Our BBQ Spiel
The story of Embers Barbecue is long and messy, but I promise I’ll try to keep it short. So most of you know us by now, our names are Andrew and Jewel Hill. We opened our shop on June 1st of this year, which happened to be our 5th wedding anniversary as well. After all the work we put into it, I will never forget the feeling we got when we got word that we were cleared to open. We spent a long 2 years working on our little place and while to some, it might seem like it shouldn’t have taken that long, all I can say is that life just isn’t easy.
I could go back several years and start our story, hell, I can track it back to when Andrew was just a kid. He spent many of his childhood years having cookouts with his family. See, we grew up poor, both of us. So cooking was something that wasn’t only fun, but necessary, and that is where the love of cooking began. I can look back and remember plenty of times getting together with family for dinner and how fun it was just getting to be together and hanging out. To us, bbq isn’t just about making money. BBQ is a way to connect with people. Since opening Embers strangers have become customers and those customers have become friends, it’s really amazing.
I’ll jump ahead to the summer 2015. It was May, we had both just graduated college and I was due in August with our first baby. After Hazel was born we were struck with the question that every mom and dad ask themselves. Can we do this? Can we care for her? How is this going to work, financially? I was actively photographing weddings and Andrew took on a job at a power plant. He was tired, he was gone all of the time and we realized that wasn’t what we wanted for our family. We are the dreamin’ kind, go-getters, if you will, and we knew there was something more for us out there. So a few months later we decided to take the dream seriously, and work on opening our place. We aren’t wealthy, so we knew a key component to opening our place was finding a cheap piece of land. That led us to Levelland, where we tracked down the nicest man we have ever known. God rest his soul, he really helped us out and his sweet wife continues blessing us to this day. Andrew and his dad built our smoker and just like all good “full circle” stories go, he used to play on that tank when he was a little boy. He never knew he was going to be cooking briskets inside of it one day to provide for his family. As a pit master, you really create a bond with your pit. Andrew’s story is different, his bond started when he was little.
There were many times when I thought this was never going to happen. We would NEVER open and I wanted to give up. Andrew kept going, because he’s honestly the most positive person I have ever met in my life and giving up is not an option. In March of 2017 we had our second sweet girl and Andrew was still constantly working…he was a maintenance man by day and would go to work on our pit and our building at night. Meaning he would come home near 12 or 1 am. Two months after I had our baby, I just couldn’t do it anymore, I needed his help…I really needed him home. So he took some time off. I know he didn’t want to, but he loves me. I might be off on some of the sequencing here, but we also battled not having hardly any money to put into our place, my parents were “on again” “off again”, his dad had several hospital stays and his mom battled breast cancer. It’s really amazing to me that through all of that, we still managed to make the dream work. Aside from all of the hard work it took to get Embers started, we also spent a lot of time working on recipes. The very first salt and pepper brisket we ever had was Andrew’s. He spent several years working at a bbq place in Lubbock and he would occasionally throw a brisket in to bring home. Keeping in mind that I was an ex-veggie, you can imagine how blown away I was when I tasted it. Later down the road we found ourselves at Louie Mueller BBQ in Taylor. That was the first central texas bbq joint we ever went to and it went exactly as expected; it was delicious and inspring!
We knew from the beginning that we wanted a super simple menu and a walk-up ordering system. We try to keep our menu fresh and we like to change it up every so often to offer more variety. We love getting to chat with everyone who stops by and we want you to be able to see your meal being prepared. We hoped we could create a unique dining experience for Levelland by offering outdoor seating. We love being able to walk out and check on our customers and talk to them and see everyone sit out there and enjoy their meal. So far, it’s been everything we’ve wanted and we have you to thank for that. You help us stay in business, you help us feed our girls, you keep us happy doing what we do. So we hope you all will come eat lunch with us this Saturday to celebrate all the hard work that not only us, but all small businesses put in to keep the world a unique place!
