What A Chef Wants… All About The Atmosphere

It’s not all about the Ferris wheels, roller-coasters and bayside amusement attractions. But they do help lure in the crowds at T-Bone Tom’s in Kemah, Texas. Nestled in this unique little hub, halfway between Houston and Galveston, the Texas-style BBQ restaurant overlooking the bay is a tourist hotspot, serving everyone from first-time visitors to dependable locals.

“I see a lot of new faces and a lot of familiar faces,” says executive chef, Carl Johnston, better known as “Chef CJ.”

All while bringing in new people, he offers a family-friendly dining experience, because family is where it all began for him. Many children grow up raving about their mother’s home-cooked meals. But for Johnston, it was his aunt who inspired that passion in the kitchen when he was just 5 years old.

From the start

“You know, I just always knew. My mother wasn’t a very good cook, but my aunt really was,” he says. “I decided at 12 that I was going to become a chef, and in five years, I made it – no formal training, no high school diploma, no nothing. I dropped out of school and was working by 16.”

Not that Johnston would recommend quitting school for others, but it fit his world of specialized learning. By the time he turned 19, he was the executive chef at a Hyatt Regency Hotel and moved on to several country clubs after that. Working for a variety of venues helped the young chef learn from others, to grow his own career.

“A lot of the people working for me, I’ve known for a while,” Johnston says. “Some cooks I’ve known for over 20 years, and we are bringing more people on, so it’s a really good situation.”

Originally from Austin, he came to Houston just a few years ago.

“I was just kind of following one of my chefs around and ended up working for a large corporation on the waterfront for several years,” Johnston says. “Now, I’m back with my general manager and director of operations from 20 years ago, and we’re running our own three restaurants.”

The legacy continues

Besides T-Bone Tom’s, he’s been executive chef of Tookie’s Hamburgers for the past four years and another place is shaping up.

“We just celebrated our 45th anniversary at T-Bone Tom’s this spring,” Johnson says. “Tookie’s Hamburgers has been open since 1975 – and we’re building a massive seafood restaurant, which will open this summer. All three restaurants are right here, I mean just a quarter mile from each other, so we compete against ourselves.”

T-Bone Tom’s began as a meat market in the 1960s selling only meat – raw meat. There were no tables, just a band saw and grinder to make their own sausage and hamburger patties for customers.

“One day, a truck driver came in and said, ‘hey, you got a little grill out back… can you cook me one of them hamburgers?’ So the old man Tom made him a burger, and the rest is history.”

It’s also the present because that meat market still operates in tandem with the Texas-style restaurant, where all menu items are prepared in a “Texas State of Mind.” That is, very, very big portions with heavy cream and lots of butter.

“There’s no diet going on here. We don’t have anything gluten-free. We don’t have anything vegan,” Johnston says. “You know – go somewhere else. We don’t even try! We are a red meat-and-potato restaurant with everything family run, cooked from original recipes and made from scratch.”

They seat 500 people, have live music regularly and stay open until 2 am every night, with a barbecue pit-style smoker operating 24-7. It’s an old-fashioned, red-checkered-tablecloth setting with great food, great service and great entertainment.

Chef CJ adds, “We provide a smile and a to-go box because our portions are so big.”

Pride in production

T-Bone Tom’s is one of the few restaurants in the area that features 100% Certified Angus Beef ® (CAB®) brand. Just last year, Johnston participated in the CAB “Pasture to Plate” tour in Nebraska, where he learned about the stages of beef production.

“What was surprising, was how all of the myths are not really there,” he says. “You hear all these horror stories of how unsanitary it is and all of the cruelty. But we didn’t see any of that, and they showed us everything.”

Johnston says cattle today are healthier and offer better marbling than ever before, which makes his job more satisfying. He knows it takes the whole family to run a successful beef operation.

“It’s all up to the kids,” he says. “They go to an ag university and come back home with more efficient ways to run the herd. We are figuring out that by breeding them correctly and raising them correctly to begin with, we can in turn produce a better product in the end.”

The man known as Chef CJ finds satisfaction in educating consumers about beef, too.

He says, “The feeds we are feeding them, the ways we are raising them, and the way we are handling the animals now is really humane and safe. I’m really, really proud to be a part of that.”

With recent prices as high as they have been, consumers have been faced with the decision of whether to buy beef.

“It’s really hard to pass those prices on to the consumer,” Johnston says. “They don’t want to see those prices.”

To help with the adjustment, he and his restaurants in effect “eat” some of the costs and work on new menu ideas to hold the line on prices.

“But, you know, it’s a brand and industry that we are fully standing behind,” he says.

The quality beef and family-friendly atmosphere keeps customers standing behind everything Chef CJ stands for.

Source: Certified Angus Beef Brand