Texas barbecue pop-up primes Tacoma area for forthcoming Jack’s BBQ restaurant
Jack’s BBQ, headquartered in South Seattle, will open its second full-service restaurant in Algona, less than a 20-minute drive from downtown Tacoma.
Serving Texas barbecue, including brisket, links and beef ribs from two “gigantic smokers” and seating for 200 people, the new location will take over the pub and music venue The Royal Bear, which closed in February.
In anticipation of a September opening, owner Jack Timmons arranged a pop-up from the PNW Coffee House in the parking lot at 35739 West Valley Highway. Customers can place an order online for an array of BBQ plates, plus sandwiches, meat-laden salads and classic sides, and pick it up at the coffee shop’s drive-thru window from 4-7 p.m., Wednesday through Sunday.
Also in April, Jack’s opened another pop-up in Bellevue as the company searches for the right brick-and-mortar there.
The company already services its food court location in Seattle’s Columbia Tower and its South Lake Union restaurant with meat smoked at the original “SoDo” space. That setup will carry through to these two pop-ups for now.
The idea is to nurture an audience in an area that might only be mildly familiar, or perhaps not at all, with the “adult BBQ” Jack’s offers. Timmons, who grew up in Dallas but moved to Seattle nearly 30 years ago, describes it as such because he likes to have a cocktail with his barbecue.
“That kind of style is fun, but I don’t want to stand in line,” he told The News Tribune in an interview this month. “I wanna sit down and have a margarita.”
One of the restaurant’s most popular items is not even meat — it’s a smoked Old Fashioned. His team smokes oranges on the outer ends of the barbecue pit, then squeezes that juice into whiskey, and stirs with smoked brown sugar that morphs into a caramelized molasses of sorts and tops it with a housemade spiced cherry.
During the dine-in closure, Jack’s has been serving that mix to-go with a bottle of whiskey, and “people love that,” said Timmons, drawing out the O. He retains a glimmer of his Texan accent.
BRINGING TEXAS BBQ TO WA
An engineer by trade, he worked for Boeing and Microsoft for most of his career. He learned to love the Northwest but missed his home state’s great barbecue, especially the brisket. Most of the barbecue restaurants here served “not Southern barbecue,” he said, but rather barbecue focused on pork and sauce, “getting cheap cuts of meat and making them taste good.”
After attending the BBQ Summer Camp run by Texas A&M’s meat science department (“They have guys with Ph.D.’s in meat: Why wouldn’t you?”) and touring famous barbecue joints in central Texas, Timmons started smoking in his backyard, inviting friends and family to taste his creations. They outgrew his house, at which point he called breweries to use their space and drink their beer in what eventually became the Seattle Brisket Experience.
He sold tickets online to these monthly parties for 18 months, “and people just went crazy,” he said. The email list blossomed from a few dozen to a few thousand. “I kinda realized I could do it professionally.”
With the help of a few friends, Timmons bought the building at 3924 Airport Way S. in 2014, a sports bar that had previously been an Italian restaurant for 40-some years.
The secret to good barbecue starts with the quality of the meat and, of course, relies on the smoker and the wood. Timmons uses majority mesquite with a mix of fruit woods, including cherry and apple, and the meat comes from AgriBeef’s Double R Ranch in Okanogan, Washington. One of his absolute favorites is the weekly special beef rib, “these giant foot-long ribs, a pound-and-a-half, super rich — it’s like a Kobe steak,” said Timmons.
That special will definitely be on the menu in Algona, as well as the popular 16-ounce prime rib dinner with sides for $49. Jack’s standard BBQ includes sausage, pork ribs, pulled pork, a half-chicken and, of course, brisket. Classic sides — mac and cheese, ranch beans, remoulade cole slaw, black-eyed pea salad known as “Texas caviar,” collards — round out the meat-and-two combos. Salads, a few appetizers and sandwiches likely also will make the cut.
Jack’s will retain The Royal Bear’s stage for live music.
It’s “kinda the perfect location,” added Timmons, on a busy street with a sizable parking lot and a large patio, within a 20-minute drive of Tacoma, just east of Federal Way and north of Puyallup.
He even dangled the possibility of a Tacoma outpost that would be fed by the smokers in Algona.
Last year, the flagship in SoDo held the first of what was supposed to be an annual music festival called Low and Slow, with a whole steer roast, Texas bands and a type of bingo — like the game of Super Bowl squares, where you hope the score ends up being your random number, but in this case, a chicken in a cage pecks around for a bit until it poops, hopefully on your number.
This year’s festival had to be postponed due to COVID-19, but it will return to Seattle and will debut in Algona, presumably in 2021.
“We’ll find a way to make it fun,” said Timmons. “That’s in our DNA.”
JACK’S BBQ - ALGONA
▪ 35731 West Valley Hwy S, Algona, jacksbbq.com/
▪ Details: targeting September opening; pop-up available now
▪ Order: online or by calling the SoDo restaurant at 206-313-6875
▪ Pickup: PNW Coffee House in Algona, Wednesday to Sunday, 4-7 p.m.
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This story was originally published May 20, 2020 at 5:00 AM.