After more than three years as a groundbreaking Chinese-American barbecue popup, Winnie Yee-Lakhani’s Smoke Queen Barbecue opens its first stand-alone restaurant in Garden Grove on Saturday, March 9. What began as a side project has since turned into a barbecue innovation that’s taken hold of the Southern California food world.
Like other successful enterprises over the last few years, Yee-Lakhani’s Smoke Queen started out as a mere pandemic-related experiment, one meant to pass the time while the world came to a grinding halt. “When I started this concept in the pandemic, it was supposed to be a creative distraction from all the noise that was going on at the time,” said the star chef, who also co-owns Bruxie in Costa Mesa.
Having been a service franchisee since 2009, Yee-Lakhani was no stranger to the culinary scene, but she had always wanted to explore her creative side (namely barbecue) but rarely had the opportunity to so. In 2018, she had tentative plans for converting one of her existing restaurants to her own barbecue concept called Char, but those plans got scrapped. Enter the mandated lockdowns, which gave her the time and bandwidth to learn new techniques to add to her already impressive culinary arsenal.
“My passion for cooking started when I was a child in my grandma’s and my mom’s kitchen, and all the techniques I learned were Chinese, but prior to starting Smoke Queen Barbecue, I actually didn’t know how to smoke meats,” she confessed. Lacking any passed-down American-style meat smoking prowess, Yee-Lakhani took to the internet to learn her craft. After trial and error and an excess of patience, she soon perfected her skills and, along with the likes of Heritage Barbecue and only a handful of others, created one of Southern California’s best barbecue concepts.
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