If you were tempted to put on a grammar-police badge when you first saw the sign for Two Goose Market & Barbecue going up in Austin, you weren’t alone. The restaurant received a since-deleted one-star Yelp review before even opening, which read, in part, “Name . . . plural of goose???” Co-owner Aaron Aday later received a voicemail with the same complaint. (You can watch him and the staff perform a dramatic reenactment.) For the record, the name is a reference to Aday and his wife Savannah’s playful roll call for their young daughters: “One goose, two goose.” Anyway, it was the “Market & Barbecue” portion of the name that drew me in.
Two Goose, which debuted in December, is open Wednesday through Saturday. I stopped in for breakfast (served from 8–11) a few weeks back and found plenty of brisket, bacon, and sausage stuffed into breakfast tacos, burritos, and sandwiches. The bestseller is the Big Honkin burrito, stuffed with chopped brisket, crispy chunks of potato, fluffy scrambled eggs, and cheese. The cooks sprinkle the flour tortilla with shredded cheese to melt, add the fillings, roll it up, and griddle the burrito on the flattop. The Big Honkin was everything I wanted in a barbecue breakfast, and the great cortado and cold brew you can also order were welcome bonuses. I skipped—but was tempted by—the pastries available from Austin’s La Pâtisserie.
Justin Abercrombie, who previously cooked at Rollin Smoke in Austin, is the pitmaster. He invited me into the Two Goose kitchen, which is housed in a 1956 Spartan Royal Mansion trailer that sits along one side of the small property. Aday found it sitting empty in someone’s backyard a year ago and retrofitted it. After having no luck finding a local food truck park to accommodate the forty-foot-long beast, he pivoted to this property, along North Lamar Boulevard, which already had a building on-site…