Barbecue business not always smokin’
Texasstyle brisket, Kansas Citystyle ribs, Alabamastyle chicken — the Bay Area might not be known for barbecue, but local pitmasters are bringing the tradition of smoked meat with regional flair to new restaurants, ambitious popups and beloved standbys. They’re chopping their own wood, nurturing their smokers and treating barbecue as a craft.
Yet Bay Area pitmasters say the barbecue scene is having trouble truly flourishing. That’s primarily due to the challenges of finding brickandmortar spaces. While it takes time and resources to open any restaurant, a barbecue operation is its own unique beast.
Unless a pitmaster finds a space that used to be a barbecue restaurant, it would likely require a full buildout costing hundreds of thousands of dollars since a large smoker —
potentially 20 feet in length — is required, as is an extralarge kitchen.
Alternatively, the smoker could sit outside if there’s a patio or parking lot, but chefs have recently become extra wary of going that route because of two words: KC’s BBQ.
After a fire ravaged the 51yearold Berkeley restaurant in 2017, KC’s BBQ moved into a former brunch spot in northwest Berkeley. It took the family owners a year to find the new space, and several more months to get through permitting, before the restaurant reopened last summer.
Then neighbors started complaining about the smoke and smell coming from the outdoor smoker.
Thirdgeneration owner Kristen Davis said she responded to neighbor complaints by adding an extra filter, installing a fan and raising the smoke stack, a device that ushers smoke high into the air. It wasn’t enough. Those complaints made their way to the city of Berkeley, and officials started inspecting the restaurant.
In December, KC’s BBQ received a ceaseanddesist letter from the city, instructing the family to stop operating the smoker. Without the smoker, there would be no barbecue — and without barbecue, no restaurant at all.
“You could have picked us up off the floor after we read that,” Davis said.
Davis appealed. In the meantime, the city is paying for mediation between KC’s BBQ and neighbors, which is scheduled for July 9.
“We want there to be a solution that can work out for both sides,” said city spokesperson Matthai Chakko.
Davis doubts anything will come of the mediation — she said there’s nothing more she can do about the smell. “At the end of the day, people could complain forever,” she said.
The conflict has turned into a warning for other Bay Area pitmasters.
“I can only imagine being somewhere and all of a sudden the city or neighbors want you out because of the smoke. If we were in Texas, it wouldn’t be an issue because there’s already an established culture there,” said Matt Horn, who runs the popular popup Horn Barbecue. “For us to continue moving the craft forward in California, people need to be a little more open.”
Horn has been looking for a restaurant location for two years. Fans line up for hours for his Texasstyle brisket, always asking why he doesn’t have a restaurant yet. It’s frustrating for Horn, but he doesn’t want to open too close to apartment buildings at the risk of neighbor complaints — a difficult challenge in an urban area.
At least one neighbor has complained about smoke to James Woodard of Smokin’ Woods BBQ, a permanent popup inside 2nd Half Sports Lounge in Oakland. He said city officials dropped by and stated the smoke wasn’t a problem, but he’s sensitive to the matter. At Smokin’ Woods BBQ’s prior popup location in Oakland, he eventually had to stop smoking meat onsite due to neighbor complaints: He parked his woodburning smoker on an empty parking lot in San Leandro and then transported all the smoked meat to Oakland.
“That really hurt our business,” Woodard said.
Many chefs agree that the recent wildfires in California have made people more sensitive to smoke; barbecue restaurants might be an unexpected casualty of climate change.
Of course, barbecue restaurants could place their smokers indoors and lessen the risk of complaints. But that unleashes a whole different set of challenges.
The sheer size of smokers means a restaurant’s kitchen would need to be massive. Horn’s 26footlong, 500gallon smoker, for example, is bigger than his pickup truck — and he’s in the process of getting a 2,000gallon smoker to help meet demand. He wouldn’t just need to fit the smoker in the kitchen but also everything else a kitchen requires: sinks, a dishwasher, a walkin refrigerator, a freezer, storage space, a range, possibly a deep fryer and more.
Barbecue restaurants don’t serve only smoked meat, so they need space and equipment to cook up side dishes like mac and cheese, stewed collard greens and potato salad. They need two ventilation systems: one for the standard burners and fryers and another specialized one for the smoker. Chefs estimate that adding the second ventilation system might cost $50,000 alone — and that assumes there’s space for it.
When Woodard was scouting locations for Smokin’ Woods, he quickly realized any space he saw would need a full buildout due to barbecue’s specific needs. He didn’t have the estimated $500,000 for that kind of project; many rising pitmasters in the Bay Area face a similar financial barrier. That’s not to mention the massive smokers themselves, which can easily run $30,000.
These high costs might mean more Bay Area pitmasters go the route of Smokin’ Woods: taking over a kitchen inside a bar and splitting the rent with another business owner.
“Like the housing market in Oakland, it’s cheaper to have a roommate,” Woodard said.
That assumes landlords are open to barbecue. In his experience looking at spaces, Horn felt a lot of landlords didn’t look at barbecue as seriously as other cuisines.
“People look at barbecue as goinyourbackyard, fireupthegrill sort of thing,” he said. “I don’t think they truly understand the craftsmanship.”
When Rashad Armstead looked for a home for his popup Crave BBQ, he ran into a lot of resistance from landlords. Some of it was the smoke issue and a fear that a barbecue restaurant is more prone to fires. But he also ran into what he saw as racist behavior, with property owners at first stating they didn’t want meats smoked onsite but continuing to reject the project when Armstead, who is African American, offered to smoke the meats in a commercial kitchen instead.
“Some landlords will say, ‘I don’t want barbecue,’ but they just use it as a cover for ‘I don’t want any black businesses,’ ” Armstead said.
Armstead had a space lined up for Crave BBQ as part of a nonprofitled redevelopment project at the California Hotel in Oakland. But it required a full buildout, and Armstead’s funding dried up. He was devastated when he bowed out earlier this year. In May, he quickly opened a takeout soul food restaurant called Grammie’s DownHome Chicken & Seafood, which required no construction. Crave BBQ will have to wait.
Despite the dire situation at KC’s BBQ, Davis said she feels optimistic that the city of Berkeley won’t force her to shut down her family’s restaurant. But if no solutions emerge from the mediation, then KC’s BBQ will have to attend an appeal hearing — Chakko described it as an informal trial. A hearing officer will hear live testimonies and ultimately decide whether the barbecue restaurant’s smoke is a neighborhood nuisance. The thought of the officer upholding the cease and desist order — of three generations of her family no longer having a source of income — brings tears to Davis’ eyes.
“That’s it,” she said. “I’d have to go sell plates out of my driveway.”