There is a certain price (which I have generally found is $4.50 - $4.99/lb, that is when my food cost for a brisket sandwich hits 50%. Target food cost should be somewhere around 30%) where it just isn't worth it to sell brisket. BBQ is somewhat unique in that you have to estimate your demand ahead of time - you can't just throw on another brisket if you run out and I don't reheat/re-use leftovers. So even if I raise my prices $2/sandwich to cover the increased cost my risk is still higher because any unsold product is now a higher loss.

Matt's BBQ is the best Texas style bbq in Portland by a considerable margin. I've been a customer and friendly with him since he started out in a pawn shop parking lot with zero foot traffic and almost no road visibility. He charges $13.50 for a 1/2 lb of brisket, similar prices for other meats. Sides are typically around $3.50.

He's up to multiple locations and his own commissary kitchen that's like 2000 sq feet.

He sells out every single day.

It's been really fun to watch his business blow up. It's all been from the strength of his product, and his personal hustle to get the momentum. His customer base is loyal and willing to pay a premium.

He even has a side hustle selling smoker rigs, via a partnership.

It's a mixed race neighborhood. For the first couple years his neighbor in the pawn shop parking lot was a soul food cart. The clientele at both looked basically the same in terms of demographics.

While you won't find as much good BBQ in Portland as say central Texas, the Carolinas, etc, it's not some sort of exotic novelty.

I don't know why you are so determined to stereotype this stuff, but it is not helpful.

It is a statistical impossibility that any given group in Portland is the same as any given group in Texas on the metrics I mentioned, so your claim is really that these metrics don't influence price sensitivity.

It's statements like this that are revealing:

> People do value authenticity in my town. The big corporate chain restaurants are a lot more sparse here, exactly because the local places are just as cheap, far higher quality, locally owned, and using local ingrediants, etc.

There's no trade-off between chain restaurants and locally owned? The latter is just an unalloyed good and other regions of the country are just making mistakes for no reason? So no, I don't find your analysis convincing, but as I already said I appreciate your input in the discussion.

Just. Stop.

I never made any claim about blanket superiority, just described factually what this place is like. You'll find plenty of people and even data supporting that characterization if you want.

Likewise I did not claim anything about equality with Texas, just that your utterly naive assertion that the customer base for the food cart I mentioned must be slanted a particular way, based on literally nothing. It is not.

In any case, it's clear continuing this line of discussion is pointless.

I don’t have any plans to go full time with BBQ anytime soon but that’s exactly the model I’ve looked into.

People in Portland and other liberal cities will paradoxically pay a premium for "poor people" food. When you are wealthy enough to consume whatever you want, the rarest commodity is something that feels like an authentic, meaningful experience. Cuisines that come from poor areas carry that sense of authenticity with them and can charge appropriately.

I don't think you can assume that pricing model will work well outside of a few places like Portland, SF, NYC, Seattle, LA. People that aren't wealthy enough such that they do care about food prices aren't going to pay extra because a brisket is served on a just-so-cute-and-"real" metal tray.

Food carts in Portland are extremely informal and very much a thing for everyday people, including people with low incomes by local standards. In fact it's one of the main drivers of their popularity here.

It's not a matter of wealthy people adopting "poor people's food" as a novelty. It's just good food no matter your situation in life. Matt is charging on the higher end, and a complete meal is still under $20. The best burger in my area is a double bacon cheese for $4.50 that uses really quality ingredients.

I've talked with customers at Matt's that live out in the country and make an hour plus drive to come by every once in a while.

People do value authenticity in my town. The big corporate chain restaurants are a lot more sparse here, exactly because the local places are just as cheap, far higher quality, locally owned, and using local ingrediants, etc.

The genesis of the food cart scene here was the city has some smart policies about making it affordable to start these businesses. Many people who dream of someday having a restaurant start out this way. You can make a serious shot at it with just $50k or so, which is tiny even by small business capital standards. They price their food accordingly.

It's true this place is getting more expensive, but I assure you, if you go out to any of the pods, you'll see a roughly even mix of people who are middle class, and young people that probably make barely enough to cover rent at a service industry job. Everyone will be hanging out, friendly and chatting.

Please don't project your own assumptions onto this scene if you've not been there. This town is pretty grossly misrepresented by a wide swath of media.

As long as they are safely handled I've found no quality difference at all when freezing stuff that is cryo-vaced. More often than not it has already been frozen at least once before it gets to me.

I don't ever sell anything that has been re-heated after cooking though. You can also do that with little to no quality loss but I try to position myself as a premium brand so everything is 'cooked to order'. There are also a lot more food safety concerns (cooing it fast enough, re-heating it fast enough, etc.) that I don't want to worry about. I vacuum seal cooked BBQ at home and it's just as good as fresh but you can't do that in a commercial setting without special permits that aren't available to food trucks (at least not in my area).

Perfect yesterday BBQ meat! Coming from USSR/Russia with its food shortages in 198x-first half of 199x i still kind of mentally shudder reading such things even after 21 years of living here.

I’m only open once or twice a week so secondary uses (beans, chili, etc) unfortunately don’t work for me.

This is really not true anymore. BBQ has become a high-ticket item thanks to “Craft BBQ” and growing demand

https://www.khou.com/mobile/article/news/brisket-prices-are-...

When a thing becomes trendy among moneyed demographics there is now stupid money to be made selling a caricature of that thing to people with too much money. BBQ is one of those thigns becoming just another experience for yuppies to talk about in the break room on Mondays. When you're running a BBQ joint you're not selling meat cooked in a particular style, you're selling an experience. People don't care about whether your BBQ is a career long refinement of what grandma made. They care about whether it's something they can brag about. They're looking for an experience and if you want to stay in business you're gonna sell it to them. It's not about doing your thing well, it's about presentation and show. Many of the people running these restaurants hate bastardizing their craft and leaning into an image/stereotype like this but it's what pays the bills.

Maybe I'm just jaded from growing up in a tourism economy but money uncritically thrown at something tends to ruin it.

When I go looking for a restaurant I go for <censored>, <censored> and <censored>, because those three genres aren't trendy right now and any business specializing in them has to succeed on its own merits, it can't just print money by looking the part.

Was this just a joke or are you genuinely censoring your own opinions on what food you like because you're scared of them becoming more popular?

I generally consider BBQ competitions overblown affairs that are arguing how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. To me, after a certain point it is quite good enough, and any further optimization for "better" doesn't pass my personal cost-benefit filter, and I'd rather spend the cognitive effort on my dining companions.

It is either that, or I possess a philistine palate. The latter is quite possible because I hold a similar opinion of many of the fine dining establishments I've eaten at, from quite fine kaiseki, omakase, Chinese, Michelin-starred French, various fusions, steak, and other restaurants, some with pretty eye-popping per-diner prices. That's mostly because I believe that we're at the nascent, fragile stages of achieving post-scarcity (by no means assured, and still many generations away), and part of that journey involves the elevation of increasingly finer experiences (perhaps some requiring ever-greater cognitive effort to appreciate that I'm not aware of) to a mass market.

Huh? The cuts are tough, yes, but they're also the most flavorful. There's nothing bad about them.

Go try and use a ribeye to make a cheeseburger sometime. It's incredibly bland compared to the flavor you're used to getting from chuck.

From: https://commoncog.com/blog/cash-flow-games/

"Food costs money. But the way that everyone (in the F&B industry) looks at food costs, and paying for food is very weird. When COVID started, every famous chef that went on TV said, “This is the kind of business where this week’s revenues pay for bills from a month ago.” So when we started to bring in money from deposits and prepaid reservations, I suddenly looked and we had a bank account that had a couple million dollars in it — of forward money

"I started calling up some of our big vendors for the big, expensive items — like proteins: meat, fish; luxury items: like caviar, foie gras, wine and liquor, and I said, “I don’t want net-120 anymore, I want to prepay you for the next three months.” And they had never had that kind of a phone call from a restaurant before.

So how much should they discount it? So let’s say we’re going to buy steaks. We’re going to pay $34 a pound wholesale for dry aged rib-eye, we get net-120 (normally). So I call the guy and say “I’m going to use 400 pounds of your beef a week for the next 4 months, for our menu, which is about about $300,000 of beef, what (would) we get, if we prepay you?” And he was like “what do you mean?” I’m like “I want to write you a check tomorrow for all of it, for four months.” And he was like, “Well, no one has ever said that.” So he called me the next day, he said “$18 a pound” … so … half. Half price.

I went, “I’ll pay you $20 if you tell me why.” And he said, “Well, it’s very simple. I have to slaughter the cows, then I put the beef to dry. For the first 35 days I can sell it. After 35 days there’s only a handful of places that would buy it, after 60 days, I sell it $1 a pound for dog food.” So his waste on the slaughter, and these animals’s lives, and the ethics of all of that, are because of net-120! Seems like someone should have figured this out! As soon as he said that, everything clicked, and I went “We need to call every one of our vendors, every time, and say that we will prepay them.”

That is an excellent idea (having more than just a transactional relationship with you food vendor is a good idea in general) but my volume is way too low to have that type of leverage. The best I can do (and fortunately what I did when I saw the prices increasing) is pre-buy and freeze as much as I can to lock in the then-current pricing. Right now food supplies aren't even able to fill many wholesale orders because they don't have enough supply so I'm not sure pre-paying would help if they can't even get the product. For example one major vendor has changed their order cutoff time from 11PM to 5PM so they can spend that extra time allocating their available stock across all the orders because they don't have enough for everyone.

BBQ is my side hustle so I'll be ok either way - but if I was paying my mortgage via food service I would be alot more concerned.

Also, just thinking aloud, during normal times, if you happen to know other hobbyist BBQ folks, I'm wondering if there might be opportunities to enter into an informal group-buying situation where you pool your collective brisket demand and bulk buy at a discount. That wouldn't work right now but perhaps it might during normal times. There are websites based around this idea. Best of luck.

https://news.yahoo.com/nick-kokonas-pivoted-hard-onset-19010...

COVID is weird in that it doesn't have a uniform effect on everyone.

Scale matters.

I still have my tech job and don’t plan on going full BBQ anytime soon. I do it enough that it keeps me busy but I can always say no to a catering job or event so it’s still enjoyable and not a chore.

The right opportunity would have to come along for me to jump onto the restaurant world. It’s definitely something I’ve looked into but one thing I have learned is that the BBQ is the easy part of running a BBQ business - it’s everything else that is tricky. Right now I don’t have to worry about employees, rent, etc. so someone with those strengths would have to make a pretty good pitch to get me to open a restaurant.

I’ve being doing BBQ professionally for 10+ years. It started out just done some small catering jobs and has grown from there. Through BBQ I’ve been able to do lots of cool stuff that I would have never imagined when I started. I was heavily involved in competition BBQ for several years and through that I’ve worked with several big brands . Currently I’m focused on my food truck and rub and sauce products. I’ve also done several BBQ classes and hope that as we turn the corner on COVID I can start that up again soon.