Brewing success: SQZBX connects with community for Foody Friday
“It’s our approach to making food, to, you know, let the ingredients speak for themselves,” said Zachary Smith, who co-owns SQZBX Brewery and Pizza Joint with his wife, Cheryl Roorda.
Roorda and Smith met the previous owner of the building in 2007, back when it was a piano repair shop. Roorda said they bought the building, which took them about 10 years to fix up.
“The ceilings were falling in. It was beyond repair, some might say. But not me and Zach,” Roorda said.
In 2013, a filing window opened up for a low-powered FM radio station, Smith said.
“We had this building that we had been stabilizing but we hadn’t really gotten to work on with a serious goal in mind,” Smith said. “And it sort of fell together, this idea of putting in community radio with a brewery and a pizza joint to be, you know, a hub of the community.”
The building now holds what Smith said is the only solar-powered radio station in Arkansas, KUHS, owned by Low Key Arts and with Smith acting as general manager. The station is a variety format and has around 60 DJs, according to Smith.
“We try to keep the airwaves open for people to contribute on a community level and play music that isn’t going to be commercially viable on one of the bigger stations,” he said.
SQZBX itself opened in late December 2017, Roorda said, with a friend helpaing with recipes and getting the kitchen put together while Smith took over the brewery aspect. Roorda now acts as
general manager while Smith acts as brewer.
Smith said he has experience home-brewing, and as a youth, worked at a pizza joint where he learned how to make dough. It was a “real trial by fire,” he said, when he was promoted after working there for two weeks when their pizza maker quit.
“And so they come to me and say ‘OK, it’s your kitchen now, you do it all.’ And I was like ‘Well, that was an easy promotion,’” he said. “And so, for the rest of the summer, I did. I made all of the food that went out of that restaurant. And so it was a real trial by fire, but it certainly made me appreciate handmade pizza.”
The style he learned to make is what he calls “Jersey style.”
“We would hand roll our doughs overnight, ferment, a cold ferment. A little bit of sugar. We hand spin them. When it hits the hot stones, they’re cooked right on the stones, when it hits the hot stones we get a lot of spring off that dough, so that you get those thick, spongy, delicious-to-eat pizza crusts around the outside,” he said.
Roorda said she’s also been working in restaurants since she “could talk my way into my first waiting job.” What sets SQZBX’s food apart, she said, is the freshness and the quality of ingredients.
“We don’t cut any corners on that. We buy the nicest food that we can get and put it all together,” she said.
Smith said their theory is “get out of the way and don’t mess it up.” They make the doughs every morning, and their blue cheese dressing is made fresh and in-house.
“The shakers on the table, the Parmesan, we grind it on the grinder so that everything that comes in is a fresh, whole ingredient that we just get out of the way and let people enjoy it,” he said.
Smith said the same theory applies to their beers. He said he has a traditional approach to making beer, not using any extracts, flavorings, or concentrates. Though he said some may find it simple, it goes well with the food, and he said it’s such a clear, clean product, it won’t give you a hangover.
Roorda said they’re grateful to have continued support from the community during the trials of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“I know that everyone wanted to see us on the other side of this and I wanted to be here on the other side of this, and whoever could have imagined trying to run a business through that,” she said. “So thank you, Hot Springs.”
The following are excerpts from the interview with Cheryl Roorda and Zachary Smith, presented in a question-and-answer format:
Favorite meal?
Smith: I gotta tell ya, if you want to know what I eat most often here, it’s the garden salad with the blue cheese dressing. I just love it. And I can eat it again and again and again. You know, if you work around pizza every day and you eat pizza every day, you’re definitely going to show it. So I try to watch my diet like that. But, our salads are fresh; they’re handmade. That blue cheese was on a wheel just a couple hours ago. And I can eat that every day; I just love that.
Roorda: It’s true, he does. I, on the other hand, I enjoy having a Caesar salad and then I’ll get a Margherita pizza and then I can dip the crust in the dressing. So good. I could just do that all the time. I try not to. I try to just have, like, pizza Friday.
Smith: I will steal a slice of her pizza when she does that.
Favorite restaurant in the world?
Smith: Well, it’s interesting. … We used to play music as performing artists and we would sample a lot of restaurants and really appreciate what the differences were between them. After becoming restaurateurs, we find ourselves becoming more and more opinionated and perhaps. … Roorda: And enjoy it less. Smith: Perhaps being a little bit more critical. Especially as trying to compare food and service with what our ideal would be in our own restaurant. Having said that, I will just call out Steinhaus Keller here in town. We played music there for so many years, had a great time … I’ve had so many delicious German beers from that bar. I’ll call them out as one of my favorite restaurants of all time.
Roorda: Truly. I was going to say, and at the same time as being critical of restaurants, being completely compassionate at how hard it is to actually get everything to go right ever. If anyone ever has a good experience in a restaurant, it’s sort of a miracle.
Smith: It is, right?
Roorda: It just blows my mind how many details you have to attend to. So now I appreciate everyone’s constant comments and advice, but if you just had any idea how hard it is to make it all work, you would just be so grateful that you ever got food at all (laughing).
Favorite part of working in Hot Springs?
Smith: You know, with the radio station, starting out there, also having been musicians and knowing people as performers for a while, I just love people’s friendliness. I think it’s a really accessible town and people enjoy relating to us as people and they enjoy our story continuing from being performing artists to becoming entrepreneurs to perhaps graduating into straight-up capitalists, and people are really friendly and just love coming along that journey with us. And then that’s also paired with, of course, it being a tourist town and getting to meet all these other people from across the world and getting their reflections of how SQZBX fits into the greater restaurant scene.
Roorda: And I would say it’s just an easy place to do business. I mean, it’s easy to be here, everything is close by. Other business owners prop each other up. I appreciate that so much. The other brewery in town (Superior Bathhouse Brewery) is run by our dear friend Rose, and we are such a great team and we always help each other out. And I just can’t imagine having the same experience in a bigger area or a smaller area. I just, I love Hot Springs. Go-to comfort food?
Roorda: Macaroni and cheese, are you kidding? Absolutely, hands down. But baked, like, from scratch.
Smith: For me, it would be the pizza. It’s like, I’m having the lunches every day, but when I want that good hit, I’ll go get sausage and mushroom pizza.
Cheryl Roorda and Zachary Smith also shared their recipe for Blue Cheese Dressing with The Sentinel-Record.
4 cups crumbled blue cheese
3/4 cup buttermilk
1 1/2 cup sour cream
1 cup mayonnaise
1/4 cup olive oil
1/8 cup lemon juice
2 Tbsp Dijon mustard
1 1/2 Tsp black pepper Mix and enjoy.