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
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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