Pour out some sauce: Fat Boyz Barbecue permanently closes site in Coral Springs
After years of growing its smoky empire, Fat Boyz Barbecue has shrunk — again — with the permanent closure of its Coral Springs location, owner and pitmaster Jarael Holston-Jones told the Sun Sentinel on Tuesday.
Fat Boyz’s Coral Springs outpost at 6192 W. Sample Road abruptly shuttered to zero fanfare, farewells or even final plates of Southern-style smoked ribs and brisket.
(As of Tuesday afternoon, the restaurant’s social media pages still listed Coral Springs as open.)
Holston-Jones blames the closure on the stress of maintaining two locations and a food truck, coupled with a now-common pandemic problem: fewer staff.
“I’m spreading myself too thin and it’s been hard keeping up quality control between the two locations,” he says. “We just couldn’t overcome it.”
Fat Boyz Coral Springs, popular pre-pandemic, courted massive lunchtime crowds with its dry-rubbed St. Louis spare ribs kissed with hickory and spice, Texas-style brisket, smoked lean pastrami and its Big Daddy sandwich, a combo of pulled pork, chopped brisket and mac ‘n’ cheese on a Kaiser roll. Since the pandemic Holston-Jones says much of his barbecue sales have shifted to food-delivery apps and weekend-only traffic but there have been fewer weekday visitors overall.
“I’ve been burned out. The whole family’s been burned out,” Holston-Jones says. “We were acting like it was pre-COVID there, and between the fluctuating meat prices and the staffing it just wasn’t efficient. I looked at the quality of the food and wasn’t satisfied because I can’t be in every place to babysit.”
Once a mighty barbecue mini-chain with four locations at its peak — Coral Springs, its Deerfield Beach flagship and two in Fort Lauderdale — only Fat Boyz Fort Lauderdale at 899 E. Cypress Creek Road, along with a food truck, remain open, Holston-Jones says.
The decision may seem unsurprising to Fat Boyz followers who’ve watched Holston-Jones shuffle from storefront to storefront in recent years. HolstonJones, a U.S. Army veteran and graduate of Blanche Ely High, and wife Yolanda, a former postal worker, first launched Fat Boyz as a fleet of food trucks a decade ago. Their first storefront opened in February 2017 inside the former Deerfield Beach home of the Li’l Ole Caboose burger joint, a red doublewide trailer with a railroad caboose attached.
From there HolstonJones plotted a rapid expansion, opening next in Coral Springs (July 2018), followed by two more in Fort Lauderdale. One location on East Sunrise Boulevard lasted six months while the second, on Cypress Creek Road, replaced the former Hickory Sticks BBQ when it opened in November 2019.
Holston-Jones’ fortunes did not improve in the pandemic. After Fat Boyz’ Deerfield flagship shuttered in February 2020, he then closed Crazy Cajun Crabs, his separate Louisiana-style seafood restaurant in Pompano Beach. HolstonJones says they had been offering the Crazy Cajun Crabs menu on Fridays and Saturdays inside the Coral Springs location but that stopped this week.
So popular was Crazy Cajun Crabs that sales of crab and seafood boils, to his surprise, started to outpace his popular barbecue platters
during pandemic, he says. Holston-Jones is planning to revive his seafood eatery as a Friday-Saturday pop-up.
In his glowing 3-and-ahalf star review of the Coral Springs location, former Sun Sentinel food critic Michael Mayo raised a piece of jalapeno cornbread and wrote that Fat Boyz “may well be the best barbecue joint in Broward County.”
Holston-Jones hasn’t ruled out a return to Coral Springs after the pandemic but says the rapid growth — and rapid closure — of Fat Boyz has taught him one lesson: He needs a business partner to help him regrow the Fat Boyz Barbecue brand.
“The business has grown beyond me,” he says. “We pushed ourselves to heights I never thought imaginable, and now I need to hold myself accountable and play it smart.”