Robert Pearson, who never lost his cockney accent through a career that began with combat service in the Royal Air Force followed by nearly two decades as an acclaimed hair stylist in London and New York, and that then took an improbable turn into Texas-style barbecue, where he earned renown as the best pit master north of the Mason-Dixon Line, died on July 8 at his home in Manhattan. He was 87.
His niece Gale Gand, herself a well-known pastry chef, said the cause was complications of Alzheimer’s disease.
Mr. Pearson opened his first restaurant, Stick to Your Ribs, in 1983, a time when most New Yorkers assumed it was enough to grill some meat and slather it with sauce to call something barbecue. Over the next 20 years, he showed them how wrong they were.
Though he lived on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, he chose to start in a rough-edged corner of Stratford, Conn., halfway between Stamford and New Haven. The rent was cheap, he said, which gave him the flexibility to hone his craft with exacting precision.
He purchased a $13,000 custom-made pit from Texas. He bought mesquite wood at $800 a cord, which he blended with local green oak (at just $110 a cord); after much experimentation, he found that a one-to-four ratio created the right balance of smoke from the mesquite and moisture from the oak to fuel the six- to 18-hour fires he needed to cook his meats.
Mr. Pearson was a purist: He insisted on wood, and only wood, as fuel. He cooked low and very, very slow. He eschewed rubs and sauces, letting flavor emerge from the meat and smoke. He specialized in brisket, the lodestar of Texas barbecue, but also offered half chickens, pork shoulder and the occasional exotic fare, like alligator, elk loin and rattlesnake.
With his location just off Interstate 95, he had no trouble drawing a lunchtime crowd from the office parks along the Connecticut coast. As word of his wizardry got out, diners came from as far as New York and Boston. Eventually he bought a mobile pit, on a trailer, which he took with him to pop-up events around New England and the Mid-Atlantic.
Having perfected his technique, he moved Stick to Your Ribs to Long Island City, Queens, in 1992. Again, his reputation blossomed — the Zagat guide called it “the best Texas barbecue pit east of the Mississippi.”
Tucked on a side street near the Queens-Midtown Tunnel, the restaurant, which he later renamed Pearson’s, became a pilgrimage site for the food obsessed. Aspiring cooks made the trip to pepper him with questions, learning at the pit of the master before starting their own barbecue restaurants in an efflorescence of grilled meat that overtook New York in the 2000s.
“Pearson’s was a place of great import to the community,” said Matt Fisher, who worked the pit at renowned New York barbecue joints like Rub, Fletcher’s and Dinosaur. “It was elusive, remote, small, and all that added to its gravitas.”
Robert John Pearson was born on Nov. 5, 1936, in London, within earshot of the bells of St. Mary-le-Bow Church, making him a true cockney, according to the unofficial rules of city folklore. His father, Robert, and his mother, Emily (Hartley) Pearson, were nurses.
He joined the Royal Air Force in 1953; based in Cyprus, he trained guard dogs and saw brief combat during the Suez Crisis in 1956. After returning to civilian life in London, he ran a candy shop.
But he soon grew bored of the shopkeeper’s life. He enrolled in the London School of Fashion to study hair styling and graduated in 1961. His first job was as a trainee with Vidal Sassoon.
Mr. Pearson timing was perfect: London was just beginning to emerge as a global center of 1960s hipness, and he was working in the storied salon whose bob and five-point cuts would help define the Swinging Sixties.
He cultivated a roster of wealthy clients, one of whom owned a salon in Bermuda and persuaded him to move to the island in 1964. There, he met Greta Anne Grossman, whom he married in 1966.
She survives him, as does his sister, Jean Sessa.
The Pearsons settled in New York. Mr. Pearson’s reputation was such that he snagged a coveted chair in the salon of Kenneth Battelle, whose client list of movie stars, first ladies and Manhattan grandes dames earned him a reputation as the first celebrity hairdresser.
Mr. Pearson later teamed up with an investor to operate a chain of salons inside Bloomingdale’s department stores. And in 1972 he joined with Paul Mitchell, another Sassoon alumnus, to open a Manhattan salon called Superhair.
By the end of the 1970s, Mr. Pearson was growing tired of the stylist’s life, in particular the long trips around the country to train stylists and speak at industry conventions. He did enjoy visits to one city, though: Lubbock, where he first encountered Texas-style barbecue.
Mr. Pearson had long enjoyed cooking, and he soon latched onto the idea of making it a new career.
“There’s no such thing as a good old hairdresser,” he told Newsday in 1994. “I wanted to get into the food industry. Ten years ago there was a great interest in regional food. I looked at pizza, which has been done and done very well. One that wasn’t done well was barbecue.”
After establishing himself in Queens, Mr. Pearson tried to open an outlet in Manhattan, which he supplied with food cooked in Queens. But he found that the cooked meat lost its zing during the drive across the East River, and in any case the space caught fire a few days after opening.
In the late 1990s, he stepped back from his restaurant, not long before it lost its lease under pressure from neighbors who, despite loving his food, were less enamored with its constant, thick smoke.
He returned in 2003 with an Upper East Side venture on 81st St., also called Pearson’s. Though it came with strong backing, including the veteran restaurateur Ken Aretsky, and a state-of-the-art smoke-scrubbing system, it closed after a few years.
While many young pit masters looked to Mr. Pearson as a mentor, few chose to follow his near-religious devotion to an austere interpretation of Texas barbecue, and in particular his aversion to sauce.
Conceding to consumer tastes, he did offer a quartet of sauces as an accompaniment: mild, medium, “madness” and “mean,” which he said, with some disdain, was a further concession to “macho” diners who insisted that real barbecue had to be wet and spicy. Mean, made with a pile of Szechuan peppercorns, gave them what they wanted, and more.
“When I’m making that sauce at the store, I’ve got to make sure it’s very quiet, and nobody else is around,” he told Newsday. “It’s very volatile. Mean is not really meant for human consumption.”
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