews cause a rush at Moonlight Roasters that makes Clemons busier than he wants to be. "We do only minimal advertising, and we've scaled back to a five-day week," he says. "We're secure in the amount of business we have. We don't want to make a fortune, we just want to pay our bills and enjoy ourselves."

--Joan Killough-Miller