Justin and Johnathan Fox of Fox Bros. Bar-B-Q
By Tom Maicon at August 7, 2009 | 4:52 pm | Print
Q: How difficult was the transition from caterers to restaurateurs?
A: It was one of the most difficult things to do. Fox Bros. literally went from one day being only me doing a majority of the cooking, with my brother Justin doing the desserts, to being open and having to stand over a staff of folks I barely even know, to take my passion and trust it to them. Another huge obstacle is the amount we are cooking. I was basically cooking small batches of pork, ribs and brisket on my own, it was much easier to control. Today we are opening up with having cooked upwards of 1,300 pounds of pork and brisket on a Saturday morning — and that’s before we even put on any ribs or chicken.
One of the difficulties of that is that each cut is different, one brisket might be 5 lbs smaller than the rest, and will be done well before the bigger ones, and making sure the person running the smoker understands that. Training and trusting that person to basically be like you. Do it how I would do it.
Today, I see several places doing BBQ on the weekends. or only one day a week, It reminds me of how it was when I started, and it is much easier to control the quality on 2, 4 or even 8 pork butts or briskets compared to making sure 64 butts are all falling into the same degree of doneness.
It took some time, but the staff I have right now running my kitchen is the best staff I have had to date. Stephen Bucalo, who is my head chef, really has taken to my vision and instills that into his staff. It really frees me up to focus on things like our BBQ sauce, which was recently put on the shelves of 18 southeastern whole foods stores, while working on our wing sauce next.
I recently got out to a wing competition in Smyrna, which we won best wings. This was great figuring most of the folks had never heard of us!
I love that we are doing things now that I could never do on my own, like smoking our own ham hocks for our veggies. But I will never forget moving from the kitchen in my house to cooking for Smith’s in our new kitchen before we opened, and what used to take me two days to make the sides (Mac and cheese, green beans, stew and collards) took me only four hours!!
So, I learned pretty fast that after we opened, we were not going to be a success overnight, and that what I had worked so hard to build from the catering, wasn’t going to translate to a full blown restaurant without a ton of work.
We got dinged pretty good by all the local press when we opened, which at first I thought was a little unfair. But it made me realize that I had to work harder now — to make this thing I built — become better. And I am still working at it.
Q: Whose idea was the Tominator? …and how much weed did he or she smoke?
A: Ha! The Tominator was the brainchild of my good buddy Tommy. It really sounds like something thought of in a frat house, but was really created while we were sitting at the bar of Smith’s Olde Bar, after a good couple of hours of drinking some beers and several shots.
Justin, my brother, got up and said he was going to the kitchen to get some tator tots, and Tommy chimed in and said to add some cheese to the tots. Shortly after that, he yelled across the room to my brother to add stew to that, and Justin obliged him by bringing out the first Tominator.
We tried it and said, man this works! I think we ran it at Smith’s a few times, but knew it was definitely something that was going to be on our own menu. We recently made Tommy a-one-of-a-kind T-Shirt with our logo on the front and the back says: “I am the Tominator!” He loves it.
Q: I like the fact that you guys keep throwing new creative dishes on the specials board. Where do you keep coming up with the ideas?
A: Cooking the same thing over and over can get a little tiring after a while. Some of the appetizers we come up with are items I used to serve at my house to friends on the weekends, that we can work in from time to time while not keeping it on the menu.
We have to cook for Tuesday starting on Monday, so it is a crapshoot on how Tuesday will actually be. So, two things could come from that, either we will run out or have some left. We serve only the fresh product, so we have to think of ways to get that day’s old product out there.
Items like the BBQ rolls and brisket taquitos are really popular, but we can’t commit these to the menu in case we don’t have meat to do them. A few weeks ago we were running so close to the line that we had to cook extra pork, just to be able to make stew.
