- Great Texas barbecue is always gonna be
built on the Texas trinity.
You should always have great brisket,
you should always have great ribs
and you should always have great sausage.
But if you're going to evolve in a market as dynamic
and as competitive as Austin,
you want to be able to add some fresh elements.
So the idea of doing a more composed plate I think is fun.
We serve are mole baby back ribs
and we season the back side with our mole spice blend.
So it's got all the classic ingredients in a mole,
just set up as a powdered form and
this is definitely one of those dishes that
we're coloring outside the lines of traditional barbecue.
The fact that we're saucing the meat
and we're doing a composed dish automatically lets people
know that we're not following the standard pathway.
It's like we're serving a composed barbecue dish with sauce.
You don't sauce your meat in Texas.
This is our version of mole.
I just think it's better to always be up front with people
if you're taking a little liberty with the dish.
Then just tell them it's like,
"Hey, this is our version of mole."
It's not traditional.
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So, you know when we start our day,
4:00 AM, our morning guy comes in.
We usually have a good coal bed
from the overnight cook still going.
So the idea is to come in, opening it back up,
get the oxygen going back in there again and then we'll stir
up that bed of coals and get some fresh logs on there.
And then immediately the fire comes back up.
So I like logs like this too.
We like the bark.
It helps build smoke ring.
So we're looking for a variety of wood going in there too,
pieces that burn a little bit cleaner
and a little bit faster.
It's funny enough that door's become kind of like synonymous
with the restaurant.
Depending on the weather and how things are going,
sometimes I'll just run it closed like this,
'cause I just want just a little bit of air flow coming in.
Other times I'll just crack it a touch,
'cause I want to catch, like maybe the wind's
coming from this direction, so I want to force a little more
air in there.
It's a trip.
We are fire builders at heart.
That's what we do.
So right now, we're cooking all of our quick cook stuff.
We're talking anything that can be cooked and served
the same day.
We have our St. Louis ribs here,
so right now we're spritzing the ribs.
We'll spritz it with a blend of a vinegar and Worcestershire
and a few other ingredients and that's one of the things
that we look for when we're cooking.
That just goes back to my time as a chef.
Whenever I add an element to a product,
the idea is to add some sort of layer of flavors.
We're gonna close these back up.
What I take from my time running high-end restaurants is
just treating it like every day.
We're going to come in and do our best to work as a team,
create good camaraderie and an environment where hopefully
everybody on the team you can excel,
which means then the food is even better for the customers.
Today we're gonna show you guys how we do
our pastrami beef ribs.
We get nice super thick stack chuck ribs or plate ribs.
They are brined in a wet brine to cure them to get to that
classic pastrami flavor and essentially it's what we
call a corned beef brine.
A lot of these things are very classic
and like a corn beef brine.
We like adding the vegetables to it, allspice,
the peppercorn, the thyme.
All that comes together to create that
classic pastrami flavor.
These guys have been on brine for a little bit of time.
Warren's going to season them up with our pastrami rub.
So this is Warren.
He is also affectionately known as Wardog.
He's my right hand man here at the restaurant.
- Call me Warren Peace, the Warren G, the Regulator.
Then all of a sudden it was Wardog and then that just kind
of rolls off the tongue better, I guess.
We're gonna spray these off in the dish pit,
Get a little of this off or it'll tend to get a little salty
and there is no salt in the rub.
You'd think the fatty part of the brisket is rich.
You get a few chunks of this.
You've really got something there.
I mean, you just want to want to curl up and take a nap
after eating one of these.
It is just a gelatinous wonderland of richness.
Take 'em over here and then we'll put the rub on 'em.
Sometimes it can be a little isolating here.
So I've gotten into some great conversations with whatever
I have on the pit.
I greet the briskets went I open up.
I'll be like "Hello gentlemen, how's your evening going?"
And sometimes they actually talk back to me.
It depends how long the shift is going.
And when the brisket starts talking back
then I think it's time to go home.
- Beef ribs are a staple in Texas barbecue restaurants.
So how do we approach that Texas standard item
and make it our own?
We decided to make it into a pastrami beef rib.
So take this great classic cut, still smoke it,
but apply a different flavor profile in a different spice
blend in order to create kind of a newer dining experience
with the beef rib.
Once they get a really nice color,
we're going to loosely wrap them in foil.
It kind of steams them.
We care about the whole menu from brisket to pickles.
Everything matters here.
One of the dishes that I think really sums us up is
our smoked scalloped potatoes.
So the scalloped potatoes is a dish.
It can be called like an au gratin.
Basically it's a layered potato dish.
So we use a russet potato.
Nothing fancy, 'cause it makes the best scalloped potato.
It's russet potatoes, cream, Parmesan,
and salt, pepper, garlic.
Oddly enough, I think we're more popular
for the scalloped potatoes than probably almost anything.
(laughs)
People talk about the sides in equal billing as the meats
I think is one of the things that really sums us up,
because we did want to create a menu where not only
was the barbecue great but the sides were great.
