They paid dues for 10 years. Working alongside each other, sweating and freezing inside a trailer parked on South Parkway. Despite those humble origins, Peppered Pig, run by married couple Shawn Duvall and Lacy Duvall, quickly made a mark with their clever, hearty and yum burgers and sandwiches.

“It was actually fun,” Shawn says now. “Honestly, like, it didn’t feel like 10 years. I’ve worked places that I’ve been there for a year, and it felt like 10 years.”

Opening December 2012, Peppered Pig grew their regulars and rep and got a boost in 2014 when Shawn won the first ever Rocket Chef cooking contest. In that Food Network-style showdown, which took place onstage in front of a sold-out Merrimack Hall crowd, Shawn bested contestants from three local upscale restaurants. His winning creation, a deconstructed peach pie. I was one of the judges that night. It was a surprising but thoroughly decisive upset.

As good as gentle-giant Shawn is with food, genuinely sweet Lacy is with people. At the Pepper Pig trailer, which was parked in front of an antiques retailer, she ran the window, took orders, treated customers like friends and helped grow the business’ regulars. Skills she’d honed managing CVS drug stores for 23 years, overseeing 11 stores at one point.

Finally, about three years ago, the Duvalls began looking for the right place to make the jump to a brick-and-mortar restaurant. They signed a lease right before the pandemic hit.

Slogging through all that, finally this January, Peppered Pig opened their restaurant, located in an L-shaped brick building, in a space next to Le Macaron pastries. It’s in Huntsville’s Jones Valley area, near the AMC Valley Bend 18 movie theater and the Target-anchored Valley Bend shopping center.

The Duvalls looked at possible locations elsewhere in Huntsville. But they didn’t want the regulars they’d connected with on South Parkway to have to drive a lot further. The fact a Redstone Arsenal gate wasn’t too far away from Jones Valley didn’t hurt either. It also helped they found a developer, John Blue, who treated them like friends not just business, the Duvalls say.

It all added up. The first day open, they did around 250 tickets, a galactic increase from business they were used to doing on the food trailer. Lacy says it was also a leap “to go from just me and Shawn’s communication to 20 different personalities [employees] all at one time.”

Even though the stakes and stress were much higher now, the loyalty of their longtime regulars and the big reception in Peppered Pig’s new digs was “very rewarding,” Lacy says. Shawn adds, “Finally to have an outcome … We tried two or three other times [to take Peppered Pig from food trailer to restaurant] that just didn’t work out. And this, everything just fell into place here. So we’ve definitely been blessed.

While I haven’t tried every hamburger in Huntsville, in 11 years covering the city’s food scene I’ve tried more than a few. If there’s a burger better than Peppered Pig’s bulgogi burger, we’ve yet to meet. It’s a seamless flavor-texture powerhouse. An eight-ounce burger marinated in Korean barbecue sauce, topped with a fried sesame sushi cake, kimchi, garlic mayo and grilled scallions on a soft-yet-stable ciabatta bun. Savory. Sweet. Meaty. Soft. Cohesive. Tremendous. In 2023, this kind of satisfaction for 14 bucks is rare.

Other menu have-to’s: The “knuckle sandwich,” a pesto-fried-onion-tomato-provolone-kissed pile of house-roasted roast beef. Another balanced, textural and tasty chomp. Twelve bucks.

Lots of unflashy organic details make Peppered Pig stand out. For example, their mac & cheese side, a blizzard-thick amalgam of Colby cheese and spiral pasta.

They do a salad elevated with marinated grilled yellow squash, zucchini, peppers and asparagus, sweet cherry tomatoes and fried onions. “Piggy Fries” remix a barbecue-joint style-loaded potato into crinkle-fry form. Shawn smokes the restaurant’s pork here with a mix of cherry, oak and hickory wood.

Shawn’s cooking style draws from his roots working in Orlando kitchens doing cuisine ranging from Asian and Jamaican to fine dining to catering. He developed an early interest in food from his mom, who was “an awesome cook” he says. “We rarely ate out. Our family didn’t have have that where it was, you know, dreading that you’re going to eat at home.”

Growing up, Shawn also loved cars. He started working at a young age at a Volkswagen machine shop. But after a year of coming home “nasty and greasy” from that job he’d had enough and decided “I’m going to go cook.” And that’s what he did, working his way through Orlando’s colorful restaurant scene. After the Duvalls moved to Huntsville, he worked for a local caterer before striking out on his own with the Peppered Pig food trailer.

Away from work, the Duvalls spend their times chasing their 4-year-old and dodging eyerolls from their teenage twins. Shawn and Lacy were high-school sweethearts and have been together 32 years now and married 25. So yeah, Peppered Pig is literally a mom-and-pop spot restaurant.

At home, Shawn likes to cook Italian and French cuisine. “Our kids are spoiled,” Lacy says with a laugh. Away from the kitchen, Shawn has maintained his lifelong interest in cars. He and his son have a vintage pickup they like to go off-roading in.

Peppered Pig’s focusing on lunch service to start off with, to simplify things and get everything tight, but dinner hours will be rolled out soon. There’s a back patio space, accessible via one of those roll-up garage doors popular are restaurants now, ripe with potential and nice views of the Jones Valley area.

In case you’re wondering what happened to the original Peppered Pig trailer, Shawn says it’s been sold to another North Alabama restaurateur who plans on doing fried catfish and chicken out of it, possibly at the same location, 11595 Memorial Pkwy. S.W.

On a recent afternoon, the 150-capacity or so Peppered Pig sky-blue-walled dining room is hosting a mix of suit-and-tie lunch-hour types, snow-haired retirees, some off-day service-industry and other unpretentious folks. There’s a U-shaped bar with craft beer on tap and domestic bottles in the cooler. A couple TVs overhead. The tables, chairs, stools and wall mounted pig logo are by Drop Metal’s Micah Gregg, whose work adorns other local faves like Oscar Moon’s Milkshake Shop, Earth and Stone Wood Fired Pizza and guitar-maker Tangled String.

On one wall in Peppered Pig’s dining room, there’s a mural depicting iconography inspired by the restaurant’s signature sandwiches. The sound system plays catchy/twangy classics by the likes of Steve Earle and Juice Newton.

Sitting there, crushing every molecule of my sandwich, it reinforced my belief a city’s culinary worth isn’t measured in fine dining apexes, as wow as those can be. It’s measured in local places easy to feel comfortable in, that serve tasty food everyday people can afford. Places like this.

Peppered Pig: 11 a.m. – 3 p.m. Tuesday – Saturday, 1305 Four Mile Post Road S.E., 256-270-8549, pepperedpig.net

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