When David Welch first opened Fire Craft BBQ, as a catering service ten years ago in Kingwood, just north of Houston, he didn’t seem to have the right work experience. His résumé was littered with fine-dining restaurants and a French culinary education. Thankfully, his training was able to come through when he transitioned from a food truck to a brick-and-mortar building, in 2023. Now Welch is nearing completion on a dining room expansion to meet demand, so it seems like he made the right pivot.
After a year and a half studying art history at the University of Houston, Welch knew as a college sophomore that he wanted a different path. At age nineteen, he had been promoted to sauce cook at a Pappadeaux location, and he decided to enroll in the culinary program at the now-defunct Art Institute of Houston. It was there that chef-instructor Peter Lehr encouraged Welch to apply to Le Cordon Bleu in Paris. He followed the advice and returned to Houston upon graduation, in 1996.
Restaurant owner Tony Raffa bought Welch his first smoker—or, at least, he bought one for Amedeo’s Restaurant, in Kingwood, where Welch was the chef. It was a Fast Eddy’s cabinet smoker used for osso bucco and smoked frog legs. Welch eventually bought an offset smoker for his own backyard. When he resigned from the chef position at Raffa’s Waterfront Grill, a restaurant he had helped Raffa open six years prior, he had few kitchen-work opportunities thanks to a noncompete clause. Raffa gave Welch his blessing to work in a pit room instead, and he spent eighteen months at Tin Roof BBQ in nearby Atascocita. “I wanted to see what production barbecue looked like,” Welch said.
Welch was ready go out on his own in a big way. “I wanted to open a barbecue restaurant,” he said, so he had a design firm draw up the plans. His grandmother helped by purchasing a half-acre lot along Loop 494 in Kingwood. They had already broken ground when their plans were stymied, in the summer of 2018. “The state funded a road expansion, and everything stopped,” Welch said. He didn’t want a new restaurant in the middle of a construction zone.
Key lime pie. Photograph by Daniel Vaughn 
Scoops of pimento cheese and chicken salad with crackers. Photograph by Daniel Vaughn
He moved his focus to a food truck parked at his family’s home. “My wife is still mad at me because we still have a smoke stain on the driveway,” he said. He found farmers markets and parking lots where he could serve barbecue to the public. His son, Austin, and daughter, Savannah, helped him. “They got bit by it too,” Welch said. Savannah, now 24, is the restaurant’s general manager.
During COVID-19, Welch was happy to have the food truck, but he soon went hunting for a permanent location again. In 2023, Fire Craft BBQ opened in a former bakery. (Welch sold his old food truck to Logan Glenn, who opened Space City BBQ in Baytown.)
It took me too long to get to Kingwood for my first visit, late last year. The sides and a slice of key lime pie outshone the brisket that day, but I really enjoyed the smoked turkey and spareribs. Welch wasn’t there when I visited, so I held off on reviewing the joint until I could come back for a second look. A couple weeks ago, I had a full meal that was impressive from beginning to end.
Welch brought out small scoops of both his pimento cheese and a smoked chicken salad with chunks of celery and red onion. I enjoyed both, but the pimento cheese was especially good. It held the shape of the scoop, evidence that there wasn’t too much mayo in the mix, and it brought some nice heat.
The seasoning on a brisket can sometimes be only bark-deep, but each bite of the juicy slices here had a robust saltiness, while the rest of the spices stayed in the background. Welch uses two gas-assisted Southern Pride smokers, but he keeps them fueled with oak for the whole cook. That flavor comes through on the brisket, while it’s more subtle on the spareribs, whose seasoning also goes deep, thanks to it being applied the night before the ribs are smoked.
I got the last half chicken of the day, and it still had juicy white meat from the overnight brining. It tasted great dipped in the barbecue sauce, which starts with Gulden’s Spicy Brown mustard as the base. Welch chars onions and purees them with mustard seeds, celery seeds, and three kinds of dried chiles. He then adds Worcestershire sauce, vinegar, and ketchup to round out the complex sauce. “We try to take that one extra step to set ourselves apart from the others,” Welch said.
Welch makes small batches of sausage from his own recipe, and he is working on one for boudin. He’s using Zummo’s boudin for now, and the smoked sausage I got was from Slovacek’s. The brisket trim goes into the spectacular dirty rice, which is made the old-fashioned way. “You gotta have the liver and the gizzards in there,” Welch said. He also melts beef fat down for tallow used in the roasted potatoes.
If some of the menu items seem more Southern than Texan, that’s because Welch gets plenty of inspiration from his Alabamian grandmother’s cooking. The joint’s popular spoonbread, which is somewhere between corn casserole and cornbread, is made using her recipe. So are the decadent squash casserole and the slaw dressing, made with buttermilk and honey mustard. The baked beans are sweet because of her, too (savory pinto beans are also available), but smoking the beans on the pit was Welch’s idea. Adding bacon and onion to green beans is nothing new, but I like that Welch uses fresh instead of canned green beans. There’s also a sweet watermelon salad that brings together crumbled feta cheese, raw purple onion, and mint tossed with the slaw dressing.
Tiffany Alford was recently hired on as the pastry chef. I got to try her cherry-ginger cobbler, which was rich with butter and pleasantly chewy on the edges. There’s also scratch-made banana pudding, bread pudding, and rotating dessert specials.
“It’s the hardest, most satisfying thing I’ve ever done,” Welch said of the barbecue restaurant. Even after working in fine-dining kitchens, he said, nothing matches the workload of a pitmaster. “I sleep up here five nights a week,” he said, to tend the fires. His commitment and credentials show in the food.
Right now the space is mostly taken up by the kitchen, with a few tables up front. That will change any day now with a new dining room in the next space over. Once Fire Craft has more room, the hours will be extended to include dinner from 5 p.m. to 9 p.m. Welch said the menu will remain the same until the joint settles into the new routine, but keep an eye out for new evening features such as smoked prime rib, smoked salmon, and smoked tomato bisque with a brisket grilled cheese.
Fire Craft BBQ
2665 Royal Forest Dr., Suite B10, Kingwood
Phone: 281-247-7292
Hours: Tuesday–Saturday 11–5
Pitmasters: David and Savannah Welch
Method: Post oak in a gas-fired rotisserie
Year opened: 2015
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