Backyard at Bee Cave
Flashback to 1991, I was newly sober and I met Tim O’Conner who was also on his own sober journey and looking to make a new life. At the time that I met Tim, he was searching for some property to purchase with which to create a new live music venue. Whether you know it or not, if you’ve seen live music in Austin over the past 20 to 30 years, you’ve likely given money to Tim O’Connor. In the Seventies, he reigned over Castle Creek, in the Eighties, he owned and operated the Austin Opera House, while co-founding Star Tickets and staging hundreds of large-scale festivals and benefits, from No Nukes concerts to Farm Aid, and much later in his career he owned La Zona Rosa and the Austin Music Hall.
On the corner of Highway 71 and Ranch Road 620 there was a dive of a restaurant, the Branding Iron, that I drove past at least twice a day for all of my many years in the Lake Travis area. Bud (the owner) and his boys had been serving really bad food for years, if it wasn’t frozen or out of a can it didn’t appear on the menu at the Branding Iron. They were single handedly giving the Texas staple Chicken Fried Steak a bad name, and that is criminal and very hard to do. I had eaten there only once never to repeat that mistake, but I did return to the Branding Iron once more for Rusty Weir’s birthday party. Rusty (now passed on) was the original Lake Snake and performed in all of the dives around Lake Travis to fund his libation habit and he was a local celebrity among his fellow snakes and had a huge Lake Snake following. They all showed up for his birthday party and raised a glass or twenty to his health. The Branding Iron hosted many local musicians, but Rusty always brought in the biggest crowd.
Anyway, one day they decided it was time to sell and a for sale sign popped up, it was not real estate I was interested in but I notified Tim and the story of the Backyard begins, Tim bought the Branding Iron from Bud and began the planning process.
They had been operating the restaurant with an inadequate septic system and had solved the problem by rolling in an old trailer on to the property to act as the men’s bathroom. When we removed the smelly old trailer, we found that the bathroom pipes had never been hooked up, this was true lake snake ingenuity, all the waste from the toilet was flushed directly on to the ground and stayed under the trailer until it was washed away by a good rainstorm. It stunk.
Also, they never threw anything away, they just tossed their junk under the deck of the restaurant, you name it and it was there boats, cars, old restaurant equipment. We thought we might even find an old Branding Iron waiter as we removed all of the crap from under the deck. No treasures or bodies were to be found, it all went to the garbage, six rollaway dumpsters worth of it. The backyard behind the Branding Iron was a natural amphitheater complete with HUGE Live Oak trees.
I had no intention of becoming involved, but it had good restaurant bones, just in need of a good cleaning and I loved Texas BBQ. At the end of the day, I did indeed become involved but under risk free terms. Tim offered me a share of the company for my work gutting the old restaurant and designing and rebuilding the new kitchen and restaurant, as well as managing the operations of the new restaurant.
Tim gave me the impression that he was down to his last dime and did unsuccessfully attempt to get me to invest in the purchase of the Branding Iron. It was years later I learned that his family had lots of money, so much money that his mom lent Willie Nelson several million dollars to produce one of his movies. I’m not sure which movie. Tim was Willie’s road manager for years. When Tim told Willie that he couldn’t stay sober and work for him, Willie’s reply was a typical Willie comment, “Tim, we knew you needed more medicine than most”. Bobbi Nelson is Willie’s older sister and his piano player. When Willie and Bobbi moved to Austin from Nashville, Bobbi needed to find her own money-making gig. Mike Burke, my lifelong friend who I met and worked with at Lakeway, hired her to do classical runs up and down the key board in the dining room. She could play anything from country to classical. I was the maître d in the restaurant and Bobbi and I became friends.
The dining room had a wraparound deck and the windows were tinted glass that the diners could not see out of when it was dark. The customers never went out to the deck. John Shipley, the wine steward in the restaurant and I took turns smoking joints on the deck. It felt odd looking in on the busy dining room while smoking and it took many visits to the deck before I felt confident that I couldn’t be seen. After returning to the hustle and bustle of the dining room I would say to John “there is a red head on the porch who asked for you”, indicating to him that it was his turn to take a little smoke break. Bobbi Nelson over heard me use the term many times and I have often wondered if Bobbi was enchanted with the term and plagiarized and passed it on to her baby brother for a catchy album name, “Red Headed Stranger”. One day a large man all dressed in black came into the dining room, closed Bobbi’s key board and said “come on Bobbi, let’s go”. I asked a waiter “who was that?”. The waiter said “that was Waylon Jennings, Bobbi’s boyfriend”.
Back to the Backyard, we were up and running. The restaurant was open for business all year long but the amphitheater closed every winter because it was an outdoor venue. Every Spring, it became tradition that Willie would be the first act Tim booked, reopening the amphitheater. I was hobnobbing on the side stage with Willie and his band and Tim saw me and came over to me and asked me if I wanted to officially meet Willie and go on the famous “Willie” bus. I said “of course”, who wouldn’t want to meet Willie in his natural environment and I assumed that Bobbi would be on the bus and I wanted to say “hi” to her. As we climbed on the bus we were hit by cloud of smoke, enough said. After meeting Willie, I asked if Bobbi was onboard and told him I knew her from many years ago. Bobbi appeared from the back of the bus and was happy to see me. We rehashed all of our old Lakeway memories and before I left, we exchanged phone numbers and I extended an invitation to her to dine at Hudson’s on the Bend and then I went about my business. The next day I strolled into the Backyard and Tim grabbed me and said “what did you say to Bobbi, she thinks she has a date with you”. Tim called and explained the misunderstanding.
