Aaron Franklin's Personal Tour of Franklin Barbecue

well hello there my name is Katan citz and I work here at Franklin Barbecue I'm in the kitchen right now about to make the rounds but in all seriousness I I'm Aaron Franklin I've been trying to get fired from here for years and it's just not working for me but I thought I'd show you guys around uh we're here in the kitchen right now making myself a little sprole dokies for the morning cuz it's very cold outside and uh yeah let's start here maybe take a tour and uh we'll explore the nether regions and the front-facing aspects of Franklin Barbecue pretty friendly here at Franklin Barbecue and that's why we always keep cordial cherries in the kitchen they really good these are Cherry Cola cordal cherries but uh you know it's like to be nice to people [Music] really so leaving the kitchen we're here in the smok house um we've got these people just loitering uh lurking In the Shadows over here they're defrosting I don't know who they are they don't work here um anyway we'll visit more in here later we're about to load up the briskets um it's about 10:15 so we're kind of starting to Stage stuff out ribs are already off for the day and uh yeah just kind of resetting the fires and stuff and getting ready for service so let's go um down the stairs and we will go check out the line and see what's going on out there little story so as we're going out the door it's it's winter time right now it's kind of chilly outside usually all the stuff's open um but if you look at the Char on this uh we had a fire back in 2017 and we Salvage just a little bit of the wood that was actually sort of salvageable but we use it on the doors uh just cuz you know it kind of looks cool and that's a reminder that we should switch to pellet cookers no I'm kidding super kidding but it does look kind of neat though so it's kind of back of the house uh nothing too special going on here uh this is our reefer container we um get about 25 to 30 cases of brisket a day delivered we get deliveries about 4:00 or 5 a.m. every day um but anyway this kind of it's really a freezer but we've set it just to cool for quick recovery time any who going to make our way over here now it is about 10 o00 right now 10:15 I guess um and this is our pre-order trailer so we're doing this a little bit backwards so once we work around you'll kind of get some context for it but if you order on online there's a pre-order that's a 5B minimum right yeah 5 lb minimum um get online order come up here kind of skip the line but it's for like big parties and birthday parties and hanging out Bachelor parties any kind of party uh really or if you just can eat 5 pounds of meat that's fine too uh anyway this pre-order trailer though the grease collection ah love this stuff we used to have a taco trailer here the pandemic killed it we uh we didn't reopen after that uh but now if you get an order there's some like overflow seating and stuff like that out here so kind of nice it's pretty on a good day I will also say the line's pretty short today um and that's kind of a cool thing like right now it's our slow season because it's the winter uh as they call it so if you're ever like oh I can't get in line there they're way too long alas my good friends you can and it's called wintertime and I'm going to start to whisper here but this is the line it gets pretty tricky out there so sometimes we're going to we're going to get through it but I thought I was dead for sure the line kind of takes care of itself it's like you know share some beers get some breakfast tacos hang out make some friends uh it's it's pure magic we don't do much to to manage this line it kind of does itself uh but anyway let's go explore maybe we'll meet some nice nice people some good friends good morning how are yall doing man another day at the office what's shcking with you guys Canada oh man so you're not wearing flip flops and shorts no no I came prepared I looked ahead yeah all right like being from Canada be like oh man it's burning they're burning up down there it's like it's like summertime well it was all right yesterday when around I never really noticed this until this winter but man we've had so many Canadians coming through your hair they're like oh it's so cold up there it's like yeah of course it is yeah getting away fromus 20 yeah it's like we're R your Florida I like oh man amima best record store ever nice nice heck yeah well thank you'all for hanging out everybody doing good out here literally cold chilling nice nice nice awesome oh hello Taylor um this is Taylor our little line person Hi um friendliest person known to man I'm going to hand this off and I'm going to go inside and do some stuff you warm up are you going to stand by The Smokers oh thank you all right thank you hi guys how are you are my friend I'm good you came prepared are you guys with them too you're friends now the line has a way of doing that it brings people together I've seen people meet in line and then get married later isn't that funny you will see something like that you are congratulations I love that right it's awesome well what are you guys thinking you're going to get do you know do you want some help I have very high hopes for you I think you'll be just fine tallies of all the meat that we're going to get today so we've got the brisket uh