Page 27 - foodservice magazine April 2019
P. 27

DINING
27
Texan barbecue is a few years older than smashed avo or matcha lattes. Back in the smoky, sticky golden age, everyone was taking to 40-gallon drums with oxy torches and buying whole sides
of beef. Eventually, diners became sleepy and fat from all the white bread and red meat and moved onto raw kale.
It’s all part of the natural lifecycle – a few brave innovators try something new, and everyone else falls in line. It becomes a brutal war of attrition – a process of natural selection. And, a couple of years later, only the strong survive.
Chris Terlikar, Australia’s Texan barbecue master, is a survivor. Few restaurateurs have taken as many knocks as this man.
Back in 2015, when Melbourne was at the height of one of its barbecue waves, the chef ’s first restaurant and passion project, Bluebonnet Barbecue, burnt down. Terlikar was living above the inner- city restaurant, and he’d just crawled into bed after stacking the smoker. He woke up an hour later to find the courtyard bathed in amber light.
The fire destroyed his custom-built smoker and damaged the kitchen and the furniture store next door. But he wasn’t going to take it as an omen.
As a temporary measure, Bluebonnet began trading at the John Curtin Hotel in Carlton. But with an enormous debt to the ATO and slow trade at the pub, things weren’t looking good. “It was really tough,” says Terlikar. “We were losing a lot of money there, so we had to find something else or it was shut it down.”
Luckily he found the Star, a 140-year old pub in North Fitzroy that had been the subject of much local controversy due to an unpopular building application. While the struggle between developers and the general public raged on, Terlikar took over the lease. Bluebonnet at the Star was a perfect fit; the hotel had a lived-in feel that suited barbecue beautifully, and even space for a bourbon bar on the corner. “We went in there and checked it out on a Friday afternoon, and we had the keys by Monday.”
But Terlikar always knew that the Star was just a band-aid. At some point VCAT would make its ruling, and the tradies would move in to make way for the new apartment block.
So he began looking for Bluebonnet’s new home – somewhere the barbecue venue could put down roots once and for all.
A few times a week, Terlikar would drive past an empty building on Lygon Street in Brunswick East. When he went in for a peak,
at first, his heart sank: the ceilings were way too low, he thought. (Terlikar is very, very tall.) “But I opened up one of the ceiling panels and was like, ‘Holy crap!’ It has these wooden beams and exposed ceilings. It just really fit our style.” They tore out the panels and did a complete renovation of the giant brick building that now seats 170 people, and in 2018, Bluebonnet was rebooted.
“We’ve got a 20-year lease on this thing,” he says. “It’s pretty important that you make it right if you’re going in there for 20 years.”
Now, Terlikar can actually focus on running the thing. But settling down hasn’t been easy. “The industry has changed a hell of
a lot, probably more in the last three years than in the last 20,” he says. “It was a lot cheaper for us when we first started cooking. For instance, we were paying about $7.50 a kilo for brisket, and now we’re paying like $12.50, sometimes $15.”


































































































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