Photo courtesy of Dylan Kough/Smoking Kow BBQ
Dylan Kough
How much does Dylan Kough love good barbecue?
Put it this way—upon graduating from college, many young adults plan vacations to Europe, somewhere tropical, or a party zone like Las Vegas. Kough chose to visit the barbecue capital of America—Kansas City.
“Specifically for the food, yes,” Kough confirms with a laugh, thinking back on the three-week road trip he took with his brother after graduating from the University of Maryland.
The two brothers had the time of their lives, camping at the foot of the Smokey Mountains and hitting up several of the most famous barbecue restaurants in the world. “It’s an obsession,” he says, of his love for good barbecue.
That’s why, despite spending years on a lucrative career in accounting and federal consulting in Washington, D.C., Kough is finally living his dream, operating two successful food trucks that serve up his own signature barbecue cuisine.
Soon, that dream will also include a brand-new, brick-and-mortar restaurant on Duke Street in Alexandria.
A lifelong love of good barbecue
While most 13-year-old boys he knew were asking for video game consoles or skateboards for their birthdays, Kough says he just wanted to own his own meat smoker—and he got it.
“I loved food, I loved barbecue. So when I got my own smoker when I was 13, I would just make stuff in it, just about every day, right in my parents’ backyard,” he recalls, of his childhood growing up in Bethesda.
Kough says his first attempt at starting his own mobile food business of sorts happened in the summer of 2007, in between graduating high school and starting college. His idea was to import handmade bratwurst from a store in rural Western Michigan and sell it around town. But the costs proved to be too prohibitive for a teenager with no real money to his name and no idea how to run a business.
So, Kough said he decided to do the smart thing and head to college to study accounting.
A Means to an End
Photo courtesy of Dylan Kough/Smoking Kow BBQ
With two degrees and a CPA certification to his name, Kough graduated from the University of Maryland and quickly landed a job with KPMG in the District in 2011. However, he says, he knew it just wasn’t for him.
“From day one, I knew, ‘OK, I can’t do this forever’,” he said. It was a good job that paid well, Kough said he soon began to think of his federal consulting job as a means to save up money to start his own business—especially when the concept of food trucks started to gain popularity in D.C.
“I would be at client sites all throughout the day and there would be these cool food trucks everywhere – I just thought it looked like the best job ever,” he recalls. “And then I would go out of town for work and go to all these awesome barbecue places, and then I’d come back home and there’s not a lot of places to go,” he says, of how few good barbecue spots exist in the D.C. Metro area. “So, I would make it for myself.”
Kough ended up working at KPMG for a little over three years—exactly as long as it took him to save up to invest in his own food truck.
He purchased his first truck in July of 2014, and spent several months fixing it up, creating his recipes and designing his menu and website.
“I was really trying to think of ways to make my food stand out,” he explains, such as by creating the perfect recipe for homemade tortillas that are tasty and yet sturdy enough to hold a good amount of meat, and dreaming up platters that feature barbecued, smoked meat on a heaping bed of hearty mac and cheese.
In April of 2015, he officially gave his notice at KPMG, and one week later, the Smoking Kow BBQ food truck officially hit the road, serving up lunch for the first time.
“I had just one week off between my last day of work and opening the truck,” he recalls with a laugh.
The first truck did so well, it was only one year before Kough decided to buy a second truck and expand, to be able to hit up more locations every day.
“I saw how awesome the business was, and how I could make money at it, and it’s so great being my own boss—so I quickly added the second truck.”
Kough’s food truck business has gone so well for him over the past few years, he says he was often being approached for advice from people who have the same dream he did. So, in addition to running his food business, Kough started a consulting company, working to advise people on the best plan for starting their own food truck businesses, or who already have a business up and running but are looking to improve and grow. DK Food Truck Consulting and Solutions’s motto is, “Make Your Food Truck Dream a Reality.”
The Need for a ‘Home Base’
As Kough explains, every good food truck business needs a home base to work out of, to cook and prep all the food before loading up the truck and heading out to serve food each day.
For the Smoking Kow, that home base has long been Union Kitchen in D.C.
“[The original] location was awesome. I knew all the management, and it operated kind of like a local food incubator,” he says. “Everyone is super into what they’re making, and growing their business, and they’re all very entrepreneurial.”
Union Kitchen was acquired by a big company, and the owners opened up a second location. Kough says he thinks the culture of the place began to change and was no longer working for him.
As the saying goes, necessity is the mother of all invention.
Kough began exploring options for investing in his own home base to work out of. He says he toured at least 50 different locations, when an old restaurant space on Duke Street in Alexandria caught his eye.
“I’d never really even considered opening up a restaurant,” he says with a laugh. “I was happy with how things were going, with the two food trucks.”
Kough adds, with a team of just three people in addition to himself—two people at a time run each food truck every day—things were going smoothly, with low overhead and reasonable costs.
“Plus, everyone’s heard all the horror stories of entrepreneurs who invest hundreds of thousands of dollars to open a new restaurant, only to have it fall flat. I never imagined I’d have enough money for it to ever even make sense for me.”
But, when he discovered the space in Alexandria, the idea for a Smoking Kow BBQ restaurant was born.
“It’s a second-generation restaurant space, so it already has a lot of the infrastructure I need, so I don’t need to do as much to fix it up and get it going, and that’s really nice,” he explains. Kough says the location is big enough to be able to serve as a home base for his food trucks, as well as operate his concept of a “fast-casual” restaurant.
Kough says he has brought on an old friend he worked alongside at Union Kitchen, Paul Tecchio, to be his new general manager and, he hopes, to help design some new menu items for the restaurant to expand beyond what his trucks serve. Tecchio previously worked as the chef de cuisine for Haute Saison Catering, and as a sous chef at City Perch Kitchen + Bar in Bethesda.
In addition to the trucks’ most popular menu items, Kough says he is hoping to feature even “more sides, more meats, more desserts, and maybe even some beer, if we can get the right permits.”
Opening Soon – Smoking Kow BBQ Restaurant
These days, Kough is hard at work serving up lunch every day from his two food trucks at a variety of locations in D.C. and Arlington, and then immediately heading over to Alexandria to get some work done prepping his restaurant to open soon.
Kough says if all goes well, he hopes the Smoking Kow BBQ restaurant will open in its location on Duke Street by mid-March.
He hopes some of the trucks’ more loyal fans will see the restaurant and recognize the name.
“I’m hoping a lot of the people who go to our trucks in Arlington and D.C. live around here and know who we are, so we’ll have a little brand recognition built in,” he said.
Updates will be posted on Smoking Kow BBQ Food Trucks and the restaurant on their website and social media.