pork ribs pulled pork Turkey House sausage and jalapeno cheddar sausage and then today we have beef ribs too so we go down the line and ask everybody about how much they're thinking about ordering it's kind of like reserving the meat for themselves so doesn't have to be exact but just so that we know when we're going to run out of [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] so the thing is almost every morning the doors open at 1059 reason for that is door opens people have about 1 minute to get to the counter cu the idea is that you're ordering your food at 11:00 on the dot so if I'm here I usually come up and uh start staring at my phone awkwardly and I start pacing and I continue to Pace you ready for this let me out y'all ready the show heck yeah long time no see you guys feel like we're besties Now hook around there and Kelsey will get to cutting good mornings glad glad we sort of have a heater in here little bit it barely works how you doing good man thanks for having us heck yeah man thanks for being had how you doing today fine how are you excellent what Shing man how are you good mornings yeah thank you all for hanging out hello hello gosh everybody seems so happy today it's like you guys are going to get fed or something sold out [Applause] it's like we were bred to do this job it's terrible my dad jokes they're not good they're not good jeez well that's really really cool we're excited to have you guys Kelsey's been talking about y'all all morning like I just can't wait to open the door so I can slice some meat for these guys it's okay you know we um we use a lot of salt and um Sal yeah yeah yeah salt pepper and some other stuff we have marinade in Unicorn Blood so this may come as a surprise as I'm getting closer and closer to the camera uh so you stand in line you show up you hang out you're like what do I got to do to get into that place really all you have to do is show up it's really simple uh but kind of hang out make some friends have a cold beverage or perhaps a hot beverage if it's early that would be coffee uh but when you come up to the line You'll see how we do everything and it's kind of meant it's kind of like German Meat Market style it's been done this way for years we'll be 15 this year and people were doing it for a real long time before we came along uh but you kind of get to the counter you're like ah give me a rib give me slice this oh man that looks good and we'll put little snacks up on the board and chitchat and you know we want to know if little Timmy's got his braces pulled off we want to know how Grandma's doing you know if Mom's a little under the weather throw an extra half pound of brisket in there to take home all that kind of stuff so this is really you know like that position was kind of like designed for me you know cuz I would just get up there cut every lunch and like chit chat so everything like the height of the counter the angle of the counter is like measured off like my body and like where I like to work and how I like to lean over and and cut and stuff like that so it's really you know and of course I built all this stuff so it was really easy to do that for myself but um but yeah the whole thing you know you get in you cut everything chitchat a bit pay high fives and stuff but really the the goal is is like you know you get there you wait for a while and it's like we we talk like we hang out it's not like we're just shoveling out me like all right blah blah blah get out of here like we want to hang out we want to make friends with you guys and that's really what this place is designed for also a cool thing about the cutter is that that kind of controls the flow of the restaurant right so you're dealing with you know cutting stuff talking to people but you're also looking at the seats so you know we we've only got 37 seats in the restaurant it's not very big at all uh and we cook about 120 briskets a day so we got to get all this food out but we don't want to rush people so say for example the dining room's full maybe we'll slow down service just a little bit to let some you know tables clear out to make some room because we don't want people standing around or we can speed it up uh if you know the line's super long we can cut a little bit faster my workday also um as Kat continu it uh you know I work downstairs which we'll take a look at more of the behind the scenes stuff here in a minute uh but I'll kind of come up here open the door make the rounds high five bust some tables chitchat go downstairs do some emails come back up here and just kind of bounce back and forth you know we're waiting on tables get filled up I'm going to go do some emails but I'll show you guys the office in the [Music] [Music] meantime man what a trek to get down to the office um we don't have a lot of room left on this property so we kind of have to squeeze in where we can uh but this is the office we have computers uh Mother Brain for the entire operation besides our real office that's around the corner and a another building um anyway yeah so this where our POS stuff happens a lot of people ask what the secret ingredient is and I mean everybody knows by now gez um but really we burn Girl Scout cookies with Post Oak and that's how we get that we get that lift you see yeah lots of Girl Scout cookies refrigerator and then this is my office