Editor's Note: This story was originally published by The Ithaca Voice.
DRYDEN, N.Y. -- Three local businesses have teamed up to give a new barbecue restaurant in Dryden a local flare.
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Brothers Chris and Sean O'Brien launched the restaurant after successfully running Lincoln Street Diner for 12 years, where they featured the barbecue menu for the past eight weeks or so.
"Down there they loved it. We got a great response," Chris O'Brien said.
The Grubbi Groks menu offers offers homemade classics -- brisket, pulled pork, wings and traditional sides such as macaroni and cheese, baked beans and collards.
Chris O'Brien said he thinks the hook for the restaurant is customer specialization -- with multiple homemade sauces, customers can decide between a range of sweeter sauces to more of a spicy blend.
His favorite menu items, though, are the chicken wings.
"They're marinated (for about 24 hours) and grilled and then we fry them, so, you know, it's not like you just pull them out of the freezer and fry them plain" he said.
Chris O'Brien finishes making a sandwich Wednesday night at his new restaurant Grubbi Groks in Dryden.
He said the restaurant launched both as a new business venture into barbecue and as a storefront for his brother's Groks RX Kitchen business.
Sean O'Brien and Tess Guckenheimer have owned the paleo meal-making business for about a year and have sold it at the Ithaca Farmer's Market and Cornell Farmer's Market, as well as making orders available online.
One of the Groks RX Kitchen meals delivered this week.
Also working with the restaurant is co-owner of Ithaca Kombucha Company Joey Durgin, who knows the O'Brien brothers from a gym he owns called Black Irish Athletics.
The barbecue and hot sauces are featured both for sale and in homemade sauces at the restaurant.
Durgin said the businesses teamed up as part of an effort to help cross promote each other.
Grubbi Groks is open 11-2 p.m. for lunch and 4-8 p.m. for dinner Monday through Saturday. The restaurant is closed on Sunday.
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