What Time Tastes Like at Flavorsmyth BBQ

A tiny Christmas smoker, a sauce that needed a workaround and a missed stop in Texas led Caleb and Riah somewhere they never planned to go. Along the way, Flavorsmyth became a Clark County barbecue story about patience, family and the hours behind every plate.

By Prash Gunda

Caleb and Riah have a small disagreement about the smoker that started everything.

Riah calls it “a joke of a smoker.” Caleb says that without it, none of this happens.

It is the kind of disagreement a relationship can comfortably survive, mostly because they are both right.

The Green Mountain Grills Davy Crockett was a compact travel smoker that Riah gave Caleb for their first Christmas together, exactly enough machinery for a man who does not seem to know how to have a casual interest.

Caleb is the cook and founder behind Flavorsmyth BBQ, the Clark County pop-up known for Central Texas-style brisket and menus that occasionally wander into longanissa sausage, curry potato salad or Korean-inspired chimichurri. Riah is his girlfriend/partner, first audience, menu sounding board and, at pop-ups, the woman certain dogs find for off-cuts.

Caleb jokes that much of Flavorsmyth may be one long attempt to convince Riah that he is cool. Like most good jokes, it is funny because there is something true underneath it. Her opinion matters to him. Her time matters to him. And the little smoker she gave him eventually changed the rhythm of their home.

Maria and I have eaten Flavorsmyth several times at Recluse Brew Works. What reaches the table feels easy: brisket that bends before it breaks, something bright and pickled, a side that tastes like Caleb followed an idea farther than most people would.

The work has already disappeared into the food by then.

A brisket may have taken 12 to 18 hours. The pickled onions contain 14 ingredients. The plate can be gone in minutes.

That exchange, hours of someone’s life turned into a brief moment for someone else, is at the center of Flavorsmyth. Time tenderizes the meat, gives Caleb room to chase an idea and slows down a table. It is also the one ingredient the business cannot make more of.

Before It Had a Name

Caleb spent 18 years in a regular 9-to-5. When he and Riah came together, they were also blending their families, raising young girls and settling into the rhythm of workdays, dinners and weekends.

Food had always been part of how Caleb understood that comfort.

He moved around a lot as a child. Money was limited, but something was usually cooking. When relatives visited, his mother prepared for days. Caleb remembers the aroma accumulating around the house and the meal feeling like a reward for all the hours spent waiting for it.

“It was a reward after spending the whole day smelling it,” he said.

His father made burgers thoroughly well-done. His grandfather left a different impression.

At his grandparents’ cabin on Loon Lake, north of Spokane, the family would gather while his grandfather smoked freshly caught lake trout in a Big Chief smoker. Caleb remembers the smell, the people and the feeling around it so clearly that he has never wanted to smoke fish himself. He is afraid a new version might crowd out the old one.

“I love that smell so much that I’m afraid to smoke fish on my own and cover up the memory,” he told me. “I don’t ever want to forget it.”

That may be the earliest clue to the cook he became. Caleb is interested in flavor, of course. But the meals that stay with him are rarely just about flavor. They hold the room, the people in it and the anticipation before everyone finally eats.

In 2014, another meal rearranged something in him.

Caleb went to Texas intending to visit Franklin Barbecue. He never made it there. Instead, he landed in a nearly empty bar with around 30 seats. The sides were plain. The room did not arrive with the mythology of a famous barbecue line. Then he tasted the brisket.

“That brisket did something to me,” he said.

He remembers thinking that if brisket could be this good in a place like that, there was an entire world of barbecue he did not understand yet.

Texas made sense as his way in. Caleb preferred beef and chicken to pork, and the style looked simple while leaving nowhere for the cook to hide. Meat, smoke, heat, salt, pepper, time. Sauce will not rescue bad decisions.

The Workaround That Took Over

The Davy Crockett arrived after that Texas trip and gave Caleb a place to start.

His first pork shoulder developed a good bark and stayed moist. That was enough. Soon the little smoker was being asked to handle brisket, wings, whole chickens, turkeys, burgers and even a blackberry-habanero cheesecake. Riah had given him a travel smoker. Caleb treated it like an open-ended research grant.

Not every experiment deserved a repeat. A batch of flanken-cut short ribs once emerged looking convincing and eating like jerky. Caleb calls it “a successful bad magic trick.” His family did not request an encore.

Failures gave Caleb another problem to solve. Once curiosity takes hold, he keeps worrying at an idea until he understands it, or until the household has eaten enough test versions to stage an intervention.

Flavorsmyth, however, was not originally supposed to be a barbecue business. It was supposed to sell sauce.

