A Pit Stop at Evie Mae’s BBQ

By Tia Urioste and Rachel Forrester

If you like eating barbecue and are ever in the Lubbock area, be sure to stop at Evie Mae’s Pit Barbecue in Wolfforth, Texas. Arnis and Mallory Robbins (BS 05) own the joint, dubbed Texas Monthly’s 2016 “Newcomer of the Year”, and the duo have turned their one-day-a-week hobby into a full-blown lifestyle.

After Mallory graduated from ENMU, she and Arnis moved to Arizona where they ran a landscaping company. Arnis had always wanted to build a meat smoker, so it was during that time that the family started experimenting and selling barbecue one day a week.

Mallory gets the menu ready for the day.

Photo by Robert Jacob Lerma

“We bought a little trailer and set up every Friday just to see how it would go. When we moved to Lubbock to be closer to home, we decided to do barbecue full-time.”

And full-time it is. Last year the couple moved from their trailer to a full-sized restaurant, and they work six days most weeks even though they only serve barbecue Wednesday through Saturday. With all meat hand-trimmed and all sides made inhouse, the team starts preparing on Mondays and they fire up the pit on Tuesday to cook food for the following day. Arnis is the head chef, while Mallory, a full-time mother of two, helps at the restaurant when needed and handles all of their social media.

Mallory shows off a piece of barbecue.

“It’s hard and it’s exhausting and my husband works crazy 16- 20-hour days, but we’re able to feed people high quality food that we literally make with love. It sounds so cheesy, but we want to make sure people are happy. They come stand in line for an hour for our food on a Saturday so they better be super impressed.”

With side dishes that are equally as impressive as the meat they offer, what may be the biggest surprise is that the family doesn’t use any special ingredients to make their delicious barbecue.

Arnis and Mallory Robbins with their two kids, Evie and Jack.

“People ask us all the time if we sell our rubs but we don’t use anything fancy. It’s just salt and pepper, and smoke and time— that’s what my husband says. It takes a long time to get the product that we end up with. And we only use prime-grade beef, so we’re not the cheapest around but everything is homemade.”

Never in a million years did Mallory think that they would be where they are now. From starting out in their trailer selling as much barbeque in one day as they felt they could accomplish, it turns out they have accomplished a whole lot. Evie Mae’s is now one of the top barbecue restaurants in Texas.

“I just can’t believe we are here when, two years ago, we were on the side of the road in a trailer in a snow storm wondering ‘what were we thinking?’ It’s really cool to see how if you work hard and set your mind to something—it sounds so cliché—that you can do whatever you want to do. But it’s so true.”