I quit tech to make $2.3 million selling Halal BBQ

Insider

Salahodeen Abdul-Kafi left a 14-year career in tech to open Kafi BBQ, a halal Texas barbecue restaurant in Irving, Texas. In its first year, Kafi made about $2.3 million in revenue without serving pork, one of the highest-margin items in traditional Texas barbecue.  Kafi makes everything from scratch, including halal wagyu brisket, Iraqi-inspired sausage, beef-bacon Texas twinkies, fresh bread, and pistachio desserts. But running a halal barbecue spot comes with major challenges, including high meat costs, custom equipment, delicate lamb casings, and a menu built around expensive ingredients.  Still, Salahodeen believes that one day, his joint could earn a Michelin star.

Transcript

00:00I went from working in Silicon Valley to opening a multi-million dollar halal

00:05barbecue restaurant. A lot of people told me that I was crazy to open a halal

00:11barbecue spot here in Texas, but I realized that Texas barbecue market had

00:16a huge gap that I needed to fill. My name is Salah Addeen Abdul Kaffee. I am the

00:22owner of Kaffee BBQ here in Irving, Texas. It is a lot more difficult to be a halal

00:28barbecue restaurant. We don't serve pork at Kaffee BBQ and in Texas pork is the

00:35highest margin item on every menu because it's really cheap to acquire and

00:39it's really fast to cook. So we had to more or less reinvent the wheel to make

00:43this work. We made just under 2.3 million dollars in total revenue our first year

00:49in business. For 2026 our projected revenue is between 3.6 and 4 million

00:54dollars. What we're trying to do here is we're trying to make the best barbecue in

01:00Texas that happens to be halal.

01:06You didn't move here intending to start a business, right?

01:10Absolutely not. I would have to be a complete fool to move to Dallas, Texas to

01:15open a barbecue spot. No, don't ever do that. I worked in tech for 14 years. Places like Google,

01:23YouTube, Shopify, Microsoft. I was feeling a little bit disillusioned in tech.

01:30I wanted a fresh start. I figured out how to make brisket through YouTube videos and

01:34started doing brisket drops from my house. Total revenue though the one year

01:38that we were a pop-up was about $60,000. Then I felt like I was ready to open my

01:43own restaurant. All right. These are our briskets for the week. We have 108

01:48briskets that we've prepped for this week. These have already all been salted. This is

01:53about $15,000 worth of brisket right here. This is a Wagyu X brisket. See this amazing

01:58kind of intermuscular fat down here. We use about between $12,000 and $18,000

02:05worth of brisket each week. The reason I'm trying to take all this top fat off is

02:10because I don't want for people's bite of brisket to just be like a big gob of fat.

02:16And the other thing is if there's too much fat on the brisket you won't get as

02:20much smoke flavor. A lot of people don't account for shrinkage or product loss if

02:27you will. Let's say you buy a 20 pound brisket. You're trimming off what you need

02:32to trim off. It's gonna go down to let's say 16 pounds. And then from 16 pounds in the

02:37smoker, the fat from the brisket, the water from the brisket is all gonna

02:41evaporate away after a 16 hour cook. So a 20 pound brisket is gonna result in 6.4

02:47pounds of cooked brisket. This is our brisket rub. Our rub is something that I

02:53developed over a six year period that intersects my Iraqi heritage with

02:57classical Texas barbecue. My parents moved from Iraq to Missouri and we had

03:03amazing food growing up. My mom, she had a cookbook that she had from her

03:07grandmother passed down through the generations. A lot of the flavors that I

03:12grew up with were missing across Texas barbecue for obvious reasons. It's not

03:16very common to have like Arab spices or anything like that in Texas barbecue. I

03:21have 13 spices in my barbecue rub. It's a little different than most barbecue spots

03:26where they probably max around four or five. We spend about $1,000 a week on

03:31spices. This is now ready to be put on our briskets. Our brisket takes three full days to make.

