09/16/2026
THE BIG E STORY — PART 2
Our First Restaurant
By the time 2008 came to an end, things were really starting to come together for Big E.
After years of trial and error, practicing, competing and developing our own sauces and seasonings, we had started using our own recipes in competition.
And we started seeing results.
Throughout 2008, we were consistently getting calls at the BBQ competitions we entered, and we were really proud of that. After struggling and learning during those first couple of years, it felt good to finally hear the Big E name being called.
We weren’t winning everything we entered, but that wasn’t what mattered. We were getting noticed, we were getting calls, and most importantly, we were doing it with the sauces and seasonings we had developed ourselves.
It felt like all those weekends of practicing, experimenting, making mistakes, changing things and trying again were finally starting to pay off.
But BBQ competition wasn’t the only thing that happened in 2008 that would change the direction of Big E.
Earlier that spring, I had catered an open house for a businessman named Mark. After trying our food, he told me something I wasn’t expecting:
“You need to open a restaurant.”
He even offered me a building to use rent-free.
And I turned him down.
At the time, I simply wasn’t ready. I had never been in the restaurant business, and there was definitely a fear of the unknown. I knew how to cook BBQ, but running an actual restaurant was something completely different.
Then came early 2009.
The company I was working for slowed down, and suddenly I found myself working only two days a week.
That’s when I started thinking about Mark’s offer again.
I picked up the phone, called him and asked if the offer for us to do a restaurant together was still doable.
His answer was simple:
“For sure.”
And that’s how our first Big E restaurant really began.
Mark had purchased an old Burger King building in Kings Mountain, but before we could put the Big E name on it, we had a tremendous amount of work ahead of us.
Turning an Old Burger King Into Big E
We pretty much redid the entire place.
We stripped everything out of the dining room—the chairs, flooring and all. Most of the kitchen equipment came out too, although there were a few pieces we were able to keep.
Then came a major cleaning and overhaul of the entire building.
We installed a new smoker and started transforming what had been an old fast-food restaurant into the BBQ restaurant we envisioned.
And we didn’t stop with the inside.
Outside there was an old playground area. We removed it and transformed that space into a nice outdoor patio and garden.
We landscaped it, added a working waterfall, and even built a pagoda where we could have live music on Friday and Saturday nights.
We didn’t want Big E to be somewhere you simply came in, ate and left.
We wanted it to be a place where families and friends could come together, sit outside, listen to some live music, enjoy good food and spend an evening with us.
Looking back, we weren’t just building a restaurant. We were trying to build a place people would remember.
It took us around four months to get everything completed.
Then Came the Menu
Once the building was coming together, we had another big decision to make:
What in the world were we going to put on the menu?
Looking back now, I can admit something.
I probably got a little carried away!
My thinking was pretty simple: if we could barbecue it, smoke it or grill it, I wanted it on the menu.
We had pulled pork BBQ, beef brisket, St. Louis-style spare ribs, baby back ribs, chicken wings, half chickens and boneless chicken breasts.
We also served burgers and hot dogs.
But we didn’t stop there.
We had a full steak menu with everything from filet mignon and sirloins to T-bones and big bone-in cowboy ribeyes.
We even served prime rib.
Then there were the sides.
We had fresh-cut fries, hush puppies, homemade mac & cheese, baked beans, collard greens, red BBQ slaw, white coleslaw, potato salad and onion rings.
Looking back with all the restaurant experience I’ve gained since then, that menu was probably too big for a brand-new restaurant.
But I was excited.
After years of learning BBQ through trial and error, selling out on Saturdays at Parker’s Amoco, catering and competing, I finally had a restaurant.
I wanted people to experience everything we could do.
Fresh Meant Fresh
No matter how big that menu was, there was one thing that was extremely important to me from the beginning:
I wanted everything to be fresh.
And when I say fresh, I mean it.
We didn’t even have a freezer in the restaurant.
Everything was brought in fresh, prepared fresh and cooked fresh.
We smoked our meats, cut our fries fresh, made our sides and tried to put the same care into the food that I had put into it when I was cooking for family, catering and competing.
Some things have changed over the years, but others became part of Big E. Our fresh-cut fries, for example, are still a staple to this day.
Operating without a freezer wasn’t necessarily the easiest way to run a restaurant, especially with a menu as large as ours.
And sometimes we ran out of food.
We actually embraced that enough that we had a slogan printed on the back of our Big E T-shirts:
“YOU BETTER COME EARLY!”
And we meant it.
Once something was gone, it was gone.
At the time, running out could be frustrating because the last thing you wanted to do was disappoint a customer. But I wasn’t interested in filling a freezer with food just so we could say we never ran out.
