Restaurant founder Goode, 71, made his brand a Houston classic

Goode Company founder Jim Goode with his famous "horn truck." Goode Company founder Jim Goode with his famous "horn truck." Photo: Goode Company Photo: Goode Company Image 1 of / 132 Caption Close Restaurant founder Goode, 71, made his brand a Houston classic 1 / 132 Back to Gallery

When Jim Goode got tired of working as a graphic artist, he decided to open either a bait shop or a barbecue joint.

One day in 1977, he stopped at a rundown restaurant whose owner was sick of the business. By the end of his meal, Goode had traded his savings for what would become Goode Company BBQ, the first of his seven Houston restaurants.

Long before Texas' barbecue renaissance, Goode's restaurants were a Houston staple. Their pecan pie, shipped across the country in a wooden box marked "made in Texas," and mesquite-smoked Texas trinity of brisket, ribs and sausage served at the original joint on Kirby made the Goode brand a Houston classic, even as the company remained a family-run business and a personal passion of its owner.

"It's been a standard for decades," said Bryan Caswell, a longtime friend of Goode's son Levi and the chef behind Houston's Reef. "Before this whole new barbecue revolution that's such a big deal now, he was the standard bearer in this city for a generation."

Goode died Feb. 2 at 71 of Alzheimer's, according to his son Levi Goode, who now runs Goode Company Restaurants.

Goode was born in April 1944 to parents from Tampico, Mexico, and grew up on the Texas Gulf Coast. He left Texas at 16 to enlist in the Navy during the Vietnam War. After his service in Okinawa, Japan, Goode attended the Milton Glaser School of Visual Arts in New York before he returned to Houston to try his hand as a graphic artist.

All the while, he infused his work with one of his personal passions - smoking barbecue for his design clients.

When he bought his first restaurant for $6,000, Goode threw his all into the business. He even slept there, waking up every hour to check on the brisket, until the place was on such solid footing that he happily realized he had enough trash from the day's customers to fill two bags. He held the trash bags above his head like Rocky, proud of his new restaurant's success.

"He liked barbecue because it was such a communal food," Levi Goode said. "The nature of the food is one that brings friends and family together and he enjoyed putting smiles on people's faces."

Soon, Goode began to expand his business, opening a few more locations of Goode Company BBQ, along with Goode Company Taqueria and Goode Company Seafood.

To the taqueria, he brought memