It's February, the time of year when Houstonian thoughts turn to barbecue. The Houston Livestock Show & Rodeo World's Championship Bar-B-Que is just around the corner. April will bring the Third Annual Houston Barbecue Festival. (Hopefully, April won't also bring showers during the festival like it did last year.)
With that in mind, this is the first of a three-week series where Chef Chat will focus on just a few of Houston's talented pit masters. It's not glamorous work. It involves working with raw meat, smelling like wood smoke all the time and staying up all night to mind the pits (or finding a night owl who's willing to mind the fires for you). The results, though, are well worth it and greatly appreciated by barbecue fans (as evidenced by the long lines of customers).
Will and Nichole Buckman are high school sweethearts who had a dream of running their own business. Will's first restaurant job just happened to be at a barbecue place, so it was perhaps a stroke of fate that life would lead him away from a job at AT&T, and both he and Nichole into a place of their very own: CorkScrew BBQ in Spring, Texas.
In Part 1 of this Chef Chat, Will and Nichole will talk about how they got started, some of the challenges they faced in finding an acceptable a piece of land for their barbecue business and why beef prices are so high right now.
Come back for Part 2 tomorrow, when Will and Nichole will talk about managing the ebbs and flows of the meat business, the best days and times to visit to get to try all the different meats and their "top secret marinating technique."
EOW: Are either or both of you native Houstonians, or "Springlandians," or...
NB: We're both from Spring, born and raised.
EOW: What do you call someone from Spring? Is there a word for that?
WB: They call us a lot of things. I don't know if there's a term. (laughs)
WB: Most people I hear call it "Sprang."
EOW: Sprang, with an "a." (laughs)
NB: Yeah, you're from Sprang.
EOW: So you've been here your whole lives.
WB: For the most part, yeah.
EOW: That's remarkable. Do you find that most of the people you meet around here are or are not originally from Spring?
WB: This part of Spring there's a lot of transplants. We've kind of on the border between The Woodlands and Spring. We've got a lot of oil and gas here in The Woodlands, so we get a lot of people from around the country, out of country. So it's a pretty great mix.
EOW: How did you meet?
WB: High school.
NB: When we were 14.
EOW: You're high school sweethearts!
NB: Yeah, we started dating when we were 17 and 18.
EOW: That is so awesome!
NB: 18 years in March.
EOW: That's so wonderful. Congratulations!
WB: Thank you so much.
EOW: Did you get involved with food and cooking separately or did you get involved at the same time? How did you know you were even interested?
NB: I always cooked. My mom cooked homemade growing up. I always cooked--pretty much every night, So, it was something we [she and Will] love to do together.
WB: Pretty much. We've worked in separate restaurants early on in our younger days. I've always loved to eat, so that's a plus. But, yeah, when we started this it was definitely a combined effort. We developed the menu and all the recipes together. I think coming into it we both had a definite interest for food.
EOW: Tell me about your early restaurant experiences.
WB: I've only worked in one restaurant before and it happened to be a barbecue restaurant. I kind of grew up in a barbecue restaurant called Reed's Barbecue, a family-owned place. Great family. I consider them my second family at this point years later. That was it. I started as a bus boy there and worked my way up to kitchen manager. I never really learned a whole lot about barbecue but it definitely taught me a whole lot about life and a whole lot about the restaurant industry.
EOW: How did you know that you wanted to get into the restaurant industry?
WB: We really didn't. We kind of fell into the restaurant industry. It was all happenstance.
NB: We always knew we wanted to own something of our own. We looked and we thought about crossbreeds of bars and grills. We thought about a lot of different things. This just happened to be it.
EOW: Nichole, did you have any early restaurant experience also?
NB: Yes. I've worked in lots of restaurants.
EOW: Where did you work?
NB: I worked at Friday's for a really long time, but I've worked at Atchafalaya, which is no longer here, I've worked at Pappasito's, TGI Friday's. This is all from about 16. And then I think I stopped working at restaurants when I was about 23.
EOW: You knew that you wanted to own your own business at some point. Why barbecue?
WB: As it turns out I was working in construction for AT&T. She was a stay-at-home mother. We have two children. We had a smoker in the driveway. One year for Christmas at AT&T, we had a potluck lunch and that was what I brought, barbecue. All of my co-workers decided that they liked what I did, so they started asking me if I would cook them a brisket for a birthday party or whatever occasion they might have. It got to the point to where that's all I was doing anymore. All of our free time, I was in the driveway.
NB: And I said, "We have to start charging for this."
WB: Yeah. So we did. We started charging for it. She made a website. We came up with a name and it just kind of snowballed. We started doing catering on the side and it just grew and grew, to the point to where we had to decide am I going to stay with AT&T, or are we going to do this full-time? We chose to do this full-time.
EOW: You just get to that point where you just can't. There's not enough of you to go around anymore.
NB: He's done with all his vacation time and all his sick days. We've gotten to the point where his work's kind of like, "What are you going to do?"
EOW: How long ago did you open CorkScrew?
NB: May 2010, when we started catering and then we opened November of 2011.
EOW: What made you decide on this particular piece of property?
WB: We were actually set to open in a different piece of property. It was in a small town, Oak Ridge North. I think it was two weeks before we were scheduled to open. Oak Ridge North told us that they did not allow mobile vendors in their community. We had all of our cards done.
NB: All the press was done, too.
WB: Everything was ready to go. That hurt pretty bad. We just started scrambling, looking for a place to go. In this area is pretty hard to find just a raw piece of land that somebody's willing to let you set up a camp on, you know? But we just stumbled across this one. I made an inquiry about it, and here we are.
EOW: There is an actual trailer over there that you serve out of and it is mobile. So, you can do things like drive it to these barbecue festivals?
NB: No, all this is now permanent. We're a permanent restaurant now, so we cannot move. We're tied to septic, sewer, water and all that stuff.
