Two UAE friends who met in security built a BBQ business: Now it’s firing up Taste of Abu Dhabi

Take two old friends, a country band, a childhood on a beef farm and one very rough drawing, and you end up, it turns out, with a barbecue business.

Hunter Burkall and Dave Kimmerly build smokers: heavy steel cookers that turn brisket tender over long hours of low heat and wood smoke. They design and build every one of them in the UAE. Ahead of Taste of Abu Dhabi, the two spoke about family, about friendship, and about the sketch that started it all.

The two have known each other for 20 years. "We are friends, and family, our kids have grown up with each other," explains Dave, adding that they are also godparents to each other’s children. They met through work in security consulting, as he says.

"You can tell, we're big fellas," laughs Hunter.

As they stand in their cowboy hats, it almost feels as if we're talking to brothers. They tease, they laugh and are brimming with anecdotes that all lead to their barbecuing journey. When Dave praises Hunter's guitar playing, Hunter grins: “Oh, now you’re making me blush.”

The guitar matters. Before there was any barbecue business, the two played together as a country band. The brand they eventually built, Exit 10 BBQ, still has some of that band’s energy. It stands for three things: Family, food and fun, as they say with much spirit and cheer.

The name comes from Hunter’s childhood. “Exit 10 is actually the highway marker for the country town that I grew up on,” he said. “I grew up on a beef farm.” There, cooking over fire wasn’t a hobby. It was how people lived. “I grew up cooking with fire, that was the culture and tradition and Dave has a very similar upbringing, so it was really easy for us to come together.”

The business itself began during the pandemic. Hunter was in Thailand with his son, and the two spent their days smoking briskets. His son loved it. When it came time to go home to the UAE, Hunter didn’t want those days to end. “So I wanted to make a smoker so that when I came back here, that we could continue to bond that way,” he said, “because that’s how I bonded with my father.”

He knew who could build it. “I needed the smartest engineer that I know and that happens to be Dave.” What he handed his friend was not exactly a blueprint. “I came to him with a drawing that looked like Homer’s drawing with a crayon,” Hunter said, laughing. “It was a horrible drawing.” Dave studied it, then looked up. “He looked at me and smiled, he’s like, what is this?”

Dave worked out what it was. He turned the sketch into a working design, and they built the smoker for Hunter’s backyard. Then, as Hunter tells it, Dave admired the finished smoker and had one more thought: “This is super great, I want one.”

That second smoker turned a favour into a company. Dave, who has lived in the UAE for 20 years, was set on keeping the whole operation in the country. “We wanted to do everything here in the UAE,” he said. They worked with local factories and fabricators rather than importing parts.

It is still just the two of them, but their smokers now go to Egypt, Saudi Arabia and beyond. Their lighter pieces weigh around 400 kilos of steel, and the largest weighs about 2.3 tonnes. "These things are bulletproof,” as they say. Both men still own the first smokers they built. “It’s an heirloom piece.”

As Hunter says, when you share a passion with people you love, “The sky’s the limit.”

Their path to Taste of Abu Dhabi came about by chance too. Frederic Casagrande, the UAE barbecue champion, asked them to build him a specialised grill, and that job led to a place at the festival. Now they look forward to the event 'every year like it’s a holiday because of all of these people.'

This year they are running two classes a day, and both are built around families. “We want people to bring their families and kind of watch and learn and ask questions and be curious,” they said.

It is how Hunter learned to cook from his father, and how he taught his son.