‘We fell in love with American soul food’

Samantha Evans and Shauna Ginn of Hang Fire Southern Kitchen, South Wales

Burnt ends and 18-hour smoked pulled pork shoulder with brisket pit beans and cornbread muffins, all cooked over wood and charcoal: these are the kind of dishes that have ensured Hang Fire in Barry, South Wales, is booked out for months in advance – as well as landing the women behind the restaurant with a BBC TV series Sam and Shauna’s Big CookOut and a cookbook contract.

Samantha Evans and Shauna Guinn embarked on a road trip around the United States in 2012, on a pilgrimage to learn everything they could about American barbecue (and to see Dolly Parton in Nashville: the pair are also musicians – Sam plays harmonica and banjo, while Shauna plays guitar and sings).

“It was a scary decision: both careers would have been difficult to get back into,” says Guinn, who was a child protection policy adviser; Evans was global head of a creative graphic designers. “But we utterly fell in love with soul food of the Deep South, and everything associated with it. There’s a romance to the notion of taking big hunks of meat, and cooking them low and slow in a smoker.”

The pair returned with a smoker they’d bought in Texas, and relied on pop-up events and social media to get Hang Fire off the ground. “I had a friend with a pub called The Canadian on the verge of closing, and emailed her asking, how about we open up a little pop-up out the back, feed the locals and see how it goes? Social media was a big part of how we got the word out. Soon, we were feeding hundreds of people.” In 2015, the pair received a record number of nominations for the BBC Food and Farming Awards after sending out a Tweet, and won the Best Street Food or Takeaway category. Off the back of that, a publisher approached them to write a cookbook (The Hang Fire Cookbook: Recipes and Adventures in American BBQ, £20, Hardie Grant), and the developer of The Pump House on Barry Island, which was undergoing major regeneration at the time, convinced them to open the restaurant.

They took 1,300 bookings in the first 24 hours and, as the only female restaurateurs in the UK specialising in US barbecue, Evans and Guinn are still pinching themselves. “It’s a male-dominated industry. As soon as you think of meat and fire, you think of tattoos, beards and leather. Ours is the only American barbecue cookbook written by two women, and we’re not even American – we’re British!”