Can you take the barbecue out of the barbecue joint?
If you eat out a lot, the postcards and email are hard to ignore.
A company with a vaguely food-related name promises to bring the best dishes from your favorite restaurant right to your door, usually in less than an hour. Free delivery!
Food-delivery services such as Uber Eats, Grubhub, DoorDash and Favor are a relatively new and rapidly evolving aspect of the restaurant industry.
At its most basic, a fooddelivery service creates a website and copies the menus of various restaurants, where those of us tempted by the siren song of free delivery place our order, sit back and wait for the food to show up.
A delivery person gets a text with our order, goes to the restaurant, places the order, collects it and then brings it to our location (hopefully without tasting it). Not surprisingly, the “free delivery” offer is just a tease — after that first order, delivery charges plus tips may add $10-$15 to the bill. In most cases, the restaurant pays a commission to the delivery company.
Of course, this type of delivery-based business model has been around for a while — think Chinese-food take-out and pizza delivery. How does it translate to more locationspecific cuisines such as Texas barbecue?
A quick survey of the most popular food-delivery sites reveals very few barbecue joints on their menus. Why?
Based on the conversations I’ve had with pitmasters, it comes down to simple economics and the physical characteristics of smoked meats.
Different cuisines have different economic models, specifically related to the profit margin generated by the most popular menu items. For example, pizzas tend to cost less to make, yielding a higher profit
margin that can absorb the extra expense of delivery and any commission that may be added by a delivery company.
Barbecue joints run on much thinner margins. With the recent rise in beef prices, the profit margin on prime brisket may be as little as 5 to 10 percent. Pitmasters can offset that low margin with a “sales-mix” approach by promoting other, more profitable items including pork, chicken and turkey.
Even then, the lower margins at a barbecue restaurant make it difficult to share that profit as a commission to a delivery company.
Then there is what I call the immediacy of the cuisine: Does it travel well? American-style pizza does, especially with the insulated bags invented over the years to keep pizzas hot and fresh during transport.
Barbecue, of course, is a different beast, both literally and figuratively. A single serving of barbecue — a brisket plate, for example — is almost impossible to keep fresh for more than 10-15 minutes once it is assembled. Brisket dries and cools, and cold side dishes such as potato salad warm up fast.
For the most part, the immediacy of Texas barbecue does not lend itself to a delivery model, both in terms of cuisine and experience.
There’s something unnatural about separating the barbecue from the barbecue joint. The experience of pulling up to a barbecue joint, smelling the fragrance of burning post oak, interacting with the meat cutter on the exact cut of brisket you want and sitting at a picnic table surrounded by fellow barbecue lovers is part-andparcel of the Texas barbecue experience. It just makes the barbecue taste better.
One area that barbecue joints have embraced is takeout service for bulk orders. CorkScrew BBQ in Spring offers an extensive pre-order menu that allows customers to place large orders several days in advance for immediate pickup — no need to wait in line.
And if you don’t want to stand in line for hours at Franklin Barbecue in Austin, there is a pre-order menu on the restaurant’s website (5-pound minimum order). Years ago, you could pre-order a big pile of Franklin brisket a few days in advance, skip the line and go straight to the counter to pick it up and enjoy it at a local park or friend’s house.
Nowadays, you have to be a lot more patient. A recent visit to the Franklin website shows a whopping three-week lead time to collect a pre-order. Maybe standing in line isn’t so bad after all?