I opened an upscale BBQ restaurant on a very limited budget. I soon found out that high quality BBQ, especially brisket, is very hard to prepare and serve in a typical restaurant setting because good BBQ does not hold for the next day. That is why high-quality BBQ joints all have a “Sold Out and Closed Until Tomorrow” sign in the window. You don’t want to over prepare because you can’t use it the next day and it results in money in the garbage can at the end of the day, so getting your daily par is super tricky. At 160 Fahrenheit the connective tissue begins to break down and becomes tender, at 170 Fahrenheit it falls apart and becomes dry. An Alto Shaam oven does a good job holding brisket at moist serving temperature, some pit masters hold brisket by wrapping it in butcher paper, others use food film. Ideally you get the best results if you can serve it directly off the pit. Sausage, ribs and all types of fowl are more forgiving than brisket. Remember one day you have perfect BBQ brisket, the next day it is shredded into Sloppy Joes. Each pit is full of differentiations, so you need to become familiar with your pit; all pits have different hot spots and you need to learn where they are. For me it’s a trial and error learning process. The best way to really learn the personality of your pit is to tend it all night. The red smoke ring or pellicle on the outside of the brisket is as far as the smoke penetrates. After you have smoked the brisket you can move it to your oven, wrap it and use a more controlled environment for holding. This is heresy in the mind of the purist pit master, but it works well.
In the world of BBQ, “low and slow” is gospel to the pit master. When cooking brisket, I find that 225 degrees Fahrenheit is the best temperature to reach 160 degrees internal temperature of the brisket. For the best results use Prime grade brisket, Prime is much more forgiving and juicier, don’t go lower than choice grade, just a superior end result. Remember everyone has their own idea of what perfect BBQ is.
Tim always booked great entertainment at the Backyard and I got front and center up close and personal seating for all shows. Some of my favorite shows were Little Feat, Willie, Greg Allman, Neville Brothers, Joan Baez, Warren Zevon, Jimmy Cliff, there was a magical night with Leonard Cohen under the purple lights in the Live Oak, and the list goes on and on. One of my favorite memories is watching the massive Aaron Neville bent over and in a long conversation with my son Andrew. Andrew and his friend Johnny Mynhier were gainfully employed by me as the burger boys and they operated the outdoor kitchen that fed the concert goers. They worked hard but had a great exposure to the food industry and the music industry as they had free run of the venue.
Each artist has a list of supplies, called a rider, that they expected us to have available to them in their dressing room. Most requests were simple such as a bottle of tequila, sometimes it was more involved. One artist’s manager requested that there were no smooth surfaces in the dressing room in order to avoid any chopping and snorting cocaine. I only lost my cool once when Warren Zevon had requested a piano on the stage. We rented a piano and hired a piano tuner. Warren took one look at the piano and said “that will never do”. I called my friend at the Four Seasons Hotel and arranged to borrow their Baby Grand Steinway piano, the best. I got a crew, rented a box truck and fetched the piano. Once the piano was on stage, I had the piano tuner tune it. I then showed it to Warren and he played a few notes and quickly rejected it. I was out of patience with the diva and I told him we were out of options and we would have no choice but to cancel the sold-out show. Warren saw that I was serious and agreed to use it and the show went on. I was giving Jimmy Cliff the 10-minute stage call and found him jumping rope after drinking 5 vials of ginseng. His comment was “the older I get the harder it is to get stage ready”, it’s all fun and games until someone gets hurt.
Close and easy access parking is essential for a successful restaurant. Tim and I did not secure enough parking for both the restaurant and the amphitheater. Tim, being a good music promoter always booked the music venue on Saturday nights. As a result, the music crowd filled all of the parking spaces and made the parking for a dinner at the BBQ restaurant nearly impossible. All restaurant folks know if you can’t fill up the restaurant on Saturday night you are doomed, it’s the money maker. I lost interest and sold my part in Direct Events and I was gone.
It was best for the Backyard to be solely focused on being a live music venue. People will walk a ½ mile for live music, not for BBQ.
Below is my favorite BBQ sauce recipe. Chefs are known to taste a product and replicate it in their kitchen. It is not considered stealing. Our Chipotle BBQ sauce is a combination of several tastes. Going with the thought that if you change three ingredients it’s now your recipe. You can use different peppers, add apple cider vinegar, the list goes on. Make it thinner or thicker. Be fearless.
Ingredients
4 ounces of applewood smoked bacon, diced
4 ounces chipotle peppers in Adobo sauce (1 can)
½ cup white onion, diced
2 tablespoons minced garlic
¼ cup apple cider vinegar
2 tablespoons course black pepper
½ cup dark brown sugar
3 tablespoons Worcestershire sauce
1 tablespoon hot sauce (2 if you like it spicier)
1 cup ketchup
1 cup water
1 tablespoon sea salt
Method
Cook bacon half way.
Add and sauté onions, garlic, chipotle peppers, Worcestershire, water, hot sauce, black pepper,
vinegar and sugar.
Sauté on medium low until the onions are translucent.
Add ketchup and simmer 10 minutes.
Add sea salt and adjust.