03:37And my favorite foods have always been foods that just take a really long time

03:41to make. I could like taste the amount of time it takes for something to be made.

03:46Café barbecue is gonna be a little bit more expensive than the other Texas barbecue

03:51that's in the area. The average price of brisket is gonna be close to like $38, $39 a

03:57pound. We're at $45 a pound on our brisket. We are getting everything local,

04:01which is extremely hard to find. And we are providing halal wagyu, which is also

04:05extremely hard to find. And we're making everything from scratch, which is also

04:08extremely hard to find. But we haven't actually increased any of our prices

04:12since we've opened. We most likely will have to because meat prices continue to

04:16skyrocket. You guys want to start with some brisket? There's so little margin to

04:21be made on brisket that you basically have to have a very successful sausage

04:24program in order to sell the brisket for the price that we sell it while not

04:28losing money. This is our meat grinder. This was about $5,000. This is actually

04:35what we're gonna be doing for our Iraqi sausage. This is our brisket trim. It's

04:39been ground, salted, and cured overnight. What we're gonna do now is we're gonna

04:42grind it again. And by passing it through a grinder a second time, we're able to get

04:48the right consistency and texture in the sausage for a nice snappy bite. It's a lot

04:55more difficult to be a halal barbecue restaurant than a normal barbecue

04:58restaurant here in Texas. Halal is the Islamic version of kosher. There's a

05:03couple of things that go into halal. So number one, the animal needs to be very

05:07well taken care of. And then also when the slaughter happens, it needs to be very

05:11humane. It needs to happen in one single cut. The blood has to all drain from the

05:15animal. That actually does help the meat become a lot more tender. We don't serve

05:20pork at Kaffee BBQ. And in Texas, pork is the highest margin item on every

05:25menu because it's really cheap to acquire and it's really fast to cook. The Iraqi

05:31sausage is gonna have like sumac, kind of very earthy flavors in there. The same

05:36flavor profile that my dad uses in his kebab seasoning. Now he's basically adding

05:41it to the mixer. Beef sausage is rare. The reason it's rare is because pork fat

05:46is a much better binding agent than beef fat is. So we've actually had to do a lot

05:51of experimentation and a lot of work to make 100% wagyu beef sausage work. The

05:56other thing that's really tricky is we aren't able to use pork casings. Again,

06:00there's a lot of different things that we had to do that most barbecue

06:03restaurants in Texas aren't having to do. This is our test. It should kind of

06:08feel like glue. Basically like it needs to be able to stick very easily and not

06:15fall apart. This is our sausage machine. It's called a Lucky Linker. This is handmade,

06:24hand-built in Germany. This is a $45,000 machine. This linker allows us to do a

06:32couple things. Reduces the labor cost quite a bit. We can make about a thousand

06:37sausages in an hour with one employee. The other thing it does is it makes every

06:43single sausage the exact same week, which is basically impossible to do by

06:47hand. Incredible piece of equipment. Really, really could not have done this

06:52restaurant without this. When we opened the restaurant, we didn't have a sausage

06:56maker like this. We were doing everything by hand, so we were spending 50 hours a

07:00week of four employees time to make sausage. I'm very solution-oriented. When

07:04I find something tedious, when my employees tell me this is like super

07:07annoying to do, I try to find a way to around it. These are lamb casings from New

07:13Zealand. Lamb casings are a lot more delicate than pork casings that are used

07:17at other places. It's definitely very difficult to work with these casings

07:21because some of them break, some of them are too soft, some of them are too thin.

