The Goodes

The first Goode Co. BBQ opened somewhat by accident. Jim Goode was a corporate graphic artist who had grown weary of being beaten down on prices after he'd already done the work for his advertising executive clients in the late 1970s. He had always loved fishing and cooking barbecue, so he thought he might want to do something with those skills.

"As fate would have it," his son, Levi Goode, says, "he came to this Goode Co. BBQ restaurant, which was the Red Barn Barbecue back in the '70s. The food wasn't good, but there weren't many options."

Jim Goode got to know the husband-and-wife team who owned the small restaurant, but one day when he went in for a late lunch, he noticed the wife manning the brisket and the register on her own. She said that her husband had passed away a few weeks earlier and she wasn't sure how she'd be able to run the business on her own. It was her husband's passion, not hers, and she longed to move back to where her family was in east Texas.

"And my dad said, 'That's interesting; I've been trying to figure out a way to get into the barbecue business,'" Levi Goode explains. "So while he ate his lunch, she sat down and they started talking. And it was pretty simple. He said, 'I've got $3,000 in savings, and I've got another $3,000 owed to me by the ad agency. And that's all I've got. Take it or leave it.' And she decided to take it. So she took off her apron and handed him her keys. Before he'd even finished his lunch, he was the new owner of a terrible barbecue restaurant."

Fortunately, Jim was really good at smoking brisket, and he enlisted the help of his uncle, Joe Dixie, in getting the restaurant started. Dixie had been a prisoner of war in Japan during WWII, and he'd become the cook for the soldiers and other POWs.

"In order to keep everything going, it was a 24/7 job," Levi says. "My dad and my uncle practically lived there. One of them would sleep on the picnic bench outside, and the other one would sleep near the pit on a cot or on a chest freezer. They had a loaded shotgun and an alarm clock, and they'd wake up every hour and check on the meat and stoke the fire and reload the wood."

Even with such dedication, business started off slow. Jim Goode would measure growth by how many bags of trash filled with paper plates he'd take out to the curb at night. By the time he was filling up half a dozen or more bags of trash each day, he decided it was time to look into opening another restaurant.

In 1983 Goode opened the Goode Co. Taqueria, which featured standards from his grandmother's kitchen and items cooked on a mesquite grill. There was an abandoned brick warehouse behind the taqueria that was turned into an office and test kitchen. Three years later the family borrowed some of what they'd learned with the taqueria and working with a mesquite grill and applied those techniques to Gulf Coast seafood at the first Goode Co. Seafood, on Westpark.

"My parents got divorced in the early years of the restaurant business," Levi Goode says. "It's hard. My sister and I ended up moving to southern Louisiana with my mother, and during that time we experienced a lot of Cajun festivals and famous restaurants from Lafayette to New Orleans and everywhere in between. So that's why you see things on our menu like gumbo and étouffée. The primary influence is Texas Gulf Coast seafood, but you also get Mexican and Cajun/Creole dishes as well."

During the next ten years, the Goodes opened another barbecue restaurant and the Barbeque Hall of Flame, a retail shop catering to all things barbecue. They also began shipping their now-famous pecan pies in the signature pine boxes.

By 2000 the Internet had begun to take over shopping, so Levi, now in business with his father, decided to move the barbecue store online and turn the former storefront into another restaurant. In 2003 the father-son team opened Armadillo Palace next to the original Goode Co. BBQ on Kirby, but it didn't have a name at first.

That was solved when Levi and his father came across a giant armadillo outside an antique store in Wyoming. They hauled it back to Texas, jazzed it up with some mosaic tiles and Armadillo Palace was born.

Levi Goode now owns the entire business on his own, and he's happy to keep the Goode name here in Houston.

"I wouldn't say we'll never leave Houston, but I think there are still opportunities in the city," he says. "We just finished a new commissary that also houses our e-commerce business with the test kitchen, so everything's under one roof. So we have a good foundation for really evaluating what's next."