Oak & Stone, the Florida-based restaurant group that's built a following around craft pizza and smoked meats, officially opened their McKinney location last month. They've already announced Addison is next, sometime before the end of the year. Two Texas locations in under twelve months from a brand that's been content to grow slowly in Florida for years.
That caught my attention.
Not because another restaurant is opening in DFW — that happens constantly. But because Oak & Stone represents a particular type of expansion that tells you something about where the market's heading and what operators are prioritizing when they scale.
Why Texas, Why Now
I talked to an equipment rep out of Dallas a few weeks back who'd been following the Oak & Stone situation. His read was simple: Florida's saturated for their concept, and Texas offers population growth plus a customer base that actually understands smoked meat. You don't have to educate a Texas customer on why brisket matters. They already know.
McKinney specifically makes sense if you look at the numbers. Collin County added something like 35,000 residents last year alone. Young families, disposable income, and — this is the part that matters for a concept like Oak & Stone — a preference for sit-down casual over fast-casual. Their average ticket in Florida runs around $28 per person. That math works in McKinney.
Addison's a different play. Higher density, more corporate lunch traffic, later dinner crowds. If they're planning both locations with the same kitchen footprint, they're going to run into capacity problems at Addison almost immediately. Corporate lunch rush plus happy hour smoke runs eat up cook time fast.
The Equipment Question Nobody's Asking
Here's what I find interesting about multi-state expansions like this: the equipment decisions get made early, often before anyone's really thinking about regional differences in how hard those machines will work.
Oak & Stone's Florida locations run a hybrid kitchen — wood-fired pizza ovens and smokers sharing the same line. That works when your smoked meat program is basically brisket, pulled pork, and maybe some wings. But Texas customers expect more. They expect it done right. And they'll notice if you're pushing volume through equipment that can't hold temp consistency across a twelve-hour cook.
I had an operator out of Baton Rouge who expanded into Houston back in 2019. Similar situation — successful concept, loyal following, figured the recipe would translate. What he didn't account for was that his Louisiana customers ordered gumbo and étouffée alongside their smoked sausage. His Houston customers ordered brisket. Period. His smoker capacity was suddenly running 40% hotter in terms of demand, and he'd specced the kitchen based on Louisiana ticket patterns.
He ended up retrofitting six months in. Added an SP-1000 to handle the brisket volume and kept his original unit for pork and poultry. Could've saved about $14,000 if he'd planned for it upfront instead of emergency-ordering during his busiest quarter.
Scaling Smoked Meat Programs Without Losing Your Mind
The challenge with any multi-unit expansion is consistency. Your McKinney brisket needs to taste like your Addison brisket needs to taste like whatever you're serving in Tampa. That's hard enough with sauces and rubs. It's genuinely difficult with smoke.
Variables compound fast. Different pit boss experience levels. Different ambient humidity. Different draft patterns in different buildings. One location running mesquite because that's what the Texas supplier had in stock, while Florida's still burning oak.
This is where equipment choice actually matters beyond just capacity numbers. A rotisserie system with consistent airflow gives you a fighting chance at replicating results across locations. Cabinet smokers without proper circulation? You're relying entirely on the operator to compensate. Some will. Most won't.
The Southern Pride rotisserie models — your SPK-700/M, your SP-1000, up through the SP-2000 for serious volume — run a continuous rotation that removes a lot of operator variance from the equation. I've seen two different pit bosses, one with fifteen years' experience and one fresh out of culinary school, produce nearly identical results on the same unit. (The experienced guy was actually annoyed by this. He wanted his brisket to be better than the kid's. It was basically the same.)
That's what you need when you're trying to maintain quality across state lines with different staff and different training timelines.
What Florida Operators Often Learn the Hard Way in Texas
Oak & Stone isn't the first Florida brand to try Texas, and they won't be the last. Some observations from watching others make this move:
Parts availability becomes a real issue. Whatever equipment you're running, make sure you can get gaskets, thermocouples, igniter assemblies, and blower motors without waiting two weeks. A smoker down during a Texas summer weekend is a catastrophic revenue event. I've seen operators lose $8,000-$12,000 in a single Saturday because their import-brand smoker needed a part that had to ship from overseas.
