He worked for a decade in finance. He’s now bringing smoked meat to Ridge Meadows

A Langley man is bringing a sweet and saucy slice of Texas to Pitt Meadows later this week. 

Beginning Friday, Nathan Seeley, owner of the Texas Style BBQ food truck, is set to be parked at the Pitt Meadows Food Truck Spot for one month, offering locally-smoked brisket, pulled pork, and beef ribs to residents with a hankering for meat. 

The move comes after Seeley recently launched an online poll that found a high level of interest in smoked meat from residents in the Tri-Cities and Ridge Meadows. 

“It was just based on the demographics of people who wanted us out there,” he said. 

For over a decade, Seeley, 44, worked in finance for a car dealership. But in the early days of the pandemic, Seeley started to frequently watch TV cooking shows. 

There was something about those shows that provided him with a sense of comfort in a time of uncertainty. While other people started quilting or baking bread, Seeley watched men and women smoke briskets for hours and hours on end. 

Seeley loved seeing the smoke rise from a barbecue. He loved seeing a chef pull out a hunk of brisket, dab a brush in a ruby-red sauce and coat the meat back and forth. 

Seeley, who grew up in North Vancouver, worked at the Keg and Earls restaurants before moving into a career in finance. Despite following a steady career path, Seeley was inspired to build his own offset smoker in the spring of 2020 and start smoking meat on the weekends. 

But the quality of his meat didn’t have the same feel as the briskets he saw on television. So he started reaching out to chefs in the southern U.S., hoping to learn their smoking methods. 

“I started smoking meat all the time,” he said. “As a perfectionist, I had to master it.” 

Eventually, his neighbours noticed, and the quality of his meat improved. Some of them even encouraged Seeley to start selling his product. 

“This is just my own personal hobby,” he replied. 

As the pandemic dragged on, though, and the calendar flipped to 2021, he slowly mustered up the courage to leave his finance job and launch Texas Smoke BBQ. 

“It was absolutely scary to leave [finance], holy smokes man,” he said. 

For the first year, he racked up lines of credit and personally financed the business. Any profit he earned went back into the food truck. 

“I had to follow my passion, my inner voice just kept saying, ‘do it, do it.’” 

As his food truck continued to grow, he started to question why southern style barbecue was not more common in the Lower Mainland. 

“For some strange reason, barbecue is more of a southern thing,” said Seeley, adding that people will set up shop on a street corner and sell out of their products by the end of the day in Texas and other southern U.S. states.

“It’s just not replicated out here.” 

To get a southern-style brisket, Seeley learned after talking with various U.S.-based chefs, you have to smoke the meat for hours — daily. 

Seeley, who partnered with a friend before launching the food truck, says his entire cooking process takes about 20 hours. The smoking will begin around 1 or 3 p.m. every afternoon and run throughout the night, he said, with multiple different people picking up shifts to monitor the meat. 

“Our pit crew leaves around eight to 10 p.m.,” he said. “Then, essentially, it’s my mom… she watches an app and comes out every 45 minutes to put more logs on the fire.” 

Some nights, Seeley will give his mother a break and watch the meat himself. However, regardless of who’s on watch, there will be one person overseeing the smoking process from midnight to 3:30 a.m. before their next worker clocks in at 4 a.m. 

“We didn’t want to reinvent the wheel, I just wanted to bring the wheel here,” he said. “A lot of people don’t do it because it takes a lot of work.” 

Later this year, Seeley is planning to take his first trip to Texas to visit with local vendors, learn new tips, and have his meat validated by authentic southern chefs. 

“We want to be identified as being the same,” he said. “There’s nothing different about us except for the region.” 

Down the road, Seeley is hoping his food truck will continue to provide an authentic and high quality product that gives Lower Mainland residents a taste of something that they may not have tried before. 

Because the reaction on someone’s face — the way they may bite into a steaming plate of meat, chew, and close their eyes — means the world to him. 

“I love that reaction of serving,” he said. 

“The reality is fire and meat, when you combine them together, it creates a super flavour.”