BBQ chicken, Voo Doo style.

It’s OK to lick your fingers at our tables. We won’t judge you. In fact, we’ll ask if you need any more sauce with that.

At VooDoo BBQ & Grill, that’s what we’re about: We want you to feel like you’re sitting at home with your family enjoying some of the best barbecue your mama has ever laid on the kitchen table.

It’s the friendly, familiar atmosphere that inspired an EatRouge.com food reviewer to sing hymns of praise for us:

“VooDoo has very friendly service. The line to order moves quickly and the food prep time is quick. The one thing that stands out is how every member of the staff (from busboy to manager) seemed to ask us how our meal was and if there was anything we needed. Excellent service! Voodoo also has a nice family atmosphere featuring a full service bar and televisions everywhere. The restaurant recently received new management. It’s definitely a nice place!”

But we’re just doing our job. And our job is simple: To make sure you’ll be scanning your mental calendars to find out when you can return for even more delicious barbecue.

The reviewer, a VooDoo first-timer, took on the pulled pork and brisket platter and some of our yummy sides:

“The pork is very moist and not overly seasoned, allowing the sauce to be the perfect complement.

“The potato salad is amazing! It may be the best potato salad I have ever eaten. It’s an extremely thick and meaty mayonnaise-based potato salad that seemed to put me in a euphoric state with each bite. From now on I will be ordering two sides of potato salad! In conclusion, if you are looking for good-solid barbecue, then VooDoo BBQ is the place. I will be coming back again!”

They said it, we didn’t. Well, that’s not true. We’ve been saying it all along. We love barbecue, and we’ll always make it with care so that you’ll keep falling in love with it, too.

Interested in joining the New Orleans barbecue revolution? Check us out at www.voodoobbq.com or www.voodoobbqfranchise.com!

New VooDoo BBQ franchise owner Steve Stumpf says the Caribbean-style dry rub VooDoo uses on items like its St. Louis-style ribs helps distinguish it from the pack.

The time has come for VooDoo BBQ & Grill to cross that bridge.

We’ve spent a decade building up a franchise system that, with our New Orleans-style barbecue and distinctive atmosphere, has established itself as the hottest in restaurant franchising. We started with 12 stores in south Louisiana and last year signed deals for 41 more locations. We just opened our first restaurant outside Louisiana, in Greenville, S.C. We’re rolling.

But we’re missing something. There’s no VooDoo on the Westbank, brah! You can roll past dozens of franchise and non-franchise restaurants as you cruise the Westbank Expressway at 90 mph — we know that’s not the posted speed limit, but it’s what everybody drives on the Expressway — and encounter nary a VooDoo. How can that be?

Steve Stumpf has come along to rectify this untenable situation. He and a business partner have signed a franchise agreement with us to open a VooDoo in Harvey by the end of the year. The property they’re looking to buy on Lapalco Boulevard has a building with a drive-through window — which Steve is excited to use at his location. We are, too. It’d be a first for VooDoo BBQ, and we’re anxious to see how our customers like it!

Steve is a rare breed, a New Orleans native with a background in barbecue. He used to manage the Corky’s Ribs & BBQ in Metairie. We’re encouraged that he has that kind of seasoning (pun intended), and we’re happy he can recognize the VooDoo difference.

“I just saw a void on the Westbank. There’s really no good barbecue over here, and I like the VooDoo concept, their food and quality of service,” says Steve, who lives in Gretna. “I like that it’s New Orleans-style barbecue, something that started here, not some national cookie-cutter brand. There’s just a mystique and atmosphere around VooDoo.”

The Harvey location will open a whole new clientele to the flavor and magic of VooDoo BBQ. About 300,000 people live on the Westbank (for non-New Orleanians, it’s the area across the Mississippi River from New Orleans proper). Lapalco Boulevard is a major thoroughfare we’re confident will funnel in a sizable lunch crowd from the many businesses and industries in the area and a great dinner crowd from the neighboring subdivisions.

Steve left Corky’s in 2009 to buy into another growing food franchise, Izzo’s Illegal Burrito, a Baton Rouge-based system of fast casual Mexican eateries. He and a team of investors own three Izzo’s locations. But he says the barbecue never left his system.

“I still have barbecue in my blood, and I’m familiar with VooDoo from the time they opened. Even when I was working at Corky’s, I knew VooDoo had a great product,” he says. “For instance, Corky’s uses a smoker but doesn’t season the meat. These guys (VooDoo) use a dry rub with a Caribbean flair and a variety of sauces that really set VooDoo apart from other barbecue restaurants. I think folks on the Westbank will go crazy for VooDoo BBQ.”

If you haven’t tried it yet, we think you will go crazy for it, too, whether you’re interested in opening one of our stores or just digging into our pulled pork, brisket or tender St. Louis-style ribs. Check us out online at www.voodoobbq.com or www.voodoobbqfranchise.com, and we’ll see you soon on the other side of the Big Muddy!

You can't find shrimp on the menu at most barbecue places. It's one of the many things that makes VooDoo BBQ & Grill unique.

