Move over, Hot Girl Summer—it’s Curry Boy Summer

For the team behind Asian Smoke: Thai and Southeast Asian Barbecue from the Curry Boys, the release of their first cookbook is about far more than recipes. It is an opportunity to document a decade-long friendship, celebrate their Asian American identities, and tell the story of how an unlikely pandemic-era experiment transformed into one of the country's most distinctive barbecue brands.

Founded by Taiwanese American chef Sean Wen, Vietnamese American chef Andrew Ho, and pitmaster Andrew Samia, Curry Boys BBQ has become known for its bold fusion of Texas barbecue and Southeast Asian flavors. The concept earned national recognition as a 2023 James Beard Award semifinalist and has grown from its original San Antonio shipping-container location to multiple restaurants, including its newest outpost in Nashville. But long before the accolades, expansion plans, and cookbook deal, the three founders were simply friends and collaborators navigating San Antonio's restaurant scene together.

Wen and Ho spent nearly a decade operating a Cajun-style seafood restaurant in San Antonio, where they built relationships with local chefs and hospitality professionals throughout the city. One of those friendships was with Samia, a respected pitmaster whose restaurants frequently hosted collaborative dinners, crawfish boils, and pop-ups. Over the years, the trio developed a creative shorthand and a shared appreciation for food that drew from multiple cultures and traditions.

When the COVID-19 pandemic forced restaurants across the country to close in 2020, the three chefs found themselves searching for a way to reconnect with their community. Ho, who had spent two years living in Thailand, revisited an idea inspired by a meal he had eaten while traveling: pairing Thai curry with Texas barbecue. Drawing on Wen's Taiwanese heritage, Ho's Vietnamese background and Thai influences, and Samia's expertise in smoked meats, they launched a pop-up in summer 2020 centered on the unexpected combination.

The response was immediate. Diners embraced dishes that paired smoky brisket, pulled pork, and chicken with vibrant Thai curries, proving that the flavors felt less like a novelty and more like a natural evolution of the culinary traditions that had shaped the founders' lives. Later that year, they opened Curry Boys out of a 200-square-foot shipping container painted bright pink—a nod to the colorful taxis Ho remembered from Thailand.

Five years later, that once-modest shipping container has become the foundation of a growing restaurant group and now a cookbook (out now). Wen and Ho reflected on the origins of Curry Boys, the challenge of introducing Thai curries to Texas barbecue fans, and the deeply personal process of preserving their experiences and culinary heritage on the page.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Daniel Anderson: I’d love to hear a little about the early days of the operation and how the concept was received. When you’re trying to break new ground or do something different, there can sometimes be tension—people don’t always get it right away, what was it like for you guys?
Sean Wen: That’s a really good question. The first time we did the pop up we had been testing flavors prior to that. Should we cook the barbecue with Asian seasonings to keep it classic Central Texas style? What type of curries go with what protein? On the day of the actual pop up, at the end of it, we were kind of tired and exhausted. We went back and tasted the leftovers and we're like, “Oh my god this really is so good.” We then felt very confident going forward these are the flavors that are going to go well.

But to your point, Daniel, you know the truth is San Antonio has a dearth of Asian food. There's not a huge Asian population, so anytime we do something that's a little different, it can be received a little timidly. We definitely encountered that even to this day, but up front there was a massive push for us educating the general public on what curry even was.

People would come up because the barbecue was in our name, and they would say, "let me get a pound of brisket." We'd be like, "Well, respectfully, we want you to try it in this dish with the curry." They would say they didn’t know what curry was or they didn’t like curry based on the one they’ve tried before. There's so many different kinds of curries so it requires a certain amount of education and patience. I think what's also really beautiful about San Antonio is that once you kind of get them to clue in, they're extremely supportive. It's been that level of support that's kind of helped us sustain and really grow.

DA: Can you talk about how you approached finding pairings—what worked well together and what didn’t? Southeast Asian cuisine has their own techniques of grilling and smoking. I love the idea that different cultures can have similar ingredients, flavors, or even dishes across the world. When you were developing the menu, how did you think about marrying those elements and finding those commonalities?
Andrew Ho: San Antonio is about 70 percent Hispanic. When you look at Asian cultures and Hispanic cuisine, there are a lot of overlaps like lime juice, cilantro, green onions, spices and rice. When we were experimenting, we made about four or five different curries. Brisket is very rich and salty with that nice bark and spice from black pepper and smoke. We wanted to pair it with a curry that would really cut through that richness. That’s why we serve our prime brisket with our Thai green curry, which has green chilies, makrut lime leaf, and cilantro stems. Our chicken is a bit lighter and more peppery, so we pair that with a velvety yellow curry. The pulled pork works really well with our garlic panang curry. We finish everything with cilantro. A lot of places use scallion or green onion, but we prefer cilantro because I personally love that flavor, and in San Antonio it’s also something you see everywhere in Mexican food.

