Standing in Black Gold’s pit room about a week before the Austin restaurant’s opening day on November 9, Mems Davila rests his hand on the handle of Stevie Ray, one of two 22-foot-long smokers custom-made by Cen-Tex Smokers in Luling. (The other pit is named Jimmy.) The mustachioed pitmaster and former musician has been serving barbecue out of his Wünder Pig food truck since 2014, and he’s spent the past three years working with local firm 3 Fold Design to transform this former Crestview van-customization shop into an upscale barbecue restaurant with a style as sexy as the crispy bark on Davila’s brisket.
Stevie Ray and Jimmy, their names a nod to Davila’s music background, power both the food and design of Black Gold. Because Davila wants his guests to witness the alchemy of smoke and flame as they dine, he asked Allison Gaskins and Page Gandy of 3 Fold to incorporate the pit room into the interior of the restaurant, an engineering and permitting challenge that the City of Austin said could not be done. But during the lengthy process of converting the property, 3 Fold made it happen. And here we are, admiring Stevie Ray’s nineteen-foot iron exit stack, through which all that good smoke will, indeed, exit the building.
Elegant steel pendant lamps dangle from the pit room ceiling, an uncommonly luxurious touch for a space that, in most barbecue joints, is tucked away and covered in offal. “These are pendants you would typically see hanging over a kitchen island in a high-end build,” says Gaskins. “They are statement pieces. And here we are, we threw them over pits. We needed to have these accents in here to make it flow with the whole space.”
This union of massive industrial barbecue pits with pretty pendant lights is an apt metaphor for Black Gold’s overall mission: to blend good design and craftsmanship into the barbecue experience. “We did not want it to be ‘give me the tray of the half pound of this, half pound of that,’ ” says Davila, wearing a black T-shirt with the curvy yellow letters of the Black Gold logo, a tattoo of a pig sneaking out from the right sleeve as he gestures with his hands. (He isn’t leaving the old-school ordering method completely behind, though: Black Gold will use it at its backyard food truck, open daily from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m.) “We want to have the method of cooking, grilling, whether it’s smoked or reverse sear or whatever it may be, to be part of an elevated experience. You know, with beautiful details. With Wally’s Oaxacan old-fashioned, you can actually see the smoke coming off the glass.”
Wally is Wally Sanchez, the beverage director whom Davila has known since his childhood in Edinburg, in the Rio Grande Valley. Sanchez, Davila, and Gandy grew up together; while still in middle school, Davila and Sanchez played in a band on the college party circuit. Much of what this team is creating here, from the spiked hibiscus agua fresca to the jalapeño creamed spinach with house-made tostadas, has roots in the food and drinks at weekend gatherings of their close-knit communities in the RGV. “This is all stuff that we grew up with,” says Sanchez. “Our grandparents knew all of it, but we didn’t really realize all that they knew until we became adults.”
For Davila, a big part of making the Black Gold experience “elevated,” a word he uses often, is weaving in an appreciation of “what is actually happening to create the food and drink you’ve come here for.” That objective has shaped the design framework for 3 Fold. Davila’s determination to make the pits a focal point of the experience, and not just a cool sideshow, meant that Gandy and Gaskins had to solve the riddle of designing an indoor pit room without, as Davila says, “smoking everybody out.” Gaskins went back and forth with Austin’s permitting department so much, often getting hit with setbacks, that they now joke about concocting a cocktail they’ll call Bad News Allison. “We should make it really intense, like with a Malört shot in it,” says Davila.
Davila worked closely with Cen-Tex’s father-son welders, Michael Johnson Sr. and Michael Johnson Jr., to customize the pits for a variety of cooking styles and meats—duck, elk, and other wild game are on the menu. (The 3 Fold team said I might die when I taste the duck fat fries that come with the smoked duck in a poblano cream sauce.) “Our pits have a two-level cooking space,” says Davila, “so we can do higher heat for our chickens and lower heat for bigger [cuts] of meat that can take a long time . . . there’s a place for ribs that need to finish faster and rods for sausages.”
Works of art in their own right, the pits guided the aesthetics for the entire restaurant. Black Gold’s deep gray color palette, industrial light fixtures, and funky charcoal wallpaper behind a quartz bar with sleek leather barstools as solid as good saddles—it all gestures back to the pits. 3 Fold also created curvilinear spaces and rounded corners to help create lines of sight to the pit room. “So it’s just called the pit room, but it’s actually this super special gem of a space,” says Gaskins, “and one that we wanted to make visible from every other corner of the restaurant.”
Sitting in the leather-cushioned banquettes in the airy dining room, I marvel that not so long ago, this space was the purple-painted porte-cocheres for Third Coast Vans, the auto-customization shop that occupied this corner of Woodrow Avenue and Anderson Lane for more than forty years. Surrounded by seven-foot-tall windows, I can see Stevie Ray and Jimmy across a courtyard that was once the shop’s work bay and imagine vans getting tricked out with custom kitchenettes. In the process of selling this property to Davila, Third Coast Vans’ owner, Craig Oakes, became a friend. Now he stops by regularly to check out its transformation.
“One time it was really quiet, and I looked up and he was just standing there looking at his place,” says Davila. “I immediately connected as a business owner. I was like, ‘Dude, I can only imagine what is going on in your brain seeing this place that you owned for forty years.’ And he loves it.”
Indeed, it seems the whole team involved in the project loves it. You feel it in the way Sanchez talks about his agua frescas and the care with which Gaskins and Gandy selected the lighting, the last big design decision they made for the restaurant and one they deliberated on endlessly, landing on playful iron pendant lamps that hang at varied lengths in the main dining room. They had to get it just right. “We are really big believers that lighting can make or break a space, especially in a restaurant environment with the experience you’re trying to create,” says Gandy. “There is a delicate zone you want to hit—not fancy, but”—here’s that word again—“elevated.”