Franchising is all about consistency, about duplicating a system and product across state and even national lines. While the franchise units within your system need to follow the same blueprint, that doesn’t mean your franchise system needs to resemble anybody else’s.

Man, I don’t know how many times I’ve had to eat lunch in a franchise restaurant that’s about 98 percent similar to some other place I’m already familiar with. Businesspeople can be copycats, and if Jack demonstrates that he can make money selling charbroiled pickles, you can bet Joe will be setting up across the street next week with a hibachi and a truckload of gherkins.

But the really successful franchise systems are the ones that start with a unique vision and maintain it, even at the cost of short-term gain. When you offer not just a distinctive product or service but a unique atmosphere and culture, you’ve set yourself apart in ways that can pay off big-time down the road.

Maybe it’s a Louisiana thing. When our CEO, Tony Avila, founded VooDoo BBQ & Grill a decade ago, he had to overcome the skepticism of people who thought he was a fool for pitching a top-ranked barbecue franchise in a city, New Orleans, renowned for Creole cuisine and seafood. But that’s what Tony was after — something out of the ordinary. He knew people there and elsewhere in the country could find New Orleans-style cuisine. He knew they could get barbecue.

But New Orleans-style barbecue? That was something else entirely.

It starts with a foundation of slow-cooked, competition-style meat and adds distinctive side dishes, flavorful sauces exclusive to VooDoo and a fun atmosphere drawn from the streets of the Crescent City. VooDoo BBQ has come a long way since it opened on one of the main Mardi Gras parade routes on Fat Tuesday 2002 (another move your business advisor wouldn’t recommend; it was pretty crazy). Along the way, we learned from our mistakes, suffered through some false starts, even lost a restaurant to Hurricane Katrina.

But Tony, his business partner Dino Arvanetes and our staff stuck with their original vision of New Orleans-style flavor and fun in a fast casual restaurant environment, and now we’re collecting on our investment.

We started 2011 with 12 restaurants, only nine of them franchisee-owned, all of them in south Louisiana. We ended the year with plans for 41 more restaurants in five other states and a plan to expand throughout the Southeast — and beyond. We just opened a location in Greenville, S.C., our first outside Louisiana, and it’s gotten stellar reviews in an area that knows its barbecue.

Sure, you have to take some chances and hang in there when your instincts (and maybe your investors) tell you you’re doing it all wrong, that you’ve already hit the iceberg, that So-and-So’s Fried Frog Legs Emporium is doing great and has a better business model. It takes guts and smarts to hang with your vision and see it through.

But when you’ve succeeded, when you’ve proven the doubters wrong and created not just a successful business but a real culture, a world of your own in which great people are employed and happy and guests are coming back again and again — really, is there a better feeling in the world?

Besides, if you’d wanted to be like everybody else, why’d you decide to go into business for yourself in the first place?

If you think a fun, unique fast casual restaurant environment is right for you, we’d love to hear from you. Look us up at www.voodoobbq.com or www.voodoobbqfranchise.com!

Our brisket. Eat some. It'll make you smile. Really. It's a proven scientific fact. Photo by Jennifer Temple via Urbanspoon.

At VooDoo BBQ & Grill, we’ve said for years that barbecue makes people happy. We know it. Our customers know it.

Now someone’s proved it.

A recent study from the Barwon Psychiatric Research Unit at Deakin University in Australia showed that women who ate less than the recommended amount of red meat such as beef and lamb were twice as likely to suffer from depressive and anxiety disorders. Researchers at Deakin investigated the relationship between the two in more than 1,000 women from the region near the university.

The folks there acknowledged how surprising the results might be to some people.

“We had originally thought that red meat might not be good for mental health, as studies from other countries had found red meat consumption to be associated with physical health risks, but it turns out that it actually may be quite important,” said Felice Jacka, the professor and health researcher who oversaw the study. “Even when we took into account the overall healthiness of the women’s diets, as well as other factors such as their socioeconomic status, physical activity levels, smoking, weight and age, the relationship between low red meat intake and mental health remained.”

Well, duh. We could have told her that! (To be fair, it’s a long way.) As long as it’s part of a balanced diet, red meat is good for you. It puts a smile on your face. It’s especially fun when you couple it with some awesome sides and the kind of fun atmosphere and music you can find at VooDoo BBQ.

People expecting our brisket to be fatty or gristly are in for a pleasant surprise. We use only the best brisket, trimming it carefully even before we season and smoke it to perfection. We know that just because you want to sink your teeth into some beef, you don’t want to eat something subpar and unhealthy. It’s lean protein, the kind of rich, flavorful meat that leaves you satisfied and happy.

One of the things we like most about the Deakin study is its reinforcement of a point we make as often as we can — barbecue isn’t just for the fellas. It’s for ladies, too! How many kinds of food can you say that about? It appeals to men and women, it’s good for you, and it makes people happy. What more could you want? So come see us — either in person or online, at www.voodoobbq.com or www.voodoobbqfranchise.com. Don’t worry. B(BQ) happy!

