Here at The Brick Pig's House our mission is to provide the delicious barbecue foods at the reasonable price. We believe the best way to achieve this goal is to, not only provide the best quality food we can, but to also provide a safe, pleasant atmosphere for you while you wait for your order
The Brick Pig’s House is owned and operated by Barry (Alex) and Carolyn Alexander
Carolyn, the master cook, comes from a long line of barbecue and food service providers. She is a third generation food service professional who has been pleasing pallets for the last 30 years. Her potato salad has long been a taste treat. The same can be said for her mouth-watering sweet potato pies, apple, blackberry and peach cobblers.
All of the meat we serve is prepared by Carolyn using a family recipe passed directly to her from her mother (who got it from her mother) and no one else. That recipe is both time tested and remains a family secret. One taste and you’ll understand why when you ask her what the recipe is she responds “If I tell ya, I gotta kill ya.”
Barry is the second cook and business manager. Barry has been cooking Carolyn-style so long that he can’t remember cooking BBQ using his own recipes. “ I’m happy cooking the way she taught me.”
I don’t expect that most of you noticed it but if you look closely at the URL in the address bar, you’ll see it doesn’t say “the brickpigshouse.com”. It says “.../thebrickpigshouse.shabfas.us/....”. The reason it does is because we’re hanging from another site. For those who aren’t in the know, the term ‘hanging from’ is slang for ‘hosted by’. We’re hanging from the site belonging to a band called Shabfas’ Shabfas is pronounced shav-vaas (short a’s please). Why? Well, before deciding to open The Brick Pig’s House, Carolyn and I were members of Shabfas. In fact, I own and built the web site (as well as this one and a few others).
Shabfas is an 8 piece dance and show band in which I play electric bass and Carolyn is one of the lead vocalists. While I only consider myself a decent bass player, Carolyn, on the other hand is one hell of a singer. So good that one of the songs she sings played on the radio for a month. From what I understand, there were quite a few requests for her too!
Shabfas formed in March of 2003 with Carolyn joining one month later, in April. Shabfas is a cover band with an open style. Open style means that we play Blues, R & B, Soul, Jazz and Rock. Basically we play whatever we think will get the audience going. We play music from the 1940’s through the 90’s although we try to avoid the standard tunes as much as possible. The reason is that virtually every cover band has at least 5 ‘standards’. We also find that audiences enjoy what we play. While we never made it ‘big’ we have turned a few heads and opened a few eyes.
Our last show was this year’s 56th Annual San Francisco Juneteenth Festival held on Fillmore near Geary on June 17th and 18th and presented by Fillmore Live in association with the San Francisco Juneteenth Committee and Safeway Stores, Inc. along with TopHat Productions.
Earlier this year, after 30 plus years as an IT Professional, I retired. Carolyn seeing the opportunity to do what she does best (cook) convinced me, rather easily, that it was her turn to lead and so we decided to open The Brick Pig’s House Black American Style BBQ Take Out. Of course we realized that doing so meant it would not be possible for us to run a business and continue to make music so we decided to put the music to the side for a while.
Mind you, Shabfas is not officially dissolved, just taking a nap. We’ve gelled so well as a band that dissolving didn’t make sense. Instead we, the band, decided to bide our time until the Brick Pig’s House has settled into a routine. Once the routine has been set, we can get back to rehearsing and perhaps do one show a month on Sunday some where in the east bay. Time will tell that part of this story.
Nate Holmes, our other lead singer, had hoped that the band could play at the Brick Pig’s House opening. I nixed it. I’m having enough headaches just getting the business started. Getting another permit is just asking too much at this point.
If you want, click on over to www.shabfas.us, take a look and give a listen. Here’s hoping you like what you see and hear! Carolyn’s version of Bettye Wright’s ‘Tonight is the night’ is on the ‘Music Samples’ page. This is the song that played on the radio for a month back in 2004. Oh yes. The radio station was KPOO hosted by Bobby Webb.
New Items:
Any business worth its salt listens to what its customer say. We are trying very hard to be a business worth our salt. We’ve been listening and when we hear from enough of you to add or change things, we try to abide by your wishes.
Well guys, it’s about that time again. If you’ve been reading our diary page you know we’re struggling. So although we would like for our pricing to stay the same we have to raise our prices. The good news is that while some prices went up, some actually stayed the same. Check the Menu and Full Menu pages for the new pricing.