Smoked to perfection

With techniques perfected over several years, carefully smoked meats are being carved up by the team at local restaurant Wildfire Craft BBQ.

Owners Casey Hildebrand and Eliza Hawker opened the Geelong business in 2022 and have been growing it ever since.

For them, the business started out as a passion project – now it serves briskets, ribs, sausages, duck, smoked chicken and more.

Hildebrand was working as a chef in 2017, smoking salmon at a restaurant when he became fixated on the cooking method and fell even more in love with it after seeing it on a TV show.

“I bought myself a little backyard smoker and then started cooking in my own backyard and learning from there,” he said.

 

Around a year later, he bought a bigger smoker on a trailer, and on their days off, the pair did popups around Geelong at different breweries and pubs.

“It was just a bit of fun for us and it was like the polar opposite of what I was working as. This was the simplest form of cooking food; it was just meat and fire,” Hildebrand said.

After losing his job during COVID, the pair decided to take the leap and launch their own business, and started the hunt for a venue.

The Newcomb building was originally a Thai restaurant and the existing smoke house was used by a deep fryer cleaning company.

Determined to make it work, the new business owners spent their savings on redoing the building and getting the business off the ground.

“We signed the lease, got the keys and we just started gutting the whole place ourselves. We built it from the ground up,” Hildebrand said.

“We managed to open the doors up and make our money back, just enough so we could open up the following week, and we’re very lucky to be here.”

 

Now the venue features a dark interior with a fully visible carving station and a smokehouse out the back of the building.

Although Wildfire Craft BBQ has developed slowly from a passion project to a successful business, Mr Hildebrand has been cooking barbecue for at least seven years.

With the doors open three days a week, their closed days are spent prepping and smoking the meat. Everything on the menu is made from scratch, from the sausages through to the side dishes.

The smoking process takes about 12 hours to complete for the restaurant’s bigger pieces of protein, all cooked using local wood.

“I don’t want to take any shortcuts and buy something. I’d rather just get the satisfaction of being proud of a product that I made myself and then the customer will look at you and go ‘That was amazing’,” Hildebrand said.

“That’s what gets me out of bed and continuing doing this is the people, it’s the regulars here, it’s the love that we’re given and to get out of bed and get paid to do that, it’s the best job in the world.”

 

A range of variables can determine the final outcome of the meat, from the wood and weather through to how much meat is being smoked.

“Barbecue isn’t a recipe, it’s a method, so how you run your fire up throughout the whole day and tweaking and adjusting things,” Hildebrand said.

He said the restaurant made sure nothing goes to waste by using as much out of each cut of meat as possible.

“You’ve got to make sure that every single piece of meat that you smoke, you can serve the whole thing from end to end.”

 

Hildebrand tries to create an experience for his customers, and said every person who came into the business mattered.

“This is a very unknown style of cooking, so I try my best to bring people out back and give them pit tours and explain the whole process and not just feed people but provide an experience.

“You can go to a restaurant and the food can be good, but the service will be ordinary or subpar [and] you won’t return. Whereas if you go to a restaurant, the food’s good but the service and the experience was outstanding, you’re more than likely to go back and you’re also going to tell your friends and family about it.”

 

Hildebrand said smoking was a unique style of cooking.

“We pride ourselves on our food. I genuinely do believe we’re one of the best restaurants in Geelong, most consistent and great service and one of the top barbecue joints in the whole country because we just don’t take shortcuts.”

The growth of the business has allowed the purchase of a new smoker on a trailer, which will see the pair take Wildfire Craft BBQ on the road again.

“I can afford to get away from this and now go mobile and start doing popups, so now the next step in the future is heating up places like Lara, Colac and the Surf Coast and Bannockburn and really expose ourselves,” Hildebrand said.

Wildfire Craft BBQ is open Friday, Saturday and Sunday.

For more information, head to wildfirecraftbbq.com.au or follow them on Instagram @wildfirecraftbbq