Caleb had developed a cherry sauce for brisket. Then came the less romantic details of putting sauce in a bottle: pH testing, regulations and the practical distance between making something good and being allowed to sell it.

He needed people to taste the sauce as he intended it, so he made the brisket to go with it.

“The whole point was to do sauces,” he said. “I needed a workaround.”

Barbecue was the workaround. Barbecue became the business.

The name came from another part of Caleb’s life. At his old job, he had been called “Wordsmith,” a reference to the jokes and verbal turns produced by his fast-moving ADD brain. “Flavor Smith” seemed appropriate for the sauce company. He replaced the i with a y because he preferred the way it looked and assumed no one else would have thought to copyright it.

The spelling complicates pronunciation. It also describes the food surprisingly well.

The Long Work of Making Something Feel Familiar

Caleb calls his style “inspired barbecue.” The word inspired matters. Flavorsmyth is Texas barbecue at its center: brisket cooked low and slow, meat moving through an offset smoker, occasional direct-coal cooking and a cook learning to read what is happening beyond a number on a thermometer.

The international influences live around that center, not in place of it.

There has been Puerto Rican-inspired pulled pork, Texas- and Filipino-inspired longanissa sausage, tri-tip with Korean-inspired chimichurri and chili crisp creamed corn. Curry potato salad came from the extremely relatable problem of wanting curry and brisket at the same time.

Caleb does not stack ideas onto a plate until the barbecue disappears. He wants recognizable food that still stops someone after the first bite.

That balance is easier to understand through two numbers. The brisket uses four ingredients. The pickled onions use 14.

The meat asks for restraint. Everything around it can carry a little more of Caleb’s restlessness.

The brisket also asks for judgment. Each animal ate differently, moved differently and carried its muscles differently. A probe can tell Caleb the temperature. It cannot tell him what to do with everything he feels through his hand.

“Temperature is a number, not a decision,” he said.

At home, Caleb estimates that cooking can be 70 percent recipe and 30 percent instinct. At a pop-up, instinct takes a larger share. One brisket may not behave like the last. Chicken skin can turn beautiful in smoke, then rubbery in a warming cabinet. Caleb still has to send out food he believes in.

Even the sides have demanded their own long education. Mac and cheese took him longer to settle than almost anything else. His four-cheese blend includes smoked Gouda and Beecher’s white cheddar. Texas chili surprised him in the opposite direction: 50 servings vanished in 55 minutes.

The curry brisket sandwich arrived as an idea while he was working in his car. That detail feels right. Flavorsmyth dishes do not appear after Caleb sits down and announces that it is time to innovate. They interrupt him. Then they occupy him.

Years before the pop-ups, Caleb and Riah shared a board at Olympia Provisions, cured meats, pâté, cheeses and pickled vegetables. They both had what Caleb calls “a moment.” The food made the room fall away for a beat.

That is the standard he carries into a brewery pop-up. People are eating out less often. If someone spends part of an evening and a paycheck on his food, Caleb wants to give them more than proof that he can smoke meat.

He wants a moment.

The First Time Clark County Showed Up

Flavorsmyth’s first public pop-up was Taco Tuesday at Recluse Brew Works on August 20, 2024.

Caleb was terrified.

Cooking for family allows for mercy; a mistake can become a holiday story. Strangers have paid you, and Caleb worried they might say the food was good because that was easier than saying it needed work.

Then Flavorsmyth sold out, and people asked when he would be back.

The fear did not vanish. Caleb says that before large pop-ups he can still be “dying inside.” The difference is that he now knows what sometimes waits on the other side of it: a line, a returning family, a regular bringing a friend, a face changing after a bite.

There were harder lessons, too. At Caps & Taps, the mac and cheese refused to stay warm the way he wanted. At A Little Vice in downtown Vancouver, the first SmythRib event arrived with torrential rain. Caleb expected the patio to empty. Instead, roughly twice the previous crowd showed up.

Breweries and taprooms have given Flavorsmyth room to become itself in public. Recluse, A Little Vice, Caps & Taps, Brothers Cascadia, Brewing Bridges and Portland events have connected Caleb and Riah with owners, cooks, regulars, families and dogs who know exactly where Riah stands.

Caleb has lived in Clark County since 1996. He has watched it grow busier, and the experience he wants to create pushes gently in the other direction. Get a drink. Eat something that took time. Stay with the people you came with. Let dinner become the evening instead of an obstacle between one thing and the next.

Maria and I have felt that at Recluse. The beer helps. The barbecue helps more. But what makes it work is the permission to stay.

The Hours Have to Come From Somewhere

A sold-out sign is easy to romanticize.

