To survive, barbecue joints must play to their strengths
At lunchtime Wednesday, I stood in a dark and empty dining area at Tejas Chocolate & BBQ in Tomball, a space that in normal times would be filled with locals feasting on big trays of smoked meats offered by owners Scott and Greg Moore and Michelle Holland.
These are far from normal times.
That day, Montgomery County had ordered restaurants to close dining rooms in a plan to stop the spread of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.
These restrictions, though necessary for the greater good of the community, will be a deathknell for many restaurants, and possibly some Texas barbecue joints.
And yet failures are not inevitable. Barbecue has always had a unique place in the restaurant industry — specifically an operations model in which all the food is cooked beforehand and then assembled into plates and served during a compressed time frame, usually a lunch rush.
In normal times this model can be a weakness. The complaint most often heard by pitmasters happens in the early afternoon when all the food that was cooked the night before runs out and the dreaded “Sold Out” sign goes up.
“Why can’t you just cook more?” is the frequent refrain. But there is only so much space on the smoker, and cooking more is not possible without huge outlays on larger smoke rooms and additional, expensive smokers.
In current times, this operations model could be seen as a strength. Per local health authorities,
businesses are being asked to limit the number of employees working together, either through telecommuting — not an option for a barbecue joint, obviously — or staggering times when employees are in the workplace.
The barbecue model is ideally suited for this — a pitmaster team cooks overnight and then places the prepared food in holding bins for a separate daytime team to unpack and begin preparations for service.
Barbecue’s traditional counter service — where guests line up and place their orders in turn with an order-taker, then collect their order at another counter or window — can also typically be
seen as a weakness.
“I’m not standing in line for an hour,” is a common complaint among some diners.
But during a time when restaurants can only provide takeout, curbside and delivery services, restaurants that have perfected the counter-service model will consider it a strength.
Pushing out as much quality product as possible, to the most people possible, in the shortest time possible, is business-asusual for most barbecue joints; in times of pandemic, it can be leveraged to survive in even the most challenging of business environments like we have now.
The owners at Tejas recognized this early on and pivoted quickly. In order to accommodate a full-scale switch to to-go orders, Scott Moore completely swapped out their point-of-sale system to one that allows for online ordering, featuring online payments and orders sent directly to his serving line.
Instead of spending all their time manually taking orders and payments, his service crew is able to focus on expediting the fulfillment and delivery of orders. “That saved us,” said Moore.
It also helps that Tejas has a dedicated to-go counter, called Tejas To-Go, around the corner from the main restaurant. Moore has coned-off the street in front to accommodate curbside delivery.
Fortunately, Moore’s “if you build it they will come” strategy has worked so far. His usual clientele continues to show up and collect orders such that his sales numbers (for now) are similar to pre-pandemic days.
Undoubtedly, restaurants and barbecue joints face an existential threat from the pandemic. There’s no way to sugarcoat that, even with the sweetest of rubs. Some may choose to close temporarily, some permanently.
But for now, there is still hope that all barbecue joints can survive with the necessary adjustments. Because the greatest strength of Texas barbecue is that it is a comfort food for many. And comfort will be in great demand in the coming weeks and months.