By Scott Taylor,Staff Writer
Monmouth restaurant bound for Lewiston

MONMOUTH – Dave Klose stepped back from the newly delivered, 20-foot-long barbecue behemoth and bragged.

“The way it’s built, in 100 years it’ll look exactly the way it does today,” he said.

“Better,” said Dan Coyne, the new owner of the combination grill and meat smoker, made of solid black steel. He took delivery of the custom-built barbecue pit Tuesday.

The giant grill and a matching 7-foot-long pig smoker will stay outside his Route 202 restaurant, Little Dan’s Barbecue, until September.

Then he’ll move them 15 miles south to Lewiston. He’s scheduled to open his second restaurant on Main Street, taking over the space that’s been home to Fat City Grill.

Coyne has been in the restaurant business for about four years. Weary of working as a trucker, he began looking for a niche and discovered there wasn’t a lot of barbecue in Maine.

“Most Mainers don’t realize there’s more to it than hamburgers and hot dogs,” he said.

He already had six other cookers, but he decided he needed something special before expanding into Lewiston.

Enter Dave Klose, barbecue-maker to the stars. Klose is a regular on the Food Network, famous for hand-built Texas barbecue pits. He’s made pits for movie director Steven Spielberg and country music singers Tanya Tucker and Leanne Rimes.

He makes all the grills by hand, welding the steel plates, as well as painting and engineering the fire boxes and the massive trailers to carry them.

Coyne placed his order for the smoker in April. Klose said it took him two months to build it. He left his workshop in Houston last week with the trailer in tow, stopping in Connecticut to deliver a smaller version to winemaker Ted Rossi. He arrived in Monmouth on Tuesday afternoon.

Coyne was eager to break in the grill.

“Twenty minutes after I got here, he had it full,” Klose said.

That takes some doing. The pit has three smoking chambers each with three sets of racks about a yard square. It also has a 4-foot-tall chamber to hang meat for smoking and a slide-out steak grill.

“That’s for the hamburgers and the hot dogs everyone expects,” Coyne said.

He estimated the pit could feed up to 1,000 people.

It cost about $20,000. The smaller pig smoker, complete with a 6-foot-long rotisserie and its own trailer, cost another $7,000. It’s big enough to roast an entire side of beef on a spit.

He’ll use it for both restaurants, as well as making it available for catering to big events. He plans to keep the mammoth barbecue pit outside his new restaurant when he moves to Lewiston.

“It brings in all sorts of people,” Coyne said. “To me, this is a work of art. It works better than a sign.”