I moved to Austin Texas in 2012, not to learn about food…but to pursue a film degree. Austin is an expensive, and incredibly food rich city, so it wasn’t long before I found myself looking for a job in one of the local restaurants. I got hired on salads/apps at a woodfired pizzeria in North Austin and worked there juuuust long enough to move my way up to running the oven, and to realize that my $10/hr paycheck wasn’t going to cut it. So I did what any normal pizza boy does… I went and staged at the most famous BBQ spot in the country! Hell, Aaron Franklin was a regular at the pizza place I worked at, surely they’d hire me on the spot! (They didnt.) Apparently knowing how to burn a fire in a 900 degree brick pizza oven doesn’t really carry over to burning a 250 degree fire in a big metal tube full of briskets…Oh well, no hard feelings. I had eaten at Franklin Barbecue a handful of times, and really enjoyed the food, this lead to me trying barbecue all over the city and I started reading, watching Youtube videos, and generally consuming every bit of information on the topic of barbecue that I could.

Throughout my time in Texas, I lived in a 500 square foot, 3rd floor apartment. Despite being the barbecue capital of the universe, Texas does not allow you to have smokers, grills, or any form of live fire on your balcony. So I had no way to cook barbecue. However, I was HEAAAAVY into restaurant cooking, and recipe development. I had plans for a Neapolitan pizzeria, a pasta food truck, a sandwich food truck, a dog biscuit company (really)…all kinds of things. I was never going to have the money to make these things, but that didn’t stop the dream.

~Interlude~

Sometime around 2014 I got a job at a really fast paced, really…really good Neapolitan Pizzeria that paid much better than my $10/hr original pizza job. This place had a HUGE influence on Joe’s Barbecue as a whole…and allowed me to buy my first little smoker. I kept it at my parents house back here in Ohio, and would use it to experiment when I was in town to visit themfor about 2 weeks every year.

Eventually I quit the pizza job, moved back to Ohio…made a lot more barbecue, made some pizzas at the Brimfield Bread Oven (Hi Judd and Gen) before my mom eventually pitched the idea of starting a food cart outside of a bar that they owned...That was a good idea.

My uncle and I built a little smoker that I pulled behind my moms SUV, I worked with the Portage County Health Department to get all my ducks in a row, and Joe’s Barbecue officially opened in 2016 under a little 10x10 red pop up tent…in November. Some of you might remember…that winter was very cold, and very windy. There were multiple -5 degree days…and sitting outside under a pop up tent was not fun. We only sold ribs…but I’ll be damned if enough people didnt stop to make it worth it.

People started asking if we sold chickens, so naturally I started cooking pulled pork…then brisket…THEN chickens…the winter ended and i started getting busy (or so I thought). We could cook 12 or so racks of ribs, one brisket, and 2 pork shoulders every day. It got to the point where that would sell out in under an hour, so I needed to expand.

I go pester my uncle and tell him that I need something bigger…so we built something bigger. I got my hands on a 20ft trailer, a 500 gallon propane tank, and about $2000 worth of wood and we built first barbecue trailer…with a smoker made from a 500 gallon propane tank…inside of it…which is a bad idea unless you enjoy 125 degree days in July. This project finished in September 2017.

My buddy Tyler B joined in, and Joe’s Barbecue became a two man show…and business exploded. Within 6 months we were full capacity again, only this time “capacity” was a lot. Our next expansion was something that couldn’t be done with just my uncle, and it was going to cost a bit more, so it took a couple years, but that brings us to where we are now!

The smoker on the left here is named Big Smoke, because he’s big, and he has a smoking problem. He’s 20 feet long, 46 inches wide and has a cooking area of something like 125 square feet…He can cook over 40 briskets at once…He’s big, and now takes up all the space in our original trailer. I couldn’t expand without pestering my uncle at least a liiiiiiittle bit, so we built out ANOTHER trailer to sell out of. His name is Young Red. He’s a city boy from Georgia. Come out to the BBQ stand some weekend and meet him.

I’m sure I will eventually have more to write, as our story surely hasn’t concluded just yet…but this brings us to where we’re at in February of 2021. Big Smoke and Young Red are pulling their weight, getting ready for the snow to melt and the warmth of spring to bring more people out so they can show their stuff. If anyone actually read this entire thing, I applaud you. Thank you for taking the time, and I hope some of you found some of it interesting.

-Joe