Southern Pride's domestic manufacturing means parts ship from right here in the U.S. We stock common maintenance items at Southern Pride of Texas and can usually get them moving same-day if you're in a bind. That's not a sales pitch — that's just operational reality when you're running a commercial kitchen.
Texas customers will compare you to Franklin, Goldee's, and Cattleack whether that's fair or not. Your smoked meat program doesn't have to compete at that level, but it can't be obviously inferior either. "Pretty good for a pizza place" doesn't cut it here. If brisket's on your menu, it needs to be legitimately good brisket.
Your hold times matter more than you think. Oak & Stone's model involves smoked meats on pizza, in sandwiches, as plates — multiple applications from the same protein. That means product sitting in a hold cabinet between the smoke and the final application. Inconsistent hold temps dry out brisket fast. A cabinet that swings 15 degrees while holding is going to cost you in waste and customer complaints.
Capacity Planning for a Hybrid Concept
If I were consulting on a concept like Oak & Stone — and I'm not, just thinking through the math publicly — I'd want to understand their protein breakdown by daypart.
Lunch is probably pizza-heavy with smoked meat as a topping or side. Dinner shifts toward plates and higher protein tickets. Weekend brunch (if they run one) might lean on pulled pork and bacon programs.
For a 4,500-square-foot location doing $2.8M annually with 30% of revenue tied to smoked proteins, you're looking at somewhere around $840,000 in smoked meat sales. Assuming a 28% food cost target and working backward, that's roughly $235,000 in raw protein per year moving through your smokers.
At brisket prices hovering around $4.50/lb wholesale (USDA Choice, packer cut), you're pushing through about 52,000 pounds annually. Call it 1,000 pounds a week, give or take.
That's not small. That's a serious smoke program.
An MLR-850 handles that volume comfortably with room to scale. An SPK-700/M works if you're running tight schedules and your pit boss knows what they're doing. Go smaller and you're running double shifts on the smoker, which burns out both equipment and staff.
The Competitive Equipment Reality
I'll say this about the smoker market right now: there are more options than ever, and most of them are adequate. Ole Hickory makes a decent unit. Cookshack has their following. The Chinese imports have gotten better than they were five years ago.
But "adequate" and "built for multi-unit commercial punishment" aren't the same thing.
When you're running two locations in different cities with different staff, you need equipment that doesn't require babysitting. You need parts you can actually get. You need a manufacturer who answers the phone when something goes wrong at 4 PM on a Friday before a holiday weekend.
Southern Pride's been building smokers in Alamo, Tennessee since 1976. Same factory. Same quality control. The SP-700 in your McKinney location uses the same rotisserie assembly as the one in your Addison location, which uses the same assembly as units running in Louisiana, Florida, and everywhere else. That interchangeability matters when you're managing equipment across sites.
The steel's thicker than what you'll find on most competitors — 10-gauge on the cooking chambers. That's not marketing fluff. Thicker steel holds temp better during door openings and recovers faster. Over a twelve-hour brisket cook with three or four door opens for rotation and spritzing, that recovery time adds up.
Watching This One Unfold
I don't know what equipment Oak & Stone's speccing for their Texas locations. Haven't talked to them, haven't seen their kitchen plans. But I'll be paying attention.
Their McKinney opening gives them proof of concept. Addison will tell them whether their systems can scale under different demand patterns. By mid-2026, they'll either be looking at additional Texas locations or they'll be quietly retreating back to Florida wondering what went wrong.
My guess? They'll do fine if they've hired local and given those pit bosses actual authority over the smoke program. They'll struggle if they're trying to run everything by the Florida playbook.
Texas isn't hostile to outside concepts. But it has expectations. Meet them and you'll build a following. Miss them and Yelp reviews will eat you alive before your first anniversary.
If you're an operator looking at expansion — whether you're Florida-based like Oak & Stone or coming from somewhere else entirely — the equipment conversation needs to happen early. Not after you've signed the lease. Not after you've finalized the kitchen layout. Early.
That's what we do at Southern Pride of Texas. Talk through capacity requirements, match units to volume projections, and make sure you're not under-speccing for Texas demand. Give us a call if you want to walk through the math on your specific situation.
Resources: Southern Pride of Texas | QSR Magazine | Restaurant Business Online
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Photo by Parker Knight on Pexels.
About the Author: Donna spent 18 years as a BBQ restaurant operator before becoming an independent equipment consultant for commercial food service operations.