Pictured: Zach Voorhees
Pining for flavors they had fallen in love with, some of these same customers encouraged Zach Voorhees to continue making at least a portion of the business’s popular, well-kept recipes after the restaurant closed.
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After Poor Boys BBQ & Dawgs closed, in late December, a message appeared on the tall marquee outside the restaurant on Payson’s Highway 198: Support local business. The local restaurant opened two years ago, with Zach Voorhees, owner, quickly building a solid reputation over a short amount of time. Tantalizing smells spun in smoke from the grills outside, as Zach and staff served the succulent cuts of meat, side dishes, and an array of flavorful in-house sauces to faithful customers inside.
Pining for flavors they had fallen in love with, some of these same customers encouraged Zach to continue making at least a portion of the business’s popular, well-kept recipes after the restaurant closed. With the help of one such customer, Zach is now doing just that: Bottling and selling a handful, so far, of the locally famous Poor Boys sauces
That customer was Chris Smith, owner of Riggatti’s Wood Fired Pizza and Deli, a restaurant located inside Reams Grocery Store in Springville. “I helped him get the concept going,”
Chris said.
Chris first encountered the flavors after his wife, Debbie Smith, suggested he give Poor Boys a try. “I thought they were amazing, really good,” Chris remarked on his first impression. “I thought he should start bottling the sauces immediately.”
The idea of bottling the sauces was was not new to Zach. But what the restaurateur, with twenty years under his belt, was unfamiliar with were the ropes of this new venture. “As far as bottling the sauces, it was something we always wanted to do,” Zach explained. “We just didn’t have the knowhow. And I’ve looked into a few different avenues, but never really got a lot of help.”
Chris was in the position to provide the help he needed. When he dropped by Poor Boys during its final days in business, “he wanted my sauce recipes and I told him I wouldn’t give them to him,” Zach said, smiling. “So I said, if you’re willing to bottle them, willing to put them in the grocery stores as early as tomorrow,” he would divulge.
Though not the following day, it did not take long for the new partners to begin bottling and selling five of the seven Poor Boys sauces. “[W]e didn’t start doing that for about three more weeks,” Zach explained. Closing the restaurant would take some time. “But once we got everything closed down and kind of completed over at the restaurant, we were able to focus on [bottling the sauces].”
Once the business of closing was taken care of, Zach joined Chris at Riggatti’s. “We went over and bottled some sauce and had them in the grocery store the next day,” he said.
“We were going to start off with just our Poor Boys Sauce, which is our sweet one,” Zach said. “But as soon as we posted it on Facebook that that’s what we were doing, we had tons of requests for all of our sauces. So we ended up putting out five of our seven sauces on the first day, and so far it’s been going pretty well. In fact, the one we thought was going to be our most popular sauce has been really popular, but it hasn’t been our most popular sauce.”
The Poor Boys Sauce was most popular while the restaurant was in operation, “by far,” according to Zach. “But our white sauce--our Alabama White Sauce--and the Mustard BBQ, have been the most popular at the grocery store level, which is kind of interesting.”
They also bottle Poor Boys’ Spicy BBQ and Special Sauce.
Describing the process, Zach explains that he and Chris, “put the ingredients together and put [the sauces] in Mason jars, boil the Mason jars to pull the air out of them, so they are shelf stable, at least while they are bottled and sealed, and then we put them out in front of the deli [inside the Springville Reams].”
A friend helps them with sales, introducing Reams’ shoppers to the Poor Boys flavor through samples. From here, the sauces are tried with a variety of products: club crackers, cocktail weenies, meatballs, different food items from the deli, “just to give them the different ideas of what can be possible. We’ve even used carrots and stuff from the produce area, because some of the sauces, like the [Alabama] White Sauce and the Mustard [BBQ] sauce are actually kind of good on vegetables.” Zach said.
“The first day, we sold thirty bottles,” Zach said. “When someone’s out there sampling we sell quite a bit.”
This week marks the third week of a new business adventure, the third week the sauces have been available for sale at Reams in Springville.
“That’s the only store selling it so far,” Zach said. “We definitely want to work our way down here, where people know who we are, but through Facebook and some other things, we’ve been able to contact people that were regulars and loved our sauces and they do get [to Reams] to get them. So, it’s been good, but we do want to expand down into this area, where people know who we are.”
Zach and Chris are also considering marketing other products made famous in Payson at Poor Boys. Rubs and fry sauces were also hits among customers he served during his two years in business at the restaurant. “We had two different kinds of fry sauces,” he said, adding that the dry rubs were applied to cuts of meat prior to cooking, as well as sprinkled on other favorite dishes for zest.
Zach continues to work in the restaurant business as his new adventure takes off. As a server at Dalton’s Steak House in Payson, he is able to continue working in the fast-paced restaurant world he loves, as well as lend his skills in marketing for the popular Payson restaurant.
Nothing Poor About Poor Boys
Don’t let the name fool you. The name, Poor Boys, came from the little amount of money it took to get the restaurant started, which lends credit to the talents of a man who has worked in the restaurant business since the age of fourteen.
“We did it very very cheaply, and that was kind of the name behind Poor Boys,” Zach explained. “Usually, to start off a restaurant, you can spend anywhere [from] between fifty and eight hundred grand, if not more. We only spent, like, twenty thousand to get it started. We did it on a dime. And we did it very quickly, as well. From the time we found out we were getting the loan to the time we opened the doors, it was about a three-week process. So it was very quick, very stressful, but we got it open and it went for about two years.”
Zach became a well liked citizen and businessman within the community throughout his two years running Poor Boys. His business was named Payson Chamber of Commerce Business of the Month for December of 2012 and Business of the Year in 2013. With his wife, Livey, by his side, he was presented the Good Citizen Award by Central Bank, Payson, in October 2013. And just last week, Zach received a letter notifying him of Poor Boys’ selection as the Utah Council for Exceptional Children Outstanding Business/Organization of the year Award, an honor slated for presentation on March 5 at Westminster on the Draw, in Salt Lake City, for his work with people with Autism.
Poor Boys opened on February 6, 2012, and closed on December 28, 2013. “[T]here are a lot of things that attributed to our decision to close the restaurant,” Zach explained. “This winter was just too quiet for us. People tend to stay in when it’s cold and snowy.”
Despite the winter’s slow spell, Zach and wife, Livey Voorhees, were often “working nonstop, and we were putting more and more money into the business and not getting any return,” he said.
“We had, and still have, plenty of fans who loved and enjoyed our food and service. It’s just been a tough time for many of us all over America. I think we had the right idea, the right place, just the wrong time,” he said. “The overall experience has been a great success was a great success! Payson has been a wonderful place for us! We’ve made some really great friends here and would like to thank the city of Payson for being so welcoming!”
Through his new business venture, Poor Boys continues beyond the restaurant scene. Both he and partner, Chris, hope to bring the bottled sauces to market in the Payson area, where Poor Boys is better known. Aside from brick and mortar sales, however, the sauces are available for purchase online. Friends of Poor Boys’ Facebook restaurant page can find them there. The page was revamped to reflect the new business venture: Poor Boys BBQ Sauces and Rubs, after the restaurant closed.
The Poor Boys restaurant website still needs to be modified to better accommodate product sales. “The website is our next goal,” Zach said. “It will be a little bit before we do it, for financial reasons, but we need to revamp the website, because it’s set up for a restaurant right now. [W]e want to revamp the restaurant just to be specifically about the sauces and actually give people the ability to order the sauces online. That way, we can, kind of, not just expand to Payson and Utah, but we can expand into a global market, if needed.”
