Tejas joint partners with East Coast delivery company
If you happen to be a Houstonian on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and you are craving legitimate Texas barbecue from home, you are in luck.
Tejas Chocolate & BBQ has partnered with a food delivery startup called Wonder to serve many of its most popular menu items to this neighborhood of New York City, with more delivery areas on the way.
Brisket, pork ribs and pulled pork, as well as popular Tejas’ sides, such as carrot souffle and cornbread casserole, are now available to Manhattanites for pickup and delivery.
Owners Scott and Greg Moore and Michelle Holland are in good company when it comes to the roster of restaurants that are also providing menu items for Wonder’s service. Among the 18 current concepts, there are restaurants from highprofile chefs including Jose Andres, Bobby Flay, Michael Symon and Jonathan Waxman.
How did a small barbecue joint in Tomball come to be associated with
A-list chefs and start serving barbecue in Manhattan? It began with a phone call in 2019.
“I was at the restaurant and my son said there was a call from a lady in New York City who wanted to partner with us,” said Scott Moore. “I thought it was a joke and told her to email me.”
Not long after, a legitimate proposal from a Wonder representative arrived in his inbox. The company had sent teams to Texas to anonymously evaluate barbecue joints to be part of the service. Tejas fit the bill. They would effectively enter into a license agreement that gave Wonder intellectual property rights to use the Tejas name, logo and recipes for their delivery service in New York and New Jersey.
Conceived by entrepreneur Marc Lore, Wonder initially began as a concept of mobile kitchens bringing food to people’s houses but transitioned to a unique, vertically integrated food delivery business model.
Unlike DoorDash or Uber Eats, which are essentially middlemen matching up independent restaurants with freelance delivery drivers, Wonder controls the whole process, from cooking the food to delivering it to the doorstep.
For instance, the Tejas concept has its own stand-alone commissary kitchen and pit room in Parsippany, N.J., that uses a combination of Oyler rotisserie pits and two 1,000-gallon Mobergbrand barrel smokers to cook the barbecue.
The barbecue, sides and desserts are cooked there and then preserved using various high-tech methods, including vacuum sealing, and shipped to the distribution storefront at Broadway and 70th Street. Delivery personnel employed by Wonder deliver the food to customers in a six-block radius to ensure freshness and quality.
Scott, Greg and Michelle recently returned from New York and New Jersey, where they inspected the operations, and came back impressed with the results. They especially credit the Wonder pit team of Alex Smith, Ben Bachande and Kyle Boursequat for producing Texas-quality barbecue. Notably, the pit team previously worked at Hometown BBQ in nearby Red Hook, Brooklyn, considered by many as the best Texas-style barbecue joint outside of Texas.
The Tejas team also spent time meeting with CEO Marc Lore as well as the upper management of the company. Scott Moore notes that the executive team is primarily made up of trained chefs, a relative rarity in any large food company.
“Their passion and love for creating good food is evident,” said Moore.
Passion for barbecue is also evident among the food connoisseurs of the Upper West Side, because, according to
Moore, Tejas is currently the most popular of all the concepts being delivered out of Wonder’s Broadway storefront.