JACK FLECHNER OF VOODOO BBQ & GRILL, FLORIDA VISITS CHINA

Jack Flechner and a Chinese ambassador

Jack Flechner, the President and Director of Operations in Florida, travelled to China earlier this month along with the Palm Beach Regional Center in order to introduce VooDoo BBQ & Grill to potential foreign investors in China.  As an EB-5 project under the Palm Beach Regional Center, a USCIS approved regional center, VooDoo BBQ & Grill franchises in Florida will be open to investment from EB-5 immigrant investors.

VooDoo BBQ & Grill is raising EB-5 capital for its Broward, Miami-Dade, and Palm Beach locations and received its first investor at the end of February. Flechner and his team are expecting to open a total of twenty – six VooDoo BBQ & Grill locations in Florida in the near future.

The EB-5 Visa program is an employment-based visa which is intended to promote the flow of assets into the U.S. economy and at the same time to promote the creation of jobs in the United States for U.S. citizens and legal residents. The program mandates that a foreign investor must invest a minimum of either USD$1,000,000 for a regular EB-5 Investment Visa or USD$500,000 for an EB-5 Regional Center program. In addition the program mandates that 10 full-time jobs must be created as a result of each investment.

The Greenville store opened this year to rave reviews.

New Orleans-based VooDoo BBQ opens its first store outside Louisiana, and customers are raving.

The Carolinas Can’t Get Enough of VooDoo BBQ
Customers give high praise to VooDoo BBQ food, fun and flavor

Early this year, VooDoo BBQ & Grill opened a location in Greenville, S.C., our first restaurant outside Louisiana, and we held a grand opening day for the store a few weeks ago. We were excited beyond words to see how people in another state, especially one with its own established barbecue tradition, would react to our competition-style barbecue, unique side dishes and New Orleans-style atmosphere and flavor.

Well … the response from the public has been phenomenal! People have flocked to online review sites like Yelp! and Urbanspoon, to our Facebook page and to our comment cards to tell us how much they love VooDoo BBQ. We knew they would.

Inside the Greenville location.

Here’s a sampling:

“Excellent food and service this evening. It was a welcome surprise to find someone who can actually produce a quality brisket here in the Greenville area … Kudos to whoever programs the music — Tower of Power, Dr. John and the Meters enhance the overall dining experience. Say hi to Dino when you dine in.” — Gil S., Simpsonville, S.C., via Yelp. (Dino Arvanetes is our COO.) Thanks, Gil — the funky music is part of our “flavor!”

The Greenville krewe, working for yewe.

There you go, right from the diners’ mouths. Want to join a fast-growing franchise system that’s just starting to take the nation by storm? Check us out at www.voodoobbq.com or www.voodoobbqfranchise.com!

Seriously — who could resist a VooDoo BBQ & Grill pulled pork po-boy? From the VooDoo web site.

One of the chief comforts of owning a BBQ franchise comes from the knowledge that, at base, you’re selling something people want.

We generalize and say that everybody loves barbecue. People love comfort food, Southern cooking, everything barbecue is. That’s not just an opinion.

Every year, the National Restaurant Association surveys professional chefs on what they think will be the hot trends in foods, beverages, cuisines and culinary themes in the coming year. The NRA calls it the “What’s Hot” list, and restaurateurs everywhere use it to measure trends in the restaurant industry.

Three categories on the main “What’s Hot” list caught our eye: Soul/comfort/Southern cuisine; “comfort foods”; and, of course, barbecue. Barbecue really falls under all three categories, in our opinion. And here’s what’s interesting: Not just that they’re on the list — of course they’re on the list — but that they’re ranked solidly as “perennial favorites,” with half or more of the chefs surveyed acknowledging that those kinds of cuisine have real staying power with diners, a draw that transcends trends that might disappear next month.

And if you’ve paid attention, you’ll notice that “homestyle” or “comfort” food is growing in popularity — and what is barbecue but comfort food? What’s more, it aligns with other food trends: the popularity of lean meats in low-carbohydrate diets, for example. Put it all together, and you’ve got a food concept that fulfills a lot of what diners are looking for when they go out to eat.

Dig these side dishes: mac & cheese, Rattlesnake Beans, cole slaw, potato salad, corn pudding. Comfort food. It's all good. From the VooDoo website.

These days, you can combine that with a market that’s underserved by good barbecue restaurants. There just aren’t that many, even in the big Southern cities you’d think would be the natural host sites for barbecue empires. But serving quality barbecue isn’t easy.

It’s a challenge VooDoo BBQ & Grill, a New Orleans-based barbecue franchise, has taken on and beaten. We’re a fast-growing franchise system with 13 locations in Louisiana and South Carolina and plans for 40 more locations in four more states — and that’s just the beginning. We’re looking closely at locations throughout the Southeast and beyond, knowing we have something that’s traditional yet original, a cuisine with a solid tradition established over decades but seasoned freshly with New Orleans-style fun and flavor that adds a new dimension to a perennial favorite.

Want to know more about how you can leverage diners’ never-changing love for this food with ever-popular New Orleans cuisine to realize a stellar business opportunity? Check us out at www.voodoobbq.com or www.voodoobbqfranchise.com!