Up in Smoke

Serving up old-school American barbecue using slowand-low cooking techniques, Smoke & Barrel brings genuine barbecue flavours to Hong Kong, co-owner & chef Arron Rhodes tells Helen Dalley

Smoke & Barrel brings old-school American barbecue to Hong Kong, says chef & co-owner Arron Rhodes

You opened Smoke & Barrel last October. What’s it like launching a restaurant during a pandemic?

Things seem to be slowly going back to normal in hospitality and we’ve been pretty busy so far, with bookings of up to 150 covers per day. We considered pushing back another year, but that’s because we were looking for the right venue. I put in a low offer to the landlord and he took it. By this point, we hadn’t started fundraising, so had to rely on investors but we managed to get the cash in place. We have a great venue with 120 seats, so it’s a big space.

We saw some other restaurant groups were opening new outlets so we decided to go for it too. As Netflix started showing The American Barbecue Showdown around the same time, it’s been good timing as it’s driven a lot of interest.

What were the challenges of setting up a restaurant during a pandemic and how did you overcome those?

We did wonder, ‘what if the government closes down dining completely?’ But in the end it was only shut for six or seven weeks. We’ve been allowed to meet our full dining capacity, although our license is restricted. Other than that, everything has fallen into place.

The restaurant is home to the only authentic imported wood-fired smoker in Hong Kong. Do you feel like you’ve found a niche in what is a very competitive dining market?

Yes – Hong Kong has many different types of restaurants, but smokehouse barbecue has never really taken off here. One of the first things we did when coming up with ideas for our dining concept was to ask, ‘ What is the city missing?’ There’s so many burger joints, Italian and French restaurants. We also wanted to find a concept that was reasonably low price. Before opening, we were cooking 24 hours a day and sleeping in the restaurant as we worked to get the smoking just right. Our smoker produces the hallmark flavours of real Texas-style barbecue imparted by hickory wood.

You’ve also launched a takeaway and pickup service. How’s that going?

There’s a lot of people calling for it. We signed up to Deliveroo and people will also be able to pick up [their orders] from the restaurant. We’ve also sent out samples onto junk boats to get some feedback. Barbecue food is often eaten as a takeaway out of containers, so we’re hoping we’ll get a substantial income from delivery service.

You also own another restaurant, Kinship. What synergies are there between your two restaurants?

The philosophy of how we treat customers and staff, and the style of service. We treat people as if they are friends and family coming to your home and call everyone by their first name. We have 26 staff at our new restaurant, and it’s been a lot easier to find them than with Kinship. Due to the pandemic, hotels and the aviation industry are still struggling, so there’s some great staff out there looking for work who really understand customer service, like cabin crew.

Would you like to open other Smoke & Barrel outlets, or debut other different dining concepts in the future?

We’re thinking of more Smoke & Barrel outlets in Hong Kong and maybe mainland China. And yes, we do also have some ideas for different dining concepts.

But for the moment, we’re focused on getting Smoke & Barrel up and running. We’ve achieved a lot in short space of time – in less than a year and half, we’ve set up two restaurants.

Long term, we will set up a holding company and operate all dining outlets under that. We want to be a small F&B group with five to six restaurants maximum. The thought of doing 15 to 20 restaurants is very scary! Now we have 38 staff, but getting up to 100 employees, there’s a lot of people to manage. When we open the next one, we’ll need to employ people in more operational roles, like HR and marketing.

How do you plan to attract new diners to Smoke & Barrel in 2021?

The goal is to open for longer as much as we can. We may even introduce some eating challenges, with those who succeed getting a free dinner, or maybe their name on a plaque on the wall. Something like this would do well on Instagram, especially if we invite a couple of celebrities. smokeandbarrelhk.com