Latest entertaining trend
going strong in St. Clair County
Story by Mike Bolton
Photos by Jerry Martin
Turn on the DIY Network or HGTV, and you don’t have to watch very long before you’ll see another outdoor kitchen under construction. A number of homeowners are now skipping the patios and decks that have long been a staple of home ownership in favor of elaborate outdoor kitchens designed to entertain family and friends.
That trend hasn’t bypassed St. Clair County. All across the county, builders are adding outdoor kitchens to the backyards of homes. Backyard tailgating has become the rage with many outdoor kitchens, hosting dozens of guests as college football teams play on television on Saturdays.
When Kenny St. John told his wife Jamie a decade ago about his dreams of building an outdoor kitchen, the fad was fairly new. She said she couldn’t even picture what he was talking about.
Today she is a fan. Their beautiful cedar-clad, outdoor pavilion in Springville gets used for everything year-round, she says.
“Kenny has a vision for things that I don’t have,” she said. “I didn’t realize just how much we would get out of it.”
Their facility has anything anyone could ask for. It overlooks a beautiful pond where Canada geese swim as white-tailed deer frolic nearby. In the background is towering Straight Mountain.
Their outdoor living pavilion includes a 55-inch big screen television and a sitting area where visitors can take in football games on Saturdays, Sundays and Monday nights. The cooking area has a Big Green Egg, a smoker, a gas grill and a cook top stove.
There is also a meadow where their kids and visitor’s kids can play football, an enormous outdoors fireplace with its own television and a large hot tub. Visitors can also fish for catfish in the pond if they like.
“This is where I live,” Kenny St. John said as he lounged in the outdoor kitchen with an NFL pre-season game playing on the big screen television. “I stay out here all the time.
“I always wanted something like this growing up. We use it year-round. We have the fireplace and propane heaters that will keep you warm late in the football season when the weather gets cold.”
The St. Johns’ backyard kitchen has understandably become the spot to be on football Saturdays and for family gatherings.
“I have six brothers and sisters and my mother lives in a garden home so we have the only place really big enough to have everyone on Thanksgiving,” Jamie St. John said. “We had my nephew’s rehearsal dinner here. A few weeks ago we had 75 people out here for my daughter’s birthday party.”
The entertaining is nice, but what would an outdoor kitchen be without food? Kenny St. John is the master chef for all events with his wife handling all the non-meat items. He cooks turkeys and hams for Thanksgiving, but it’s his barbecue, steaks and fish fries that draw rave reviews throughout football season.
“We cook a lot of pork butts and ribs,” he said. “My wife makes potato salad, fried green tomatoes and a lot of Rotel dip and a lot of hors d’oeuvres.”
If it’s a sport it gets watched at the St. John outdoor kitchen. There’s NASCAR, drag racing and NFL football, but it all hinges around college football on Saturdays. The St. Johns are big Alabama fans and most parties revolve around watching Crimson Tide games.
“We watch everything, including Wheel of Fortune, out here, but college football is what we live for,” Jamie St. John said.
Living in such a rural area does have its advantages for really rabid football fans, the husband and wife team agreed.
“We have a cannon that we fire every time Alabama scores a touchdown,” Kenny St. John said. “One of our neighbors said he doesn’t even have to watch the game because he knows every time Alabama scores.”
If you’re wondering why in the world someone with a 7,000-square-foot home would need an outdoor kitchen, you obviously haven’t seen the view from Johnny Grimes’ Pell City backyard. And besides, who wants 100 people milling around inside their home no matter how big it is?
Grimes’ outdoor kitchen, which overlooks Lake Logan Martin and Stemley Bridge, is headquarters for many Pell City area Auburn fans on football Saturdays. A crowd of 75 people on game day is not that unusual, and the record stands at 105. Crowds are so big in fact that those who arrive by vehicle must park in a designated area away from his home, and they are brought to the party in a 15-passenger van. Some choose to arrive via the Coosa River and park their boats in Grimes’ covered slips on the water.
Once there, visitors can watch Auburn on one of two big screen televisions at the lavish cypress bar in the outdoor kitchen, or they can listen to the game as they lounge around the 52-foot saltwater pool, which has a walk-in beach. The pool is surrounded by immaculately manicured gardens and fed by a waterfall.
