Year 2023 was a special year for me. In that year, I started my very first Texas BBQ restaurant called TBBQ, standing for Tao's BBQ. For a person, a software engineer, who never set his foot in a hospitality industry before, this was a huge challenge.
The first bite of brisket I had was in a restaurant at the mountain top while snowboarding. But not had enough, so when I was back to city, I started a brisket-taste journey, looking for all BBQ restaurants around Melbourne where I can taste a real brisket, or the one just out of smoker. This took me about couple of months, and found that the flavour between different restaurants were different, some were a bit of salty for me, some were a bit of sweet, and most of them poured the sauce over the meat, and the sauce was quite sweet. I thought there should be just one flavour, but in fact there were severals. So I jumped online and dived into the Texas BBQ background, and found that there are two different styles, Southern and Centre. Southern let meat stand out, which is what I was looking for, while the Centre style enhances the meat flavour with sauces. Different style give you different taste experience. And also found that Southern style BBQ is very less, which told me that this could be an opportunity to ope a shop offering Southern style Texas BBQ.
With this idea in mind, I started cooking at my backyard with the cheapest smoker (only AUD$130), the heat was leaking everywhere, but i still managed to smoke very first one brisket. It took me 15 hours, and the result was horrible, really tough, dry and very salty, completely failed. I didn't give up, and continuously trying it for about 5 years including COVID-19 pandemic period until 2023. Food was acknowledged by all my friends, and I believed that this was the time for me to start my original plan, opening a Southern style Texas BBQ shop sharing this type of food with more people.
After 10 months hard-work preparation with tight budget, finally Oct 2023, TBBQ had its grand opening. It was exciting and nervous. I thought that people would start coming in and try something new. But the fact was that lots of people passed by didn't even know what this shop was all about. First 6 months were very tough to survive. In order to let people know what this shop was about, I started to offer free-meat taste front door almost every day, this worked out a little bit, people started coming inside and having dinner. This was a good start, but also pointed out our weaknesses in daily operation across front house and back house. Due to lack of hospitality experience, lots of thing were learnt in hard way, i.e. one star reviews. We made improvement day by day, week by week, month by month, eventually we went through the most tough fist year. Menu was updated from only four main bbq meats with no sauces at all plus a few sides with only beer and soft drinks to nine main meats and a list of sides plus 11 different sauces, and desserts with spirits, wines and cocktails. Daily routing from back house to front house was also changed completely.
Entering the second year, we hosted much more guests, and started receiving corporation lunch and dinner reservations. Seeing them leave with happy smile on face made me believe that all hard work was paid off, our food had been acknowledged by the publics finally. Close to our 2nd anniversary, we received our first awards, Best Restaurant 2025 Awards in east Melbourne region. This awards meant a lot to us, which admitted our hard work, enlightened our direction and proved that all the improvements we did was not wrong.
Two years down the road, we had serviced about 15K people. As a software engineer to a pitmaster and restaurant owner, I never thought we could host that many people, but we did. Sincerely appreciated all of you stopped by and had diner with us. Your trust and support are the motivation for us to keep moving. We will try what we can to keep offering high quality food and letting more people know about Southern Texas Style BBQ.
Looking forward to seeing you all in our next chapter.