and boy is it junkie like any restaurant guy stuff lot of bottles lot of books stock pots heat lamps beer samples that I'll never get to back up trays all this stuff uh but nothing nothing too interesting going on back here it's an exotic life we live alas we're here again in the smok house kind of you know kind of my path for a workday just kind of making the rounds making circles just like you know time to make the donuts again but anyway kind of doing some stuff it's pretty chill this is kind of you know once the door opens we wait for the tables to come of fill up and then when that first turn happens we start doing pit tours so this kind of our quiet time this when we reset the SmokeHouse get the briskets on get the fire stable get everything kind of cleaned up um and then probably about 11:30ish uh guests will start coming in here for like pit tours and hanging out and asking questions and you know we got a bunch of pretty awesome people that are really great at talking to everybody and you know do some Q&A whatever whatever it doesn't really matter too much but um anyway a couple weird little tidbits about the SmokeHouse uh this is actually the second smok housee we've had uh the first one burned down in a nasty fire it burned down um anyway who thought it would be a good idea to frame a Smokehouse uh with wood well no one said anyone ever but we did it a second time and we have this woodframe Smokehouse um but a couple design changes on this one is that we have a single plane ceiling which is kind of cool cuz the other one uh you know was just just a normal kind of hip roof I guess um but you know we don't have any fans in here so we have this natural ventilation uh up top it's called the clear story but the idea is is that it's naturally ventilated so with a single plane roof we can actually get air in here and it kind of venturies the uh the hot air and the smoke out of here so like right now we're filling with pits getting the fires going but it's not even smoky in here and it's not loud either there are no vent fans uh which is really cool cuz you can hear the fire crack you can hear kind of like all the context clues for how things are burning and how things are working um big old stack of Post Oak over there um we'd go through about six cords a week it's a pretty insane amount of firewood um I forget what the hard number is but to burn each one of these smokers for one hour cost $33.2 if I remember of firewood um so we've got it down because that factors into cost of goods and all the stuff you have to figure out um um which is stuff that you don't think about when you pay 30 something dollars for a pound of brisket it's like what it took to get there but that factors in for sure um anyway but this is it uh let's go check out the sausage situation I never sausage a cool walk-in this is where we make the sausage hello hello hello how are you so this is it uh we've got a grinder um you know cuz we're uh Judas Priest fans I've got our little lucky Linker we've got this guy Travis our other lucky Linker and uh yeah we're just kind of doing stuff nothing too special going on in here and a ooh grinder parts ready to go to the wash this is also where we take our breaks and eat lunch sometimes so we oh hey look back in the smok house so if you've ever been here you'll know this and if you haven't you're about to learn it uh Franklin Barbecue has a really challenging topography uh we're up on the side of a hill so it kind of drops down and where we built the smok housee used to be a parking lot underneath us but the problem was that the building was too high so we couldn't just like go downstairs to bring meat and stuff like that so to my knowledge this is the only uh Second Story Smokehouse you know that I've ever seen at least uh but it is above ground and we store things underneath which we'll take a look at that but that also created the problem that we had to get stuff up and down constantly so we have a freight elevator um just to get like meat and kind of the way the the path Works in here is that like in the mornings you show up about midnight for rib shift bring stuff up do ribs do stuff get this and by the time you're about to wrap ribs that cook is over here the kitchen's already reset and the prep gu show up about 6:00 a.m. and then meat lugs start coming up here that we trimmed that are held in a cooler down here uh they come up do a secondary trim get seasoned and then when they go out the new stuff comes in for the primary trim for the next day next day's batch so it's like kind of a big Tetris game it's like one little piece it's always kind of moving around it's like one of those puzzles where you can only move one thing at a time uh but this elevator gets a lot of action so during lunch meat's not really coming back up it's starting to go down to get reset and weighed out in in meat lugs in the two coolers um but then trash goes out here and then all kinds of stuff so this is kind of a big a big path for the smok house U but we try to organize everything where it's pretty open and clear during lunch in the afternoon it gets real busy again uh anyway let's head back this way this is our very own customade mop syn so we can scrub our grates every Sunday anyway we're back down here um again second time we've been here but uh the nether regions uh let's take a