At Lonestar Sausage & BBQ, success means knowing your customers
The dining room at Lonestar Sausage & BBQ is about the size of a typical living room, with three round tables inside and a couple of picnic tables outside.
Owner and pitmaster Kevin Mason is usually working the counter, taking orders and welcoming guests. Lonestar is the prototypical neighborhood barbecue joint located in the bluecollar Sablechase subdivision just south of the perpetually bustling FM 1960 corridor (now Cypress Creek Parkway) in northwest Houston.
Being a small neighborhood joint is both a blessing and a curse. Mason’s kitchen isn’t much bigger than his dining room, and the cooking area is mostly occupied by the hulking Southern Pride woodburning smoker he uses to make the barbecue, including the excellent house-made sausages for which he is known.
On the plus side, Mason is a one-man market-research machine. By greeting and chatting up most customers, he gets to know where they came from and what brought them to Lonestar BBQ. For any business in a data-driven world, this is invaluable information.
Remarkably, many of Mason’s customers come from out of town. In just the last month, guests from Singapore, Saigon, Atlanta, Chicago and Miami have made the trek to Lonestar during their trip to Houston.
“They show up carrying their suitcases from the airport,” says Mason. He suspects that a combination of Google search engine keywords lists him at the top of the results when out-of-town folks land in Houston looking to sample local barbecue traditions.
Mason is a former standout wide receiver for the University of Houston, so he gets a steady stream of old teammates and coaches into the restaurant. And as a retired sheriff deputy, he gets plenty of former law enforcement colleagues in on a regular basis, too.
He does occasionally see a group of roving barbecue connoisseurs who make the rounds to places around Houston and Texas to sample the latest and greatest barbecue and take pictures to post on social media. But for the most part, the customers who patronize Lonestar aren’t there to take pictures of the food.
“Most of my customers are between 45 and 60 years old,” says Mason, reflecting the surrounding demographic. “They come here to get a good value for their lunch or dinner.”
They do indeed get a very good value. Mason is selling his brisket at $20 per pound, when the average price nowadays is around $28 per pound. One-meat dinners with two sides are going for around $15 at Lonestar, when most other places are pushing $20.
Why the lower prices? Again, it comes down to knowing his audience.
“In some ways, this place is like a community service,” says Mason. “We get a lot of retirees and older folks.”
With the rising cost of just about every other daily expense, Houstonians on fixed incomes can’t afford big price increases at their favorite neighborhood restaurant. Mason is trying to accommodate them as much as possible.
For now, Mason is absorbing the additional costs and looking to expand his dining room to do more volume to make up for the lower margins. Like other barbecue joints, he’s accentuating higher-margin dishes like rib tips, fried catfish and smoked chicken to offset the costs of more expensive proteins.
In a time when it seems like every business is raising prices, Mason is holding firm and counting on the goodwill of his regular customers to get him through to the other side when pricing pressures will hopefully start coming down.