Merger brings top-flight Texas BBQ to Sebastopol
A&M BBQ is bringing barbecue lovers from all over the county—and beyond—to their location on South Main Street. Grand opening this Saturday.
As any small business owner knows, running your own small business can be lonely at times. BBQ artist extraordinaire Kris Austin of Austin’s Southern Smoke BBQ in Santa Rosa was doing well enough financially, but with the high cost of living and the high cost of housing in Sonoma County, he was thinking of packing his bags and going back home to Mississippi.
Then, on social media, he noticed a new barbecue business, Marvin’s BBQ in Sebastopol, and decided to stop by and say hello.
“Just as a friendly barbecue courtesy,” Austin said. “So, in the barbecue community, we don’t look at each other as competition because we’re all striving for the same goal, and that’s to create a superior product and something that truly comes from your soul and from the heart and deliver it and share with the community.”
Austin and Marvin’s BBQ owner Marvin McKinzy became fast friends, and then they became business partners, merging their two businesses into one, A&M BBQ, at Marvin’s location in Sebastopol.
Austin got an early start with barbecue.
“I started doing barbecue when I was ten years old,” he said.
Back in Mississippi, his family had huge gardens that provided all of their produce, and they raised their own hogs and chickens.
“The only thing we went to the store for was flour and sugar,” he said.
“So I learned how to barbecue really early, but I will say ‘grilling’ because it was over like a 55-gallon barrel drum that had been converted into a barbecue grill. Every summer we’d get a new one because the one from the year before was burned out at the bottom.”
“When we would process hogs, it was like a family team kind of event,” Austin said, “with some of us taking the cuts, curing them, and getting them hung up in the smokehouse. That was my introduction to barbecue—like watching my dad and my granddad. We had a physical smokehouse out in the yard that had an offset barrel, and then at one end, we’d have a really low coal-based fire that would cure and smoke all the meats.”
Playing football in college, Austin forgot about barbecue for a few years. Then in his senior year, the television show BBQ Pitmasters brought it all back and piqued his interest in learning more about barbecue and cooking in general.
He studied different styles of barbecuing, but when he stumbled upon Texas-style barbecue, “it simplified everything for me,” he said, noting that Texas barbecue master Aaron Franklin was a big influence on him.
Practicing his craft led Austin to “understand the technique and understand how the meat should look and feel at a certain point.” Sure, he’s got all the gauges and thermometers and other gadgets, but in the end, it’s the look and feel of the meat that matters, he said.
“I mean, you can get BBQ anywhere, right? But have you taken the time to put the effort, the hours, the detail into every single rack of ribs that comes out, every pork butt, every chicken? Everything that we do, we make sure that our process from top to bottom checks all those boxes. So that way, what we provide to the public is something that you can’t get anywhere else.”
Austin and McKinzy seem equally thrilled about the merger.
“I got into barbecue as a hobby,” McKinzy said. “My daughter pushed me to do it. But Austin has studied it from bottom to top, so merging with him only makes our whole team better.”
For Austin, having a partner made all the difference.
“Marvin was cooking by himself, and I was doing all the cooking by myself,” Austin said. “Cooking everything by yourself—it’s kind of like burning the candle at both ends. You feel like you’ve become a slave to what your actual passion is, and feeling like that makes you sometimes want to give up on it or not even do it anymore.”
But working together with McKinzy changed that. “It’s a good, healthy work environment, where it’s nice to come to work every day. You look forward to it,” Austin said. “And it’s reignited that fire of passion that both of us have for barbecue.”
That passion and attention to detail explain the long line of barbecue lovers that queue up all weekend for succulent ribs, meaty pulled pork sandwiches, perfect chicken and sides like collard greens, sweet baked beans, jalapeño cornbread and coleslaw.
A&M BBQ also does catering. In fact, they had to close the restaurant down last weekend because they had so many catering jobs—three weddings in one weekend—so it was all hands on deck.
Austin and McKinzy are having their official grand opening celebration this weekend, on Saturday, June 29—and it’s likely to be mobbed because they have definitely been discovered.
Their current hours are Friday through Sunday from 11:30 am to “sold out” or 6 pm, whichever comes first—and believe me, these days, “sold out” generally comes first.
where do you source your meat? in w county we care!
thanks