L. Drew Pumphrey spent years bouncing from job to job before finding his calling in a Christmas gift.
After his parents gave him a meat smoker one year, “this lightbulb went off in his head,” recalled his sister, Paige. Though he’d had no training as a chef, he became obsessed with barbecue, geeking out over different woods and the flavors they’d lend to meat, and recruited his mother to help make sauces. He traveled to North Carolina to explore its barbecue culture, bringing his findings home to Maryland.
He eventually opened The Smoking Swine food truck, which traveled around the Baltimore area before receiving a national spotlight on Guy Fieri’s “Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives.” During that time, he was “Peak Drew,” Paige said.
The larger-than-life pit master eventually left his business behind to pursue a quieter career as a civil engineer. He was in his office in Annapolis when he died Feb. 4 of a heart attack at the age of 48.
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His death shocked longtime friends from the hospitality industry, including Sarah Simington, who met Pumphrey when he was working as a bouncer at Max’s Taphouse in Fells Point, the same neighborhood as her Blue Moon Diner. “He was a big teddy bear,” Simington recalled of the barrel-chested man who stood around 6′3″ tall.
“He was such a huge personality and so positive — his energy was so good to be around,” recalled Chad Wells, chef at Walker’s Tap & Table. “He was the relentless barbecue man.”
His sister recalled how he pulled others into his orbit with his singular and larger-than-life persona. “Drew was who he was and no one could tell him different,” said Paige, calling her late brother “very boisterous” with “a flair for the dramatic.” His Facebook profile photo features his smiling face popping out from a barbecue window, his middle finger extended.
Born Linton Drew Pumphrey in Baltimore on May 13, 1976, he grew up in Glen Burnie and graduated from Glen Burnie High School. At 16, he got his first job in the food world: a stint at Burger King, he recalled in a podcast interview recorded in March 2020. “It was a pretty swift kick to the pants about how brutal the [restaurant] industry is,” he said.
In 2008, he married Karen (née Boyer), at a ceremony in Las Vegas. The couple welcomed a son, Fionn, who is now 20 and a sous chef working in Baltimore. Karen said she was drawn to her husband’s “sense of humor, his ability to make everybody comfortable” and his “amazing smile.”
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That warmth was on full display when Pumphrey became owner of The Smoking Swine. “He was in tune with his customers and just the plight of the human experience, the good and the bad,” Simington said. Pumphrey and Simington traveled together to feed U.S. troops at Great Lakes Naval Base in Illinois, where he used a huge paddle to make his signature mac and cheese.
Daniel Jacinto, who worked for The Smoking Swine food truck in 2014, said whether they were working at a crowded festival or an office park, Pumphrey had an ability to laugh off the most stressful of situations. “The man couldn’t be shook,” he said.
Showing off his dry rub recipe for celebrity chef Fieri on TV? Not a problem.
In 2021, Pumphrey opened The Hanover, a bar and restaurant in Baltimore’s Brooklyn neighborhood. Michael Roslan, owner of Diablo Doughnuts, said Pumphrey had already moved into the building when Roslan’s doughnut shop learned it would need to leave its previous location in Federal Hill. Always quick to lend a hand to friends in need, Pumphrey offered to share the space with Roslan. “It saved my business,” Roslan said. “He’s the reason there is still a Diablo Doughnuts.”
For two years before moving to its current home in Nottingham, Diablo Doughnuts ran out of a small wing attached to the bar. Pumphrey would stop in for a doughnut before getting to work making barbecue.
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Before opening The Hanover, Pumphrey was full of optimism for a beleaguered stretch of Hanover Street just a bit south of its eponymous bridge. He said that he would help make “Brooklyn the new Brooklyn.” But the hoped-for renaissance never happened, and Pumphrey became worn out working 80 to 90 hours a week. In early 2023, he closed the bar and sold off all his equipment, though he admitted that “it does absolutely crush my soul that I have to walk away from it.”
He later returned to what his sister Paige jokingly called “civilian life,” his career in civil engineering. While he was gutted by Pumphrey’s death, Roslan said he took heart in knowing that Pumphrey was happy with his decision to leave the food world. “It seemed like there was a lot of stress off his plate.”
Jacinto also credited the barbecue master with introducing him to his future wife, Ashley, who worked for the food truck, too. Pumphrey “knew that we were both funny and crazy, and not looking for anything serious,” Ashley said with a laugh. She and Daniel have now been married almost 10 years.
Ashley recalled how one year, just before Christmas, someone stole a star shower from their front yard that they’d been using to project red and green stars onto their home. Ashley had bought it as a present for Daniel, who had been wanting one for ages.
They couldn’t believe someone had been such a Scrooge as to nab it, and she posted about the theft on Facebook. Two days later, Pumphrey pulled up in his big huge maroon pick-up truck with a Christmas gift: a new star shower for their front yard.
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