gander this way this is the kind of stuff that nobody ever gets to see I hope it's clean this is our kind of like catwalk uh you know from the elevator to the to go trailer to the T-shirt thing to the reefer all that stuff this is also our loading dock these gates open up and this is where we get our wood deliver in every Monday while we're closed and they go this way now we're really good at knowing what we use uh so right now this is all pretty empty because it's Saturday right so we've only got one pallet of wood and each pallet is about a third is of a cord um so come Monday afternoon this whole thing will be filled with firewood and that's the week Supply we'll get through it and then by the time next Saturday Sunday rolls around uh we'll be down again uh it's kind of where we store like speed racks and stuff all these kinds of things upstairs after our first trim of brisket uh for the next day next day's food everything goes down here and then we do meat lugs and everything's weight out uh this is where poultry lives this is just kind of our other cooler elevator uh beverage cooler for the line stuff this is our freezer for gel packs for gold gold belly orders and this is our dry storage we're not going to look in there though let's take a look at the uh to- Go trailer now I will say there's no money in brisket cuz it's really expensive but we sell a lot of t-shirts this is kind of kind of fun little territory this is a 20ft chiby container just for Merch and little portion cups uh but these are all the t-shirts all organized we restock um this is not where all the merch lives we keep a lot at our shop uh down in South Austin also uh but this is just kind of like our daily you know needs here uh and weekly stuff too but anyway you know Koozies trays Togo boxes all that stuff nothing nothing too exciting [Music] here uh let's see more back of the house stuff um yeah so this used to be now we call this the cancer Den long story but it holds phase converters in there so there's a lot of a lot of stuff going on in there it gets real hot your insides get warm uh and I know that because it used to be my office and I would sit at my desk be like ah I think I need to get a EMF you know reader who's like oh there's either an apparition or it is not a safe place to be uh I also ate a lot of paint chips as a kid so I wasn't too worried about it but anyway so this uh initially I built this when we were in the trailer about 13 years ago um and I built it just wide enough that I could FL fit on a flat bed trailer yeah so it was dry storage at the trailer we outgrew as you can see we've gotten a little bit bigger than we used to be uh when we were in the trailer started off cooking three briskets on Saturday two during the week and then I think when we left the [Music] trailer in March of 201 I suppose I think we were cooking 24 briskets a day now we're 120 so things have changed and our our dry storage needs have also changed but anyway blah blah blah going on there it's a deep freezer for more gel packs for gold bellies this is another shipping container that holds gold belly boxes and sauce and beer and all that kind of stuff so every Monday uh we with gold belly it's like a third party shipping brisket thingy um but we pack him up here and since we're so busy all the time we don't really have like smoker space or any of that stuff so we do 120 briskets a week with gold belly because that's all we can fit in one cook so if we really get in a pickle we can do a Sunday night cook because we're closed on Sunday so since we're closed on Mondays Sunday night could close yeah so since we're closed on Mondays we uh you know load up all the stuff over the weekends and then just service all the gold belly orders out of this trailer which is also our to- Go trailer hello hello how's car doing today good thank you um nothing special here but if you do order uh an order online and I hope you do uh this is where you'll come and you know you show up give us your name all that stuff check in we'll cut the food and that's about it really guys are so quiet in here so quiet just turned off no I mean it's the first time I've not heard Austin flapping his gums with dad jokes anyway this is Austin he's a he's the fellow that makes us laugh all the time got all the jokes got all the jokes yeah I feel like this is like the uh our underground layer of the barbecue underworld Franklin Barbecue underworld any this is our Brak table this is one of the first picnic tables no I take the back somebody threw that one away it's a replacement uh anyway this kind of where we do like work meetings it's about the only quiet spot there is uh when we're up there working and stuff you know break table kind of made the rounds usually instead of uh you know going around giving a tour of the place I would be back there doing emails little hat on smoking cigarettes paper ding um doing stuff like that but come up here kind of hang out so I'm going to go chitchat a bit uh thank you all for watching hope you enjoyed it um and yeah if you have any questions or we didn't cover anything ask Kevin at Kevin's barbecue joints [Music] [Music] know

Channel: Kevin Kelly

Views: 207,779

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Id: nsOLJ6tfo-4

Length: 28min 2sec (1682 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 22 2024