Red Hot Mama
Jill Lewis of Austin Slow Burn
By MM Pack, Fri., June 18, 2004
Lewis began her food career at age 13, busing tables at the Lago Vista Country Club. She grew up out on Lake Travis, often skiing to work behind her father's boat. She's a poster child for on-the-job restaurant training, emphasizing that she learned the business by the seat of her pants. "The day I became a waitress was the day the waitress didn't show up; later, I became a bartender the same way. It was instilled early in me that you can do anything you set your mind to do."
At 20, Jill moved to the big city (Austin) to work as bartender at the Wild Hare Pub on Sixth Street. She migrated to Southpoint Seafood in 1981, where she waited tables, prepared desserts, trained the waitstaff, managed the catering operations, and functioned as general fish expert. She also met chef Kevin there, who later became her husband. They both recall that her first words to him were "Do you realize you're in my way?"
In 1985, the newlyweds helped open Southpoint Seafood North, with Kevin as chef and Jill as assistant manager. However, two days before opening, the general manager had some, ahem, legal trouble, and Jill found herself managing the restaurant, once again learning the job as she went. When Austin's economy went south in the late 1980s, the Lewises worked for a couple of years in Charleston, S.C., restaurants. Jill says of those days, "I discovered there that I wasn't a Southern belle. I was definitely a Texan." They returned to Austin, where Kevin joined the Chuy's organization and Jill worked at the Majestic Diner, the Backyard at Bee Caves, and Romeo's.
About that time, the Lewises began growing lots of vegetables, herbs, and chiles in a big home garden. They made salsas and gumbos for Christmas presents and, encouraged by satisfied family and friends, began entering them in contests (among many others, they've entered every Austin Chronicle Hot Sauce Contest since its inception in 1990). And they started a five-year-long discussion about starting a chile-pepper business.
On New Year's Eve 1994, Jill told Kevin that either they moved forward with the hot-sauce plan or they could never talk about it again. That New Year's resolution apparently did the trick: With Chuy's help, they both attended food-processing school at Texas A&M and became proficient and FDA-certified in canning, bottling, sanitation, and food manufacturing. They set up shop in a corner of one of Chuy's restaurant kitchens, and their first product, Salsa con Habañero, hit the market in 1996. Jill remembers sneaking a dummy jar onto the salsa shelf in Central Market, trying to decide if the label was eye-catching enough to compete with the other products. When a woman tried to buy that jar right in front of them, they figured they had their answer.
Now, there are eight Austin Slow Burn products – salsas, sweet/hot jellies and jams, and Jamaican jerk marinade – on the shelves of grocery stores in Texas and specialty food stores across the U.S., Canada, and Germany. For the first three years, all the peppers they used came from their own 20-foot-by-20-foot garden in Manchaca. Then, Jill's father also began growing peppers for the seemingly insatiable sauces; the next year, they bid on a farmer's pepper-field yield before it was even planted. These days, they're using chopped and flash-frozen IQF habañeros and jalapeños, which are considerably easier on the salsa makers' hands and other parts.
That salsa maker is still Jill Lewis, who is also the bottler, labeler, distributor, shipper, schlepper, bookkeeper, publicity person, and writer of labels and press releases. On weekends, she and Kevin (who works full time as kitchen operations manager for Chuy's) exhibit at food events, do demonstrations, teach cooking classes, and make TV appearances.
"I'm really happy doing what I do," she says. "The best part is meeting customers, having people tell me what they like and what they want. We've had calls from as far away as London and Alaska, asking for orders." What's the worst part? Making the same things over and over. She cooks 60-gallon batches daily, in a kettle "that could double as a Jacuzzi."
When asked if she has some advice for others aspiring to their own food manufacturing business, Jill laughs and says, "Sure. Just dig a hole in the back yard, throw your money in it, and go do something else. Seriously? Go to a co-packer. People have no idea how complicated and expensive it is to start up in this. Because of our backgrounds in the restaurant business, we have resources that most people don't have. And everyone already knew us way before we ever got a jar on the shelf."
With regard to the future, she says, "We plan to grow as much as we can, adding new products and new markets. Our cranberry/habañero/rosemary jelly is about to come out. I've never had a limit put on me, and I'm not going to start now." However, she isn't interested in nonchile products. "If it's not hot, we don't bother. Life's too short to eat bland food."