I love the brisket meatloaf that we do. We originally started making it the way I make it at home, with beef, pork and veal, and one day decided to make the meatloaf with fresh ground brisket, it is ground in-house and we make it with the same recipe — minus the pork and veal. We have been running that on Tuesdays and it has become very popular.
The beef short rib we sell on Thursdays and Saturdays flies out the door. It’s hard to cook enough. Justin will often spend a few days in the kitchen creating some dessert specials for the weekends that people love and ask for often. We barely have the space to make the chocolate pecan pies let alone have a pastry person follow his lead. By far the most popular has been the red velvet cheesecake. I love the idea of offering something special, it gives me or my chefs the ability to spread our wings a little bit.
Last night I saw a couple slabs of smoked pork belly in our walk in.
Q: Cliff Bostock has been tough on your food pointing out inconsistencies. Do you think he’s here on only the bad nights, or does he just not get your barbecue?
A: Cliff has been documenting his dining experiences for much longer than I have been living in Atlanta. I regularly read his column, and as a matter of fact, his piece about a popular Athens restaurant that opened in Buckhead and the horrible server experience he had there, I made all my servers read it to enforce our demand on how important it is for them to give our guests the best service they can give.
So, I take his columns as a way to make Fox Bros Bar-B-Q better. Cliff loved our take on a burger once, but the next two times it was flawed and he called us out. Well, it was a matter of the way it was being made, so it has totally been re-worked because of his thoughts, and I think it is really a better sandwich because of that.
We make it a point to talk to each table to find out how our guests are enjoying their experience and anything we need to do to make ourselves better. We work everyday to make ourselves more consistent, it just stings a little bit to be called out in print vs. hearing about it firsthand during that dining experience.
We had some really big growing pains when we opened, and we finally feel like we have a great staff that not only loves our food and cares about the product, but also has the pride to make sure that the product they put out follows our main belief, which is to prove ourselves, one plate at a time.
So, like I hope that one day the Falcons will have back-to-back winning seasons, that one day Cliff will also share that he has continually had outstanding meals at Fox Bros. Until then, we will keep working at being the best we can be.
Q: What was the worst customer experience you’ve had?
A: Where to begin? You learn fast that you can’t please everyone. I remember right after we opened, I was talking to an older couple and the wife was doing most of the talking, it seemed that the husband loved the food, but she didn’t, and she was asking me if I had been to “so and so bbq” and had their stew. I say no, and she says, “try it, you should make yours like theirs.”
My brother was called a racist one night for not seating someone fast enough. On one very busy Saturday night at 7pm we were on a wait, and a group of 25 bikers showed up and wanted a large table on the patio. It took a long time and they finally gave up and all got back on their bikes and just sat there revving their engines for 20 minutes out of spite until we finally said, “if you are going to leave, just leave.” We apologized over and over but had the rest of our customers to keep happy as well as the ones waiting.
So, you just try to do your best to make people happy, sometimes it can be frustrating waiting so long for a table or if the kitchen is a little backed up, but we hope by the time they get the food all will be well. If it isn’t, then we go from there to ensure a positive experience.
Q: I’ve heard a rumor or two that you might be looking into a possible second location. Any truth to the rumor mill?
A: We have been looking. One of the things we run into is, that with the size of our kitchen and the volume we do with the restaurant’s business and catering, that it is to much for our current kitchen to handle size wise. On several occasions we‘ve had to turn down catering on the weekends just to be able to satisfy the volume of the restaurant.
It is kind of the curse of Fox Bros., meaning, I started out in my own kitchen with an oven half the size of most normal ovens, and that seems to be still holding true.
We were moving on a location on the north side, but it fell through. It is funny, our current location we found on a Friday and the following Monday we had the building. This last location that fell through, it seemed like two months went by talking back and forth.
We are still looking, it can’t be just any place, it has to feel right for us — not to big and not to small. I guess the “perfect” location. If that even exists.
I am really looking forward to the challenge of opening a new location with a much larger kitchen, and I am very thankful that with today’s economy that we have that opportunity.
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