BB’s Cafe in the Heights finds niche with Tex-Orleans cooking
Brooks Bassler can clear a platter of crawfish like he was raised on it: twist the antennaed head, slurp out the flavorful goo, then peel back the shell and pinch the tail off for the meat. Late lunchers around him at BB’s Cafe in the Heights similarly dig through piles of crawfish, corn and potatoes, and sprawling po’boys. They ignore the TVs, hung high on the walls like an afterthought, showing a football game and a fly fishing show.
On the patio, a pair of diners drink from goblets of Abitaritas — pink margaritas with a Louisiana-brewed Abita beer dunked on top. On weekends, customers spill from the patio to the adjacent parking lot, gripping beers with oily red fingers.
“This time of year, crawfish, gotta go crawfish,” said Bassler, 36, dark curls pushed back from his forehead, elbows up, ready to peel.
BB’s Cafe started eight years ago in a sliver of strip mall near the intersection of Westheimer and Montrose. Today, the Heights restaurant alone sells 12,000 pounds of crawfish a week during peak season, March and April. Growth has been the goal from Day 1, and Bassler is just gaining speed.
He started with $310,000 — $50,000 in savings he’d accumulated from years of working in other restaurants, a matching loan from his parents and a $210,000 U.S. Small Business Administration loan. To date, he has added five locations, from inside the Loop to the suburbs, and samestore sales are growing at a rate of 20 to 30 percent each year. This year he expects to bring in between $13 million and $14 million in sales, with 12 percent to 15 percent in profit, dwarfing the $680,000 in sales his first year in business.
The restaurants employ 250 to 300, peaking during the busy crawfish season.
Bassler is thinking about expanding to San Antonio or Austin, but that’s a few years down the road. He aims to open one to two new restaurants a year and said he’s always having to slow himself down from wanting to grow faster.
“From Day 1, it was start small and dream big,” he said.
In Montrose, Bassler had just nine tables. His passion, he said, doesn’t come from loving to cook but from loving to eat. Early on it was catering that kept the business afloat, he said. Bassler started the catering operation from the first day the restaurant opened, something he had learned from running a catering business for another Houston restaurant.
Things picked up two years in, after Chronicle food critic Alison Cook reviewed the cafe and the next day a line formed out the door. Soon after, BB’s starting turning a profit.
After a few years in Montrose, Bassler opened a short-lived restaurant downtown at 509 Louisiana. But when the city told him the building needed a subfloor replacement that would have cost $200,000, Bassler moved out. The restaurant had been doing fine there, he said, but he couldn’t afford the extra cost and in the end lost about $200,000 of his original investment. Backyard atmosphere
The Heights was next, and the bigger location lent itself to the backyard crawfish boil feel that keeps it bustling.
On the third Saturday that the Heights location was open, four years ago in June, it brought in as many sales as an entire month in Montrose. From its perch between Little Woodrow’s and Fitzgerald’s, BB’s began to take off. Bassler opened a third spot on Richmond Avenue, and more recently moved into Briargrove and Katy.
Bassler has branded his food Tex-Orleans cooking. His best-selling appetizer is loaded pollo bullets: deadly delicious chicken stuffed with cream cheese and jalapeños, wrapped in bacon, with Cajun cream sauce for dipping.
He went to University of Houston on a track and field scholarship — a high jumper — and found the school’s entrepreneurship program.
Growing up with entrepreneurial parents, Bassler had always been interested in starting a business. By the time he graduated in 2002 he had made restaurant entrepreneurship his focus, and for a few years worked at other restaurants in Houston, learning “on somebody else’s nickel,” as his dad had taught him. ‘It’s in the swamps’
When he decided he was ready to go on his own, at 27, he called his grandmother in south Louisiana, Maw Maw, and his mom, in the Central Texas town of Rockdale, where Bassler grew up. Maw Maw, Jeanie Nicar, had moved to Morgan City, La., from Winnie as a 17-year-old bride.
As Bassler says, “It’s in the swamps, man, it’s the epitome of small-town Louisiana life.”
Her husband loved Cajun cooking so she taught herself to cook étouffée, gumbo and fried alligator, a Cajun delicacy, according to Bassler.
“I went to my mom and Maw Maw and said, I need to start working on recipes,” Bassler said. “And they said, ‘Honey, we don’t have recipes.’ ”
Instead, they came to Houston and spent three weeks in the tiny Montrose kitchen teaching Bassler’s head chef Enedino Cristobol, better known as Chickalean the Machine, and his wife, Elvira Cristobol, about Cajun cooking. Now the couple’s two sons Rodrigo, 22, and Jorge, 18, also work in BB’s kitchens.
In Louisiana, where Bassler spent summers with Maw Maw and his cousins, gumbo and potato salad were staples. At Christmas it was fettuccine with shrimp or crawfish.
“Everything revolved around a meal, and that’s why I fell in love with the restaurant business, really,” Bassler said. “Eat, drink, party and go to church on Sunday. That’s about it, not much else to do.”
Maw Maw always had a batch of chocolate chip cookies ready and would cook up whatever they brought back from hunting or fishing that day.
“You clean your birds, you skin your fish and that’s what you’re working with for that night,” Bassler said. His favorite was grillades and grits.
But Bassler grew up in Texas, plus his largely Hispanic kitchen staff has given the food a Tex-Mex edge.
There’s the Chickalean the Machine po’boy with fajita chicken, queso and avocado. (Cristobol got the “Chickalean” part of his nickname growing up in Puebla, Mexico, for his short stature. Bassler added “the Machine” because he never seems to wear out.)
The name BB’s comes from Bassler’s initials, but it didn’t become a nickname until after the mischievous half-moon logo sign went up in blue neon lights. Now his employees call him that when he stops by.
Bassler’s wife, Maricela Bassler, designed the logo, with a moon for the Crescent City. She also does marketing, social media and designs the decor for the restaurants.
The Montrose location originally didn’t close until 4 a.m., and recently changed to being open 24 hours. Bassler said even on weeknights, “they come in pretty strong until 3 in the morning.”
Bassler spends about a day each week scouting for new spots.
His secret to profitability, he said, is to watch for restaurants in good locations that are struggling. When they go under, Bassler tries to scoop the spot before others even know about it.
The strategy allows him to keep his costs lows because the spaces are already outfitted with ventilation, grease traps and equipment.
But for his first location, Bassler took Maricela’s advice to look in the Chronicle’s classified section. He found the Montrose site, where another restaurant had gone out of business.