07:33This is our M&M 2000 smoker. We can load about 900 to a thousand sausages at a

07:38time in the rotisserie right here. This is a $45,000 smoker. Café BBQ opened in

07:44December of 2024. I actually put an order in for this and put a down payment in for

07:50this before I even rented this restaurant. The estimate to open this Café

07:57BBQ location was about half a million dollars. We had about a hundred thousand

08:00dollars in the furniture, about another $200,000 worth of equipment including the

08:05smoker. I'm about $200,000 worth of construction. That was all the startup

08:10cost before we opened and then since then we have spent approximately $400,000 on

08:16other equipment. The way that I think about it is it's it's basically like I'm

08:22paying myself to bet on myself that I can make that money back. So this is the

08:29Rolls-Royce of barbecue. That's what I call it. It's a Wagyu dino rib, almost like a

08:34vanity item if you will. I mean look at that marbling. It's gonna be some of the

08:39most expensive meat in the whole cow. It has the lowest margin of anything on our

08:44whole menu. While we don't really make much money on the dino ribs

08:47themselves, they do tend to bring in a lot of customers that are really excited

08:51about dino ribs. So the dino ribs are usually the first to sell out. We don't ever

08:56want to be in a place where we don't sell out of our dino ribs because if we don't

09:00then that's just a huge huge financial loss to the restaurant. Barbecue is an

09:07industry in general where you have extremely high food costs. On an

09:12average month we are paying about a hundred and twenty hundred and thirty

09:16thousand dollars for food right which is an astronomical figure for any

09:21restaurant. And then we are paying fifty thousand dollars a month in our labor

09:26costs alone. And then you have a bunch of other things that you have to account

09:31for. You know the disposables is about another five thousand dollars. The spices

09:35is another a couple thousand dollars. The rent here is about fifteen. The

09:40utilities is about five thousand. Marketing is another five thousand. You have

09:45to have a pet master. You have to pay for wood. So in total we're spending roughly

09:49about two hundred ten two hundred twenty thousand dollars a month. When you add

09:53all of that up you're really not left with that much profit at the end of each

09:57month even though our revenue is so high. We made just under two point three

10:00million dollars in total revenue our first year in business. For 2026 our

10:05projected revenue is between three point six and four million dollars. I haven't

10:10paid myself anything since we opened the restaurant so I've just been using my

10:14savings. So it'll be interesting to maybe spend a little bit of money on

10:17myself. We're getting ready to make our Texas Twinkies. This is the only Halal

10:29Texas Twinkie that exists at a barbecue restaurant. It's a jalapeno pepper stuffed

10:33with smoked cream cheese, smoked brisket, wrapped in bacon, glazed and then cooked

10:38again. So what we do here is we actually make our own beef belly bacon from scratch

10:46from our Wagyu beef belly. This machine is about three thousand dollars.

10:54So you see that vibrant red color on the inside. Beef bacon cooks a lot

10:59differently than pork bacon so any of the instructions for making Texas Twinkies

11:04that are there for pork bacon is not gonna apply at all. So we had to more or

11:09less reinvent the wheel to make this work. We glaze it with a house made glaze and

11:14then we cook it again. That creates a nice crunchy outside layer. It's Texan. All part

11:22of a natural diet in Texas. I don't know why they called it a Twinkie. For a lot of my

11:27customers this is the very first time in their lives that they've been able to walk

11:31into a Texas barbecue restaurant and eat absolutely everything on the menu.

11:36We kind of have one of the most diverse groups of customers in barbecue in the

11:40entirety of the state of Texas. About 50% of our customers follow a halal diet and

11:4650% don't because we were able to open up barbecue to a whole new group of

11:51consumers that didn't have access to barbecue before. I have a very strict

12:01thing here at Cafe Barbecue which is we don't cut corners. So for me the

12:06guideline here is it's made here. We make everything here from scratch. When it

12:12came time to make the banana pudding of course we had to make the wafers from

12:16scratch. Of course we made the pudding from scratch. This is our station to make

12:21our pistachio chocolate cheesecake which is our special tea dessert right now. This

12:25bag of raw pistachios is about a hundred dollars. We make our own pistachio paste

12:30in-house. It's not very common when you see like a pistachio dessert that they

12:36actually made the paste in-house. It's gonna be much fresher. It's gonna have a lot

12:40more flavor to it. This is some of the most expensive chocolate in the world. This