Grimes, who owns Johnny’s Electric in Pell City, is the chef and he prepares ribs, chickens, hamburgers, steaks and crawfish boils from his $6,500 Viking gas grill that is located just feet from the 10-seat bar. The outdoor kitchen also has a freezer, refrigerator and deep fryer.
An air-conditioned and heated bathroom is located just off the flagstone patio of the kitchen.
“This keeps all the mess outside,” Grimes said. “We cook the main dishes in the outdoor kitchen, and the breads and all the sides are cooked in the house.
“People just feel more comfortable and enjoy being outdoors on game day. They can whoop and holler and mingle, and it is a lot more pleasant for them to be out here. I built this kitchen five years ago, and everyone just loves it.”
Fourth of July celebrations were huge at Don Farmer’s home when he was a boy growing up in Springville. Literally hundreds of people would show up over a two-day period to eat barbecue and celebrate Independence Day.
“I was born on July 3 so for the longest time as a kid I thought everybody was coming to my birthday party,” Farmer said with a laugh. “With my dad now gone, I now have great memories of all those family members and friends coming to our house like that.”
Farmer says it is those memories that spurred the building of his outdoor kitchen. He says it was a project that started out small, but he admits that it kept growing until it turned into a monster.
Farmer’s outdoor facility atop Simmons Mountain is indeed monstrous. The L-shaped structure is 30 feet by 40 feet on one side and has the same dimensions on the other. It is complemented with a swimming pool and a hot tub that seats 10 people.
It features beautiful brickwork arches and stamped concrete floors and countertops. A big-screen television is the focal point every Saturday during football season. The double pavilion is designed to entertain a lot of people and it does that whenever Alabama is playing on television.
“For some of the bigger games like Tennessee, it’s nothing to have 80 people here,” Farmer said. “We’ve had people we don’t know just be driving by and stop. They just say they see all the cars on Saturdays and wonder what is going on.”
Farmer is an excavator by trade. He says no engineers were involved in the massive project, and no plans were ever put on paper. He said it was “just all in my head. It all began when my granddaughter Chassidy said she wanted a swimming pool,” Farmer said. “I told her Nana would run down to Wal-Mart and get her one. She came inside a little while later and said she didn’t want that kind of pool. She said she wanted one in the ground.
“I started digging the next week.”
Farmer first built the pool and then decided to add a pavilion on the side so his mother and mother-in-law could get out of the sun. It would also serve as an area under the cover so he could grill.
“That was okay but my wife decided she wanted to enclose it and make it part of the house,” he said. “I decided I was going to have me a place where I could cook.
“My wife said if I would build it that she would take care of it. I got it in my mind what I wanted but I didn’t realize how big it was going to be until we actually started building it. It has about become a full-time job for my wife to take care of it now.”
Farmer says he did some research and got some very good advice early. “Somebody said don’t put anything into the construction of an outdoor kitchen that didn’t come from the earth. It’s almost all stone, brick and concrete – even the walls. The only wood in it are the gable ends and the exposed beams.”
Farmer loves kids, and he didn’t want a place where kids weren’t welcome. He says he made everything “kid friendly.” There is a playhouse, and parents can watch their kids in the pool and the hot tub from the raised kitchen that looks down on both.
The rules to attend a get-together at the Farmer’s outdoor kitchen are simple. You can bring a dish if you like, but Farmer and his son Heath provide the meat and do the cooking. Boston butts, pork ribs, different sausages and steaks are their specialty. The kitchen has a smoker, a broiler, a griddle, a stovetop, a grill and a barbecue pit.
When the weather cools late in the season, a fireplace keeps the area warm. Blinds can be lowered to keep everything cozy.
“We’ve had 140 people here on July 3 and about 80 the next day,” Farmer’s wife, Deniase, said. “We just stay up all night and celebrate Don’s birthday and July 4th.”
Farmer says his goals in building an outdoor kitchen were simple even though the final outcome was not.
“I wanted a place that would keep the foot traffic out of the house,” he said. “I wanted a place where somebody could spill a drink or drop a meatball on the floor, and it wasn’t a big deal.”