To a customer, it means the food was popular. To Caleb, it represents the work people never saw: trimming, tending the smoker, timing the hold, making sauces and pickles, packing the event and predicting demand.

“They don’t see how hard it was to get the things there that people who showed up earlier got to enjoy,” he said.

He is not scolding the person who arrives after the brisket is gone. He knows why they are disappointed. But barbecue cannot be restarted and ready in 20 minutes. Once it is gone, the day has reached its natural end.

Sometimes that ending gives Caleb and Riah enough evening to take the children for ice cream or cookies.

That detail carries more weight than it first appears to.

When I asked what Flavorsmyth had cost him, Caleb did not begin with money or sleep. He talked about family time.

“Everything I do for this business costs doing something with her,” he said of Riah.

Every menu test, prep day and pop-up occupies hours that could have belonged to their home, their weekends or their children. When Caleb’s 13-year-old daughter moved across the country, the passage of time stopped being abstract. He had to reckon with how much of it had already gone by.

He did not turn that realization into a grand speech. He said he needed to be a better family man. He wanted to be more present with his other children.

There is a painful symmetry in it. Riah gave Caleb the smoker that opened this life to him. The life it opened has sometimes taken him away from her.

Flavorsmyth has made Caleb a better cook. It has made him a better communicator and problem-solver. He has learned how to recover when an event goes wrong, how to listen to feedback and how to stand behind the food. He loves seeing a crowd, the families, the regulars and the dogs. He loves the look on someone’s face when a dish lands.

He has learned how long to wait on a brisket.

He is still learning when the people he loves should not have to wait.

The Detour

Caleb can see a larger Flavorsmyth ahead: a kitchen of its own, perhaps a brick-and-mortar, weekend service with Riah, a good staff and room to build catering. He still wants to bottle the sauces that began everything.

The dream has not become smaller. It has become more honest.

When I asked Caleb what he would call this chapter of his life, he chose The Detour.

“Sometimes a detour isn’t about ending up somewhere different,” he said. “Sometimes it’s about learning enough along the way to appreciate where you’ve been and to see how far you can go with it.”

Almost nothing arrived by the expected route. Caleb went to Texas for Franklin and found his life-changing brisket in a nearly empty bar. He tried to sell sauce and ended up selling meat. Riah gave him a tiny smoker, half joke and half Christmas gift, and it grew into work across Clark County.

The next time Maria and I find Flavorsmyth at Recluse, we will come for the brisket. I will probably order whatever side sounds least likely to have occurred to anyone else. But I will also see what is harder to put on the menu: Riah’s gift, Caleb’s obsession, the family meals that formed him, the hours behind the smoke and the evenings they are trying to take back.

The first smoker was small. What it set in motion was not.

And while Caleb is the person most people see, the cook standing in the smoke, watching the brisket and following each restless idea, he is very clear that Flavorsmyth was never carried by him alone.

Riah is a mom of two with a job of her own. She helps keep Flavorsmyth moving while still being the person everyone in their home can count on at a moment’s notice. That kind of work may never appear on the menu, but it is present in every plate that leaves Caleb’s hands.

“More than anything, I want to make sure Riah gets the appreciation she deserves,” Caleb told me.“Riah is the backbone to me, our family and to Flavorsmyth. She’s the magic. I’m just the cook.”

Where to Find Flavorsmyth BBQ

Flavorsmyth is a rotating pop-up across Vancouver, Clark County and Portland, with frequent appearances at Recluse Brew Works in Washougal. Follow @flavorsmythbbq for current menus and dates.

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Taste Flavorsmyth’s Next Detour at Recluse

If you made it this far wondering what Caleb’s “inspired barbecue” looks like when another cook brings an equally restless idea to the fire, you will not have to wait long.

On Saturday, August 22, 2026, Quevin Food will make its pop-up debut alongside Flavorsmyth BBQ at Recluse Brew Works. The long-awaited Nem Nuong Glizzy leads a menu that also includes a curry chicken glizzy, Viet meatball sub, charred kale salad and salted coconut cheesecake, all cooked over Thaan charcoal.

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It feels like a fitting place to continue this story: a first-time pop-up, a familiar brewery and a menu that refuses to stay inside one neat category. Maria and I have enjoyed Flavorsmyth at Recluse more than once. If you have been waiting for the right day to try Caleb’s food, or you simply need to know what a Nem Nuong Glizzy tastes like, this is a very good reason to go.

Saturday, August 22, 2026 | Noon–4 p.m. | Recluse Brew Works, 4035 Grant St., Suite 102, Washougal

Pop-up menus are made in limited quantities, so arriving closer to noon than 4 p.m. is the safer move. Follow @quevin_food and @flavorsmythbbq for updates.