In his two-bedroom apartment on Jamesville Road, roughly three miles from Manley Field House, Derrell Smith finally found the breakthrough he was looking for. It was about 2 a.m., but he called his best friend Bruce Williams.

“Yo, come over,” Smith remembered telling Williams. “We got a winner.”

Judging by the tone of Smith’s voice, Williams knew it was serious. It was 2013, roughly one year since Smith retired from the NFL. Williams rushed over to Smith’s apartment, dipped a meatball into sauce, and indulged.

“I’m going to sell this one day,” Smith said as his former Syracuse teammate’s eyes lit up with delight.

Smith never writes down recipes, but he never forgot what he put in the “OG sauce” he and Williams refer to today; the sauce that propelled Smith into the culinary industry, one that’s a “sweet, spicy, creamy vodka-less vodka sauce.”

Five years later, as a viral chef for Tastemade, social justice advocate, CEO and successful meatball caterer, Smith is combining the entrepreneurial instincts and culinary imagination he developed at Syracuse.

“I’m a hustler that can cook,” he quipped.

***
Growing up in West Philadelphia, Smith always watched his mom cook. She let him lick the cake bowls when she baked, which “sparked my interest,” he said. Smith cooked his first meal for his family when he was seven years old — pork chops, which he burnt.

“Food is much bigger than food, it’s a way for me to spread love,” Smith said. He thinks of food as a device to connect people — a “spiritual fulfillment” as well as a physical one.

While Smith was in high school, he moved out of the “hood of West Philly,” to Delaware, where he was named the state’s 2006 Gatorade Player of the Year as a running back and middle linebacker.

At Syracuse, Smith led the Orange to a Pinstripe Bowl victory in 2010, his redshirt senior year. That year, Smith made 114 total tackles and forced three fumbles, earning second team all-Big East honors.

“He was definitely the captain of the team for a reason,” Smith’s former SU teammate Robert Nieves said. “When he spoke, the whole team listened … It didn’t matter what class, whether you were a freshman or a junior, we all looked up to him.”

Smith’s affinity for the culinary arts persisted through college. After football practices, Smith went to the grocery store and experimented. Smith couldn’t go home for Thanksgiving because of football, so he cooked for his teammates.

Susie Teuscher | Digital Design Editor

Smith excelled in cooking meatballs, and became “addicted” to trying to perfect the sauce to compliment them.

“Meatballs became the vessel that I was the creator and this is the way I give a piece of me,” Smith said. “The meatballs, you taste them, man, and they come from my soul. I put a lot of work into them, and love. And that’s how I spread it.”

But cooking remained a hobby through college, as meatballs took a backseat to football.

He graduated from Syracuse with a dual degree in information management and technology and marketing, and signed with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers as an undrafted free agent. Halfway through his rookie season, the Buccaneers released Smith, but he found a new home with the Houston Texans.

In the summer of 2012, Smith returned to Syracuse to finish up a few classes and begin his master’s degree in advertising at the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications. By the time training camp came back around, he landed back in Houston.

Throughout training camp with the Texans, Smith was starting on each special teams unit and was the first string fullback, a new position for him.

Then, one summer night, Smith woke up to go to the bathroom and collapsed because of a swollen knee. The first thing that came to his mind was how to disguise the injury in practice to maintain his spot on the depth chart.

“As soon as that thought came to my mind, I knew I was doing this for the wrong reasons,” Smith said. “I no longer love this … That’s when it came to my mind: ‘I don’t need football.’”

But Smith continued to play through the discomfort. Three weeks later, he hit somebody in practice, helmet-to-helmet, with his head angled down. He suffered a compressed fourth vertebrae. To this day, it hurts to turn his head and he can’t sleep with pillows. A NFL career he no longer wanted was over.

Smith returned to SU again to earn his master’s degree in advertising, which led to a job at R/GA, an advertising agency in New York City. While earning his master’s degree, Smith discovered the “OG sauce.”

As he worked in New York, Smith continued to experiment with food, especially meatballs. In 2016, Smith entered the Brooklyn Meatball Takedown, a meatball cooking competition, and won.

***

In 2016, Smith applied to run a pop-up stand at Smorgasburg in Brooklyn, the largest weekly open-air food market in America. Using advertising and marketing skills he learned at Syracuse, his pitch impressed. 99Eats, Smith’s food company, was born.

His boss at R/GA allowed Smith to work from home on Fridays, letting him to prepare his meatball stand for the weekend markets. Every Friday, Smith woke up at 5:00 a.m. and rolled 1,000 meatballs. With the help of his sister and fiancée, Smith rolled meatballs from 6:00 a.m. until 1:00 a.m. the next day.

“I sit in there, I have my headphones on, and I’m just in the zone,” Smith said. “It’s just like football in the sense that you become so engulfed and focused on the task at hand, that everything else around you doesn’t matter.”

Taking his approach from the gridiron and applying it to the kitchen led to weekly sellouts at Smorgasburg. Whatever he had left over at the end of each day, he’d bring to the nearest shelter, an act of spreading love.

Courtesy of Derrell Smith

On April 12, 2017, R/GA cut Smith’s department and laid him off with no severance package, and Smith had “little money” because he’d put each paycheck back into his groceries. Smith called his mother.

“Look, I’ve never failed at anything in my life,” he remembered telling his mom, “and I don’t think this will be different.”

Smith built a reputation as a chef at Smorgasburg. In addition to his meatball stand, Smith worked full-time as a caterer. One month after getting fired from R/GA, he catered their office lunch.

More catering opportunities arrived when Nieves, his former SU teammate, reached out to him from Fooda, a catering company for technology companies like Facebook and LinkedIn. While catering, Smith also worked as the resident chef at a local Bed Bath and Beyond, where he learned how to produce a cooking show with a live audience.

He uploaded the Bed Bath and Beyond cooking videos to his YouTube channel, which caught the attention of Tastemade, a premium food content platform. As a contributor to Tastemade, he’s made several viral videos — 9,000 views for his meatball parmesan cups, 7,200 for his “Bomb A$$ Breakfast Burritos” and 6,700 for recreating The Rock’s protein pancakes.

His most-viewed video was inspired by his time at Syracuse. In college, Williams used to make ramen noodles and Smith would fry hot dogs in brown sugar. Now, 15,000 people have seen Smith recreate a go-to college meal.

Smith has also made a web series with Disney. In one video, he makes avocado toast in the shape of an alien from Toy Story with aspiring chef Atticus, who orders him around the kitchen.

Making money has always been on Smith’s mind, but he founded 99Eats with a loftier goal: to connect others through food. Through his company, Smith organizes a monthly event called The Salon, where he encourages strangers of different backgrounds, religions and heritages to come together and discuss social issues in a friendly, dinner-table environment. Once Smith serves dinner, people converse civilly as food fades into the background.

When people eat his meatballs, Smith wants them to feel transported back to their childhood, an act of nostalgia inspired by a scene in the movie Ratatouille. He rebranded his meatball company as Amazeballs.

Smith dreams of opening an Amazeballs stand or restaurant on Marshall Street, he said, “because that’s where it all started.”

“I don’t have any food experience, I’m just a hustler,” Smith said. “I just figured out how to connect the dots. And I used my West Philadelphia upbringing, and just my Syracuse grit.”

Published on January 13, 2019 at 10:46 pm

Contact Danny: dremerma@syr.edu | @DannyEmerman