A version of this post originally appeared on June 11, 2025, in Eater and Punch’s newsletter Pre Shift, a biweekly newsletter for the industry pro that sources first-person accounts from the bar and restaurant world.
This send is the last in a four-part series on restaurant growth, presented by Square. Organize all your orders — dine-in, online, and third-party — and fulfill them in a flash, right from your POS.
Distant Relatives, according to chef and owner Damien Brockway
The growth: After a career creating fancy dishes in a starched white chef coat, Damien Brockway wanted to cook food more like what he made at home. Inspired by meats he smoked in his backyard pit, Brockway dreamed up Distant Relatives in 2018 to showcase the flavors of the African diaspora, and it opened as a pop-up serving out of his home kitchen in 2020. He moved to a food truck the following year and racked up accolades: one of Eater’s Best New Restaurants in America, a Michelin Bib Gourmand, and two semifinalist nods from the James Beard Awards. Here, Brockway shares how he is building his restaurant intentionally, without investors.
Size of restaurant in 2020: Brockway’s home kitchen, 1 employee
Size of restaurant now: Food truck, 5 employees
On staying true to his vision
I knew it was going to be a difficult project because cooking modern African American food may seem polarizing for some people. But to me, it’s not. I’m the only investor in Distant Relatives because I needed to control the narrative, the style, the aesthetic, and the ethos of what we’re doing. But this control came with financial limitations—I could only borrow enough to set up a food truck.
On losing money as a pop-up
With the pop-up, I had a schedule for pickups from a cooler outside my gate. People would Venmo me or throw a couple bucks in the cooler for their plates. But I was getting my reps in: I spent this much, I sold this much, I got my yield percentages hammered out. At home, I cook like a grandma — a pinch of this, a spoon of that — but as I scaled up I had to set ratios. When I was doing 40 to 50 plates per pop-up, I knew I needed to move to a food truck. The pop-up ended up costing me a lot: I destroyed my stove at my house and had to redo the plumbing in the kitchen.
I didn’t open with brisket on the menu because I wanted to focus on large, subprimal cuts of animals, but it was a rude awakening to see the number of guests that walked up, saw there was no brisket on the menu, and left. The crazy thing is that people will complain about $30 a pound for brisket. If you are running 30 percent food costs, we’d all be charging $40-plus a pound. There’s a cap to how much you can charge, and all of us barbecue guys have banded together on this. In culinary education, we call dishes like this a dog: It’s on your menu and it loses you money. With brisket, we want it to sell out — like, we want it available, but we also need it to sell out.
Math is important. I average 35 percent food cost. If I was a chef anywhere else, I’d be fired already, but that’s pretty standard for a barbecue-focused trailer. Food trucks have higher costs because we serve on disposable flatware and we don’t have beverage revenue. Selling barbecue by weight involves loss from trimming and cooking it, so using that fat in sausage or sides is paramount. Our food costs are sustainable with proper controls on labor, rent, and overhead expenses—and a very modest profit margin.
On reducing waste and cost
Barbecue is supposed to feed the masses. We use everything to keep costs affordable. We use tallow. We smoke bones. We don’t buy ham hocks.
Go visit the farmers you work with — they’re sweating and working out here in the summer just like we are. They’re not making a ton of money either. So when you use their product, respect it. Be conscientious about your price point.
I made mistakes in the first four years, chasing expansion and buying more equipment. I needed to do those things, but now I need to show that all of this investment [became] profitable, which we are. But to get into a building, I need to show that I can handle an increased debt load.
There’s definitely a vision for a brick-and-mortar, but it’s a process. A lot of the guys that I looked up to when I was starting with barbecue have taken up to 10 years to get into buildings. I’m not thinking that I’m the exception to the rule — it’s gonna take time.
