"First and foremost, I am not a chef," begins Thomas Ward. "I'm just a really big guy that likes simple food." Long before opening Pig Floyd's Urban Barbakoa, Ward worked in the supermarket business and would visit late-night food trucks specializing in a sandwich fashioned from pan sobao (a Puerto Rican sweet bread) with churrasco, chicken, potato sticks, lettuce, tomato and mayo-ketchup. "I found the sandwich so delicious that I set out to make my version of it." Ward's well-regarded Treehouse Truck became known for the "ChiMoo," a sandwich of skirt steak, chicken, coleslaw, sweet potato fries and mango barbecue sauce, and that sandwich helped him parlay his keen culinary vision into a successful brick-and-mortar barbecue operation.
No surprise, then, that Pig Floyd's sandwiches are the most popular items on the menu, only now, those sub rolls are filled with luscious oakwood-smoked brisket and flavorful pulled pork. Barbecue-loving hipsters hooked on Treehouse Truck anxiously waited for Ward to open the doors on Mills Avenue last year, and now, meal after meal, Pig Floyd's never fails to leave them comfortably numb.