I wanted people to know that when they ate at Big E, we were actually cooking their food.
Fresh wasn’t just something we put on an advertisement.
It was how we operated.
Getting Ready to Open
After roughly four months of construction and remodeling, the building was finally ready.
But we weren’t.
It took us another couple of weeks to get our staff hired. Then came something completely new for me—training an entire restaurant staff.
We had to train the kitchen staff, teach everyone how we wanted the food prepared and get everybody accustomed to all the different items we would be prepping and cooking every day.
At the same time, we had to train the waitstaff on a new POS system, get their uniforms together and work through a hundred other little details that I had never really thought about before.
Remember, I had never run a restaurant before.
I knew how to cook. I knew BBQ. I had catered. I had competed. I had spent years working on our sauces, seasonings and recipes.
But managing a kitchen staff, waitstaff, POS system and an entire restaurant was a whole different world.
Looking back today, there’s one thing I definitely would have done differently.
We advertised our grand opening heavily.
At the time, I thought that was exactly what we were supposed to do. We wanted everybody to know Big E was coming.
Today, with the experience I have, I would have done a soft opening first.
It would have given the staff—and me—a chance to work through some of the problems before opening the doors to everybody.
But that’s not what we did.
A Preview of What Was Coming
Before our official opening, we decided to have a special dinner for everyone who had helped work on and remodel the building.
It was supposed to be our opportunity to thank the people who had helped us get there.
But then something happened.
People started coming in who hadn’t worked on the building.
Word had apparently gotten around, and what was supposed to be a controlled dinner quickly became an overwhelming situation of its own.
Looking back, maybe that should have been my warning of what was coming next.
Opening Day
Then came the day we had worked toward for months.
Opening day.
I wish somebody had followed us around with a film crew that day, because I would give anything to be able to sit down and watch it now.
It was absolute chaos.
We had advertised Big E so heavily that when we opened those doors, people came from everywhere.
The restaurant filled up.
People were lined up almost all the way to the interstate.
Our parking lot couldn’t hold everybody. People were parking in the McDonald’s parking lot next door and even in the field across the street.
Inside that restaurant was a brand-new staff trying to operate a brand-new restaurant for the first time.
And right in the middle of it was me—a first-time restaurant owner trying to figure everything out as we went.
It was overwhelming.
It was chaotic.
And it was probably the busiest thing I had ever been a part of in my life.
I’m sure things went wrong. I’m sure people waited longer than they should have. We were learning on the fly under circumstances that, looking back, no brand-new staff could have truly been prepared for.
But we kept going.
And somehow, we made it through.
One of the Proudest Days of My Life
As overwhelming as that opening day was, when I look back on it now, getting through that day was also one of the proudest moments of my life.
And there’s another part of that memory that means even more to me today.
My wife and my kids—the older ones who were old enough at the time—were right there in the middle of all that chaos with me.
They weren’t just there for opening day.
They had been there with me from the beginning.
They had been there through the years when I was learning, practicing every weekend, catering, competing, experimenting with sauces and seasonings and trying to turn this passion for BBQ into something.
Big E may have been my dream and my passion, but I didn’t make this journey by myself.
I’m incredibly thankful that when one of the biggest days of my life finally arrived, my family was right there beside me.
And then, after all the customers were finally gone and things started settling down, came a moment I’ll never forget.
Mark and I walked outside to the garden we had built.
After months of construction, remodeling, planning, hiring and training—and after one of the craziest days I had ever experienced—we finally had a chance to sit down.
We grabbed an ice-cold grape soda, sat there in the garden and just reflected on the day and what we had built.
I can still remember that moment.
The crowds were gone. The parking lots were finally clearing out. The chaos was over.
And for a few minutes, we could just sit there and take it all in.
A few years earlier, I had started learning BBQ on an old rusted-out smoker somebody had given me.
I had practiced every weekend. We had sold BBQ on Saturdays. We had catered. We had entered competitions and struggled. I spent years working on my own sauces and seasonings until we finally had something we believed in.
Then we started competing with those recipes—and started getting calls.
I had even been given the opportunity to open a restaurant and initially turned it down because I was afraid of the unknown.
And now here I was.
Sitting outside the first restaurant carrying the Big E name, drinking an ice-cold grape soda after an opening day where people had lined up nearly to the interstate and parked anywhere they could find a spot.
We had done it.
We had opened our first Big E restaurant.
Sitting there that evening, exhausted but proud, I don’t think I could have imagined all the places this BBQ journey would eventually take me.
But there was a whole lot more of the Big E story still to come.
To be continued