12:45six-pound bag cost us almost $150. I've never tempted to go cheaper. I'm always

12:52tempted to go more expensive. Not just because expensive is better or anything

12:56like that. It's because our customers are already paying a very high premium for

13:00barbecue and so if you're gonna have that barbecue experience and it's not

13:03good it's gonna be really disappointing to you. I'm using the absolute best

13:08ingredients that I can and everything that we make. These are the cheeses we

13:13use for our smoked gouda mac and cheese. This log is about $35. Tillamook

13:17extra-sharp cheddar. This log is gonna be about $140. And this is a German gruyere.

13:22This is a Danish smoked gouda. This log is about $50. So Lily is behind me

13:28assembling the jalapeno cheddar cornbread. I'm right here grinding the cheese.

13:35We shred all of our cheese in-house. We have never bought any shredded cheese. When

13:40you shred cheese in a factory they add cellulose to that. Cellulose is basically

13:45wood pulp. We grate everything fresh. Everyone always gets a bite at the end.

13:50That's the cheese text. Always the cheese text. Okay. We grate our cheeses. We go through

14:00between 40 pounds and 60 pounds of the dry noodles every single day for our mac and cheese.

14:07We have seven different spices that we add to our mac and cheese sauce as well as three

14:11different cheeses that we add to it. Our mac and cheese is actually our most sold side here.

14:16We usually sell about 500 to 600 servings of mac and cheese every weekend.

14:22The last thing we're gonna show you is how we make our homemade bread. Which we give out to

14:25everyone for free on their tray. We're making about five batches of fresh bread every single day.

14:32And that's on purpose. We want the bread to be as fresh as possible so that when we're serving it

14:37on

14:37the line it was baked an hour ago. So you're gonna get some of the freshest bread that you've ever

14:42had in

14:42your life. D Magazine, which is the largest circulating magazine in Dallas, they named

14:47us top 12 barbecue restaurant in Dallas and Fort Worth. And that was based on the first week that

14:52we were open, which was pretty crazy to us. We also won an award from Eater. They named us one

14:58of

14:58the 15 best new restaurants in America. I do really think that we can get to a point where our

15:04barbecue

15:05restaurant is Michelin star. So that's something that I'm really aiming for here because we're doing

15:09stuff that a lot of people have never done before with barbecue.

15:14There's some fun people in Texas, you know. We do get some comments, people hating on us because

15:20we're halal. People saying that it's not real barbecue if you don't have pork. But we just kind of let

15:24them go.

15:25Who cares? It's fine.

15:28I think my faith has really been a guiding principle and a guiding factor in opening Cafe Barbecue.

15:35My philosophy is that I am in business to make halal barbecue accessible to this community.

15:42So I'm going to do what my purpose in life is, however difficult that is.

15:48My faith dictates that I don't believe that capitalism is the way that I should make my

15:54decisions in life. So as a very simple example of this, if you go to certain countries in the Middle

15:59East that are truly practicing kind of the original tenets of Islam and you go to the marketplace and

16:05you go to one vendor and they'll tell you, like, I've sold enough today. Just go to my neighbor.

16:09Buy from him. That philosophy, that mindset just doesn't really exist in a capitalist society.

16:17And that's the reason why I'm also talking about, like, I don't feel like I'm in competition with

16:21anyone here. I want all the other barbecue joints to succeed. So it's never really been about competition

16:26for me. It's really about providing the best experience that I personally can for my customers

16:31and doing everything that I can to make everything in-house.

16:36I actually have people that ask me, like, why do you share everything that you make? Like, don't you

16:41think someone's going to steal your recipes? And we're like, be my friend, go for it. Right?

16:46The reason we show all this stuff is we want to show how difficult it is to make everything. And

16:51so if

16:51that means someone else is going to go through the process of making everything from scratch,

16:55the same way we do it, that means we've done a great thing. We've helped someone else do what

17:02a restaurant's supposed to do. Right?

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