Very unceremoniously dump it all in there.
This gets finished with a little bit of Parmesan on top.
This helps create a really nice crust,
almost like a bark, if you will.
People have said that this dish is about the closest
you can get to having vegetarian barbecue,
because it's rich and decadent like brisket
and it's got this great crust and barky exterior
when it comes out of the smoker.
- That's one of the side dishes I can just curl up with and
just eat it.
I mean, I'm like a goldfish with that.
I'll just eat it until I roll over and float.
(laughs)
When it comes to executing the classics here,
I mean you have to have your s*** together.
You can't serve poor brisket.
You have to nail brisket to be taken serious in this town.
- So what is up with these things today?
Good Lord.
- Wow, that's enormous.
- This is like a whole cow.
Stay, stay there.
Do not move.
They'll jump.
- Before you do anything, you gotta make sure that
you have your brisket down.
It's got to be rock solid.
You can't have errors in it.
It's gotta be moist and juicy and tender and flavorful.
It's gotta have good bark.
- It's time, fellas.
Is that what you've been waiting your whole lives for?
I like to put the really big ones towards the back,
and a lot of times we'll go four-breast,
but I think we'll do these at three.
My ADHD nature does not like to do repetitive things
and while I cook brisket every day,
there's something always seems to be different.
At last night's cook I was out of here by 11:30.
Everything went great.
The night before, it was raining
and I got out of here at one.
I was just stressing out and I just had visions that
the whole cook was ruined.
We were gonna have to close the next day,
because when I'm the last one touching them,
it's still every single day that just stresses me out.
So whenever John rolls one and cuts into it,
I'm always right there going, how was it?
How was it?
Is it okay?
- Briskets look nice, Warren.
This is a relaxing moment for me
and this is a nerve-wracking moment for Warren.
- Well, I just want them to be good.
- It's like Christmas every time, man.
Santa brings me brisket.
When you do really good job with the basics,
hopefully you've built up good will with your clientele,
because they know well, "These guys killed on brisket
and that special sounds pretty intriguing."
I should give it a try.
Well, so we'll run out of this moist brisket
by about one o'clock.
The lean is what we judge ourselves on.
Like we don't really worry about the moist side
nearly as much.
It's the lean side that's harder to cook right.
So when we taste brisket and determine if we'd like how
we're cooking things, we always taste the lean side,
not the fatty side.
And that's our goal on a daily basis.
Like take care of my business, making good Texas barbecue.
And then when we had the opportunity to play a little bit
outside the lines.
- I call this the Enforcer.
When the fire's giving me a hard time,
I'll fire that sucker up and it'll certainly change
the attitude of the wood.
And then, we can go over here and we can give
this a little boost if you want it.
- When it comes to cooking with live fires,
it's just a hell of a lot more fun
than working in a restaurant.
I don't think I could ever go back to a line situation
where tickets were popping up in some random cave where
we're cooking food and slaving over a hot stove.
So it's a much more relaxed and rewarding style of cooking.
We're gonna build our banana cream tart.
Idea behind this dessert was taking a classic barbecue item,
like banana pudding and make it our own.
So we want to fill the bottom of this tart shell up with
a nice layer of banana, so you get banana flavor
every time you bite into the dessert.
We're trying to present a menu that speaks of
classic Texas barbecue from a chef's point of view.
Because of my background running high-end
American fine dining restaurants in the past,
whenever I cook anything I'm just leaning on my past
experience and knowledge.
To top it off with dulce de leche.
And this is an ingredient from my childhood in South Texas
and that is our banana cream tart.
I think people really enjoy it.
I tell them that this is a handheld,
so you go in tostada-style and you just crush it.
It's not a fork and knife dish.
It's a lot more fun if you eat it with your hands.
- All right, guys, you know what time it is?
It's about 10 o'clock, so we want to be
out of here by 10:30.
You think you can do that?
Give these ribs about 10 more minutes and wrap them back up
and they'll bring them in.
- These are our St. Louis ribs.
St. Louis rib is similar to a spare rib.
However, a full spare rib is gonna be bigger
and a little bit wider.
It's gonna have thinner sections where the meat runs off
and St. Louis is basically a trimmed out section of that.
So it's a slightly nicer cut versus the whole spare rib.
This is actually my favorite time of the day
when all the moving pieces finally come together
and we can just sit back and enjoy a lunch service.
How's it going, guys?
- Pretty good.
- What can I do for you today?
There's a ton of great barbecue restaurants that are run by
guys who just, all they've ever done is cook barbecue.
We're coming at this from the perspective of being
restaurant lifers, having worked in lots of restaurant
situations and having lots of different experiences.
Whereas maybe some of the other guys that we hope to be
one day are just all they've really done is barbecue.
When we decided to switch over to barbecue,
a lot of people were like, "Why are you doing that?
We don't need any more barbecue places."
For me running the barbecue place is just as natural as
running a fine-dining restaurant.
For me, it was a really easy transition,
but people were surprised that we decided to get
out of our lane and do something different.
I just love barbecue.
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