BBQ STATE OF MIND
Food court location is a blessing and a curse for Feges BBQ during the coronavirus outbreak.
Among Texas barbecue joints, Feges BBQ is unique in that it is in the food court at Greenway Plaza, the sprawling campus of office buildings just east of the Galleria.
Known as The Hub, this food court serves thousands of office workers for breakfast and lunch, Monday through Friday. Or at least it did.
With the stay-at-home order associated with the coronavirus pandemic, most office workers are now working from home and The Hub is closed both for lack of customers and for safety reasons.
Among the dozen or so food vendors in The Hub, this represents an existential crisis. Their entire clientele and revenue stream dried up within days.
For Feges BBQ, it is an unexpected reversal of fortune for husband-and-wife owners Patrick Feges and Erin Smith, who opened to great fanfare in 2018.
Like most Texas barbecue joints, Feges and Smith have pivoted their business model to adapt to the changes wrought by the pandemic. But their location in a food court has greatly complicated that effort.
First, let’s address the elephant in the room: Why open a Texas barbecue joint in a food court?
It’s important to note that
The Hub is not your typical food court usually associated with malls and airports. It’s become something of an incubator for up-and-coming restaurateurs and chefs as a relatively inexpensive way to open a restaurant. Greenway Coffee, Burger Chan and Rice Box in addition to Feges BBQ are some of the heralded small food vendors located there.
For Feges and Smith, The
Hub offered several benefits.
The landlord shouldered much of the cost to build out the kitchen and order counter. Also, being surrounded by office buildings meant there was a built-in clientele and neverending stream of foot traffic.
And because The Hub is open only for breakfast and lunch during weekdays, it offered a better work-life balance (weekends off!) to start a family.
Indeed, this all worked to plan with steady business and a stream of accolades, including a two-star review from Alison Cook and a spot in Texas Monthly magazine’s Top 25 New Barbecue Joints in Texas. Pitmaster Feges came up with a tongue-in-cheek label for his restaurant: “The best food court barbecue in Texas.” Business progressed to the point where Feges and Smith recently announced a second location in a shopping center in Spring Branch.
Alas, if the food-court business model is particularly wellsuited for a startup barbecue joint, it is particularly ill-suited for a startup barbecue joint during a pandemic.
The customer base disappeared completely. Feges and Smith had enough money on hand to pay their seven employees for a week after they initially closed. Then, after briefly furloughing staff, they received a Payroll Protection Program loan and have brought their employees back on board to implement a radically different game plan to survive.
Though Greenway Plaza is still officially closed — the doors are literally locked — some office workers are slowly returning. Feges and Smith have reopened the order counter in The Hub so the trickle of returning office workers can pre-order from a limited menu for pickup (the food-court seating area is still closed). They have also implemented a weekday, parking-lot curbside-delivery system for anyone coming from outside Greenway Plaza.
On Saturdays, they pop-up at their upcoming location in Spring Branch and on Sundays at Roost restaurant in Montrose, where they sell fully cooked, chilled and vacuum-sealed meats and sides that customers can reheat as necessary.
There are some indications that Greenway Plaza may reopen soon, which will hopefully restore the couple’s primary customer base. For now though, as for most Texas barbecue joints, it’s a daily scramble to find ways to survive until some sense of normalcy returns.