Ex-Google employee leaves $450K tech career to build halal BBQ business

Salahodeen Abdul-Kafi spent 14 years in tech, working at Microsoft, Google, YouTube, Shopify, and Cruise, and earning $450,000 a year at his peak. Today he runs Kafi BBQ, a halal barbecue restaurant in Irving, Texas, that generated nearly $2.3 million in revenue in its first year.

Abdul-Kafi told Business Insider in an as-told-to essay that he grew disillusioned with an industry he felt had drifted from improving people's lives toward simply making money. At 33, he left San Francisco to become VP of product at Yaqeen Institute, an Islamic research nonprofit based in Texas.

While at Yaqeen, he kept hosting dinner parties and smoking barbecue for friends. Guests told him they couldn't find halal brisket like his anywhere else, and that pork cross-contamination, common even at restaurants where beef is on the menu, kept them away from traditional barbecue spots altogether. That gap became the opening for Kafi BBQ, which opened in December 2024.

The restaurant sold through three days' worth of prepared barbecue on its opening day and went straight back to the smoker that night. It has since been named one of the top 12 barbecue restaurants in Dallas-Fort Worth by D Magazine and one of the 15 best new restaurants in America by Eater.

"Last year, we generated just under $2.3 million in revenue, and we're projected to reach up to $4 million this year," Abdul-Kafi said. "That said, I still haven't paid myself a single dollar since opening and have been living off of my savings." Food costs run about $125,000 a month, labor about $50,000, and rent roughly $15,000, with utilities, marketing, and supplies adding more on top. The restaurant is turning a monthly profit but hasn't yet recouped the roughly $1 million it took to open.

He now works 70 to 80 hours a week, more than he did in tech, but says he finds the trade-off worthwhile. About half of Kafi BBQ's customers follow a halal diet; the other half are drawn by the food itself, including dino ribs, beef-bacon Texas twinkies, Iraqi-inspired sausage, and a pomegranate beef belly burnt ends recipe he reworked seven times before settling on the current version.

He credits his tech background with shaping how he runs the kitchen. Before signing a lease, he spent months testing demand by selling brisket out of his house and tracking data from pop-up events, aiming to remove as much uncertainty as possible before committing to a major investment. He worked with meat suppliers ahead of opening to understand exact costs, down to how much weight a brisket loses through trimming and smoking. That precision carried into the restaurant's operations: every recipe is logged in a spreadsheet with ingredients measured to the gram. New menu items go through customer testing and revision before they're locked in.

"In a lot of ways, barbecue isn't as different from tech as people might think," he said. "I'm still experimenting, solving problems, and constantly trying to improve a product."

Disclaimer: This article  is based on reports from third-party media outlets.