Crammed inside a pub, Samantha Evans and Shauna Guinn served their first barbecue feast one cold night in 2012. Their temporary South Wales pub kitchen takeover, serving mouth-watering recipes – curated on an epic 2011 road trip through the Deep South – was the first of many.
‘Before cooking together, we’d talked a lot about quitting our careers,’ explains Shauna, a former social worker. Samantha was a graphic designer and, together, the couple quit a busy life in London to fulfil a lifelong dream of touring the world.
‘The three most important things that inspire and connect us to each other and everyone we meet are music, food and travel,’ Shauna says. The couple, who’ve been together for 22 years, have an obsession with country music and outdoor cooking. Samantha says, ‘Neither of us had experience in the food business but we had the passion. American barbecue was really taking off and we were really into it.’ The pair travelled the west coast of the US, before sweeping across the Deep South. Samantha says, ‘It wasn’t until we went through North and South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Texas and Louisiana that we hit that magical trifecta with barbecue culture.’
The pair shared incredible meals at competition cookouts and family ones, welcomed by strangers everywhere they went, tasting crawfish broils, briskets and ribs. Samantha adds, ‘Other people joined the cookouts with beer, music, kids, grandmas, uncles and cousins all thrown in. Communities gathered around hunks of meat, each bringing side dishes of corn, slaw and marshmallow-covered sweet potatoes.’ The culture of barbecue food brought a vibe that felt innately inclusive for Samantha, 45, and Shauna, 43.
‘That was it for us. I said, “let’s take barbecue back to Wales”,’ Samantha adds. ‘It can be a secretive world because of long-kept secret family recipes of special blend spices and sauces, but locals shared it all with us. You could taste the love from century-old pulled pork recipes passed down through families.’
The pair were inspired by Franklin Barbeque in Austin, Texas, which opens at 11am and sees queues of 100 people outside by 8am. Inside, traditional post-oak fuelled smokers are used to barbecue the best organic beef. Samantha says, ‘You’d be lucky to be licking the grease off the floor by 1pm. There were no empty seats and it was a real experience with pit masters in the thick of it, relatives on the till, grandpas and babies crammed in next to one another and, of course, the sublime food – brisket so tender and full of flavour. That’s what we wanted to bring back to Wales, and we created that with our restaurant, Hang Fire.