BBQ News

New Fort Worth BBQ restaurant Poppin' Fresh serves a lil' soul food on the side

The restaurant will take over the old Billy's space.

Photo by Malcolm Mayhew

A new restaurant specializing in two of Fort Worth's most cherished cuisines has snagged a primo spot on the city’s far west side: Poppin' Fresh BBQ and Soul Food will open at 7709 Camp Bowie West Blvd., the building recently vacated by local favorite Billy’s Oak Acres BBQ.

Poppin' Fresh owner Torri Walker is an entrepreneur who launched a food truck by the same name in east Fort Worth in 2016. Over the past four years, Walker and longtime pitmaster Carl Mosley have built a following of barbecue lovers, prompting the jump to a brick-and-mortar.

"Despite the pandemic, business has been good," Mosley says. "People keep asking us, 'When are you going to open a restaurant? When are you going to open a restaurant?' When we heard Billy's space became available, we thought, now is the time."

The property has gone through an extensive remodel, including an expansion of the patio.

"With everything happening with COVID-19, we knew we'd want to put an emphasis on outdoor dining," Mosley says. "The patio is now as almost as big as the dining room. Everybody will have plenty of space to social distance."

Barbecue will be the primary focus, with a menu that includes brisket, pork ribs, hot links, and whole and half chickens, along with rotating items such as beef sausage and beef ribs.

There will be equal emphasis on soul food, with dishes such as smothered pork chops, smothered chicken, oxtails, chicken-fried chicken, and other Southern-food staples. Sides include pinto beans, potato salad, candied yams, cucumber salad, and cornbread, all made from scratch, Mosley says.

"It's going to be a wide, wide, wide menu," he says. "Everything from barbecue to lobster tails."

Poppin' Fresh will fill the void left by Billy's and BBQ on the Brazos, the highly rated BBQ restaurant that left the area when it relocated to Cresson in July.

Billy's closed in March, and owner Billy Woodrich opened a new home-cooking concept in southwest Fort Worth called Rufus' Bar & Grill — leaving far west Fort Worth bereft.

"There are some chains on this side of town," Mosley says. "But ours will be the only family-run barbecue restaurant in the area."

To smoke his meats, Mosley will use a 250-gallon wood-burning smoker, hand-made by his uncle.

"I use a combination of woods — pecan and white oak," he says. "It gives the meat a different, deeper flavor than you might get at other places."

Mosley's love of cooking came from his grandmother, Era. "She was the pastry chef at Broadway Baptist Church for 35 years," he says. "That was my first job in a kitchen, as a dishwasher. I was 15 years old."

He's cooked ever since, cutting his teeth at two east Fort Worth institutions: soul food spot Stormie Monday's and the acclaimed Off the Bone BBQ. His background in both barbecue and soul food came in handy for Poppin' Fresh's twofold concept.

"The two go hand-in-hand," Mosley says. "Both are forms of comfort food — food that makes you feel like you’re home surrounded by friends and family. That's what we're going for here, food that makes you feel like you’re at home."

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Chef News

Fort Worth's Will Rogers Memorial Center welcomes bright new chef

FortWorthtx.gov

Will Rogers Memorial Center

There's a new chef in town: Waylon Cornelius, named executive chef of catering and concessions for Craft Culinary Concepts, the food and beverage provider at Will Rogers Memorial Center.

Will Rogers Memorial Center is the 120-acre entertainment complex anchoring Fort Worth’s Cultural District, owned and operated by the City of Fort Worth. Cornelius will oversee menus for trade shows and other events at the center which bring in more than 2 million visitors a year.

Craft Culinary Concepts is headquartered in Glendale, Arizona, and manages food and beverage programs for entertainment, sports and cultural facilities.

Chef Waylon Corneliusfortworthtx.gov

According to a release, Cornelius joined the team this summer and is already shifting the expectations of guests from a typical “BBQ and beans” menu to a bill of fare satisfying every kind of palate.

“We always have fajitas ready to go, but we also make a beautiful Beef Wellington or baked salmon with a pink salt crust,” Cornelius says in a statement.

For consumer trade shows, Craft and its partners Caribou and Taco Heads offer more choices for the thousands of guests who attend events at WRMC annually.

“Some of our equestrian guests are away from home and here for several days, and they need more than popcorn and hot dogs,” Cornelius says. “Our concessions offer biscuits and gravy, burritos made in-house, strawberry salad, fruit and yogurt cups.”

A native of Mansfield, Cornelius grew up helping in a farm-to-table kitchen. He was raised on a farm with his mother, grandmother, and grandfather -- a Vietnam veteran who enjoyed vegetable gardens and raising hogs and chickens. He studied computer science after high school and holds an associate's degree in Cultural Resource Management and Policy Analysis from Tarrant County College.

He's a 2003 graduate of AIMS Academy of Culinary Arts in Dallas where he was mentored by a number of great chefs. While training as assistant executive sous chef at the AAA four-diamond Grand Hyatt DFW, he worked with Executive Chef Sutti Sripolpa, chef Eric Dreyer (who went on to be Oprah Winfrey’s personal chef), and Chef Jean-Claude Plihon, under whom he honed his French cooking skills.

As executive sous chef at the opening of Perry’s Steakhouse and Grille in Southlake, Cornelius gained expertise with volume. While at HG Sply Co., he learned about gluten-free items and other food allergies.

HG Sply is also where he crossed paths with Chef James R. Schell III, Craft’s general manager at WRMC, who recruited Cornelius to the complex.

"James said he needed someone who can hit moving targets, push the culinary team to be more avant-garde and use locally sourced, seasonal ingredients, so here I am," Cornelius says. "Culinary is a small world."

“I want people to say, ‘When we were in Fort Worth, you won’t believe what we got at Will Rogers!’” Schell says. “Even the celebrities who perform [in the auditorium] are surprised. When Chicago played here recently and we served dinner backstage, they said they felt treated like the Rolling Stones.”

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