Sean Larkin took a long walk around his Dallas neighborhood alone the day after Memorial Day in 2024. He was trying to clear his head after learning he’d been let go from his job in health care. He had just taken the position two months earlier, in the hope that the bump in pay would support his growing family. Sean’s wife, Jillian, who was pregnant with their daughter at the time, waited for him at home with their one-year-old son. “When I got back home, I told [Jillian] I had a plan, and it had nothing to do with updating my résumé,” he said. Larkin was going to start a barbecue business.
He already had a five-hundred-gallon steel smoker he and his brother-in-law had purchased in 2014 to start their barbecue-competition team. “Our first couple of competitions were miserably bad,” he said, but they took home first place for their ribs on their third try and were hooked. Turning that passion into a barbecue joint had been a dream ever since. “I wrote the original iteration of the menu six or seven years ago,” Larkin said. He watched as Pecan Lodge, in Dallas, grew from a catering operation into an award-winning joint thanks to the leap owners Justin and Diane Fourton made from corporate America, and it gave him confidence after losing his job. “That resonated with me a lot,” he said.
Larkin Barbecue began as a pop-up in June 2024. Larkin compared the grueling routine to “setting up a full tailgate and tearing it down by myself three to five times a week.” I first tried his promising barbecue in a barbershop parking lot, and then outside a brewery in late 2024. In November, Larkin debuted his trailer, which is parked next to a skate shop at the 3G intersection in Dallas, where Garland, Grand, and Gaston come together south of White Rock Lake. He’ll be serving there for the foreseeable future, Thursday through Saturday. Look for the oak smoke coming out of the ’stack…