SW: Daniel, you kind of nailed it. One of the reasons we knew this would work is because we just happen to be Asian, and we understand those flavors. We also happen to be in a predominantly Hispanic community, so we were able to recognize those through lines. There are so many similarities: grilling culture, aromatics, fresh herbs, crunch, and that balance of sweet and savory. For us, it felt like a no-brainer. I think for a lot of people it can seem like, “How did you come up with this?” But we’re not geniuses by any means. It’s just flavors that have always made sense to us. It just so happens that Texas barbecue, Mexican food, and Asian food are all things we’re familiar with.

DA: Getting into the cookbook, I’d love to hear about when that idea started and the timeline for the book.
SW: We were approached in 2024. We were asking ourselves if this was something we really wanted to do, because we knew it was going to be a huge undertaking. We were also expanding Curry Boys into Nashville at the time so there was a lot happening. I think ultimately we came to this place of, we don’t really care if we sell 10 or a thousand copies, or if people are clamoring over this book. This was more for us—to sit down and really appreciate what we’ve built, and to understand who we are again. Sometimes you kind of get lost in the sauce after doing something for so long. You’re not really sure why it’s happening anymore or what you’re doing. So it was actually really meaningful for us to go back to the roots and ask, why did we do this? What makes being Asian American in Texas so great? What makes our story so fun for us? I think that’s what pushed us to say, “This would be really special—to write this for ourselves, for our families, and for the people we love and appreciate.” It might sound like a corny answer, but that was genuinely the reason we took the time to write the book.

AH: It also happened to overlap with the publisher’s timeline, which required over 100 recipes. Once we got the brief, there was also some structure from the publisher in terms of categories—fish dishes, appetizers, soups, and so on. Overall, it took about 45 days to write the recipes. It was a challenging process because barbecue is typically made for larger weekend gatherings, while cookbook recipes needed to be scaled for smaller households, usually six to 10 servings. A lot of our recipes are designed for large-scale batch cooking, while others are meant for one or two people at home, so not everything scales cleanly—ingredients like fish sauce and soy sauce, for example, don’t always translate proportionally up or down. That required a lot of testing, refinement, and adjustment. We also had to keep the recipes accessible, since part of the requirement was that ingredients should be widely available, not overly specialized.

Each day involved cooking eight to 10 dishes while carefully following and simultaneously refining recipes to ensure accuracy and presentation. We’d finish around 6 p.m., then immediately go grocery shopping for the next day’s production. 

DA: I always like to ask about the emotional journey of translating and transcribing family recipes for cookbooks. What was that process like for you both?
SW: I know both of us have really personal ties to this cookbook through our families. For me, a lot of the book reflects Southeast Asian food. Being Taiwanese, there’s still a huge Chinese influence in Thai cuisine. I wanted to highlight how, across Chinese, Thai, and broader Asian food, there are different expressions but also strong through lines that connect them. A lot of that came from conversations with my mom, because I’ve always cooked with her. She never used recipes. It was always, “just add a little of this,” or “three tablespoons of that,” and I’d be like, “are you sure?” We talked a lot about dishes like dumplings, braised pork belly, and different proteins and vegetables. Through that process, I got to rediscover her relationship to cooking and the joy she passed on to me. She cooked every day when we were growing up, to the point where she eventually burned out, and now she barely cooks at all. So seeing her engage with this project was really special. She even gave me her old cookbooks—handwritten, no measurements, just notes her grandma had passed down. I didn’t even know they existed. Being able to reconnect with her through that was incredibly meaningful.

AH: Yeah, very similar for me. Growing up, I also had a lot of influence from my family. In San Antonio, people are very supportive and open to trying what we put out, so a lot of our specials come directly from things we cook at home, grew up eating, or that our parents made. I’d often write those down over the years. That ended up helping a lot with the cookbook. When the publisher asked for recipes, we were able to pull from multiple places: about 30-35 core menu items, 25 or so previous specials, another 15-20 dishes from friends’ restaurants or collaboration events, and the rest from ideas we’d talked about or cooked at home. So it all came together pretty naturally.