Ask Ron Stoloff ’80 how a Lehigh accounting graduate ended up running a successful restaurant, and he’s got a ready answer.
“I’m a lousy employee but a great employer,” quips Stoloff, a co-owner of Blue Ribbon Barbecue, which has four locations in suburban Boston. The restaurant’s original location in West Newton, Massachusetts, is celebrating its 30th anniversary this year.
It specializes in barbecue lovers’ favorites like pulled pork, brisket, ribs, and burnt ends, accompanied by side dishes, all made from scratch with no artificial ingredients. Whole Foods markets in and around Boston carry its North Carolina-style barbecue sauce.
“If somebody had asked me, ‘What are you going to be doing 30 years from now?’ there’s no way I would have known that I was going to be running a 150-person operation of restaurants in multiple locations and sauces that are on the shelves of Whole Foods markets,” he says.
Stoloff says the transition from accountant to restaurateur grew from a desire to be his own boss.
“I came to Lehigh with the understanding that an accounting degree was going to give me the basis of understanding how businesses work. I always had an entrepreneurial bent,” says Stoloff, who remembers selling candy bars to classmates in middle school. “When I came back to the Greater Boston area, I did start working for CPA firms, but it became very clear to me that I’m not good at working for other people. That was not going to be my life.”
Quick Service, Quality Food
The idea of opening a restaurant was proposed by Chris Janowski, a friend who would become his business partner. They met through their wives, who worked together at Ocean Spray, the cranberry company. He remembers Janowski asked if he was happy doing accounting. “He said, ‘I’ve got this idea.’ And he basically took the bar napkin and sketched out the idea for Blue Ribbon,” Stoloff recalls. Janowski had spent several years living in Virginia and North Carolina, where he saw the popularity of barbecue. At the time, there were few barbecue restaurants in Boston and virtually none in the rapidly growing suburbs surrounding the city.
Patterning itself after a popular regional chain, Boston Chicken — which later became Boston Market — Blue Ribbon followed “a quick service concept,” Stoloff explains. It emphasizes takeout meals featuring quality food for families wanting to avoid typical fast food burgers and fries.
Stoloff continued being an accountant while his partner quit his job as a film editor, attended culinary school, and gained experience working for Boston-area celebrity chef Chris Schlesinger, who had a barbecue restaurant. Janowski’s brother, Geoff, who had worked in the restaurant industry, joined them as they opened their West Newton location in 1995. The village was chosen, Stoloff says, because it was the only place willing to let them have a smoker for their meats. The idea was unknown in Boston in the ’90s.
At first, Stoloff’s role was behind the scenes. “I was the business guy who made sure all the bills got paid, the taxes got filed, and the employees got paid,” he says.
He had planned to keep working in his accounting job, but that soon changed. “It took over my life pretty quickly. It felt like I was living in the restaurant, working 14-16 hours a day.”
He says he washed dishes and swept floors on his way to success. Today, he still personally delivers the bottled barbecue sauce sold at Whole Foods.
Best of the South
Blue Ribbon’s menu features barbecue from different regions. “What we like to think we’re doing is picking the better versions of barbecue scattered around the great South of this country,” Stoloff says.
That includes North Carolina-style pulled pork in a vinegar-based recipe, a Texas take on brisket that is rubbed with spices, and St. Louis ribs. Side dishes include mashed potatoes, collard greens, and macaroni and cheese.
“We make it ourselves every day, all from scratch,” he notes, adding that he prides himself that the meats are smoked using real oak and hickory hardwood, not wood pellets or other substitutes.
After launching the West Newton location, the partners opened a second one three years later in Arlington, Massachusetts. Locations in Dedham and at a kiosk in the Time Out Market in the Fenway area of Boston followed.
“We have beat all the odds,” Stoloff says. “We’re still standing after recessions and pandemics and all the various economic and other factors that go into making or breaking businesses of all types. … Most restaurants don’t make it five, let alone 30 years.”
He credits much of his restaurant’s success to its employees. “I told you that I’m a lousy employee but a great employer. I treat the people who work for me as family. They’re the ones who make my success,” Stoloff says.
