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Love your courage and willingness to make a go of it, MattBilling !!!
Tell us how your vision of making your Q joint work has clarified since you opened?
What have you learned since you started? -
I would recommend getting your hands on the book "Peace, Love, and Barbecue" by Mike and Amy Mills. I think there are some good inspirations in there as he interviews a lot of BBQ legends and how they got their start. Also Bib Bob Gibson's is another good book by Chris Lilly. They aren't exactly how to books but really do show how everyone's approach varies and how people make it work no matter if it is a huge restaurant or a weekend food truck.
When it comes to Q joints I like it when it is kept simple and the menu doesn't get overly complicated. Instead of trying to have a huge variety... pick a few things and just knock them out of the park.
Find uses to make the most out of your Q that may be left over or excess.
Possibly offer a family style take home option... i.e. 1 kilogram of pulled pork and some sides for a set amount.
From a business standpoint I would recommend getting a business plan in place and creating a vision of where you would like to see this end up so you can create a road map to get there. Best of Luck!Leave a comment:
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You NEED to read this thread about a guy in Michigan that documented his experience opening a BBQ place. It is quite lengthy (191 pages!!!) and I ended up just reading his posts.
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First off let me say I am from Houston and got taken to a "BBQ restaurant" in London in 1990. Unless things have radically changed, there is a great need for your services. I second the advice about reading Aaron Franklin's book. You should find it inspiring and helpful.
Best of luck.
-DanielLeave a comment:
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I moved this to BBQ Restaurants > England, that way if anyone in your neck of the woods looks up a places in England, there you'll be! (We don't have a catering channel)
I know eugenek has been doing something similar, maybe he can offer some advice when he gets time. Best of luck to you!Leave a comment:
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I am certainly no expert at advice, but a peruse through Franklin's Barbeque & Meat Smokin Manifesto offers a little on how he did it. It sounds like you are on the right path. Continue to work hard & you will prosper. A famous quote that I live by & you should be very familiar with, "Never Give Up".Leave a comment:
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Any restaurateurs / caterers out there?
Not really sure where to post this, so please move if necessary.
This is in part me looking for some help and advice, and also, if I can offer any advice to anyone in what I've learnt in the past 18 months I'd love to.
I'll start at the beginning.
2 years ago I got a text from a friend which said 'I'm bored of work, let's open a restaurant' so I replied 'ok'.
We got together and started sketching out ideas, we initially hoped to open a burger joint, but they are extremely common in the UK these days, I'd started getting in to BBQ a few months previously and discovered amazingribs.com so I suggested BBQ (how hard can it be, right??) and Hickory Pit was born, we quickly buried the idea of a restaurant and decided on a street food / market stall approach. We did our first big event 6 months later (turns out it's quite hard) and we've been running since then, we now do events like festivals, private parties and we have a monthly residency at a pub (bar, I suppose you'd call it) where we live in Maidstone, just outside of London. We serve mostly pulled pork, sometimes beef ribs and we're trying to learn the dark art of brisket at the moment! The business is growing (we both still have full time jobs) and this post is basically a request for any advice from anyone who's been in the catering business (or anyone who can tell me what they love best about their favourite BBQ restaurant) on how to grow a business like this and on commercial cooking. We aren't rich so we run 5 UDS and that's all we have to cook on. We'd like to buy a nice trailer smoker and the plan is one day for a restaurant, but at the moment we are a real backyard business.
I'd love to hear anyone's thoughts, and, if anyone's thinking about doing anything like this I've learned a lot over the past 2 years, made plenty of mistakes so far too so I can help anyone else out.
Not sure if I'm allowed to post this, but here's a link to our Website and Facebook page which has links to all our other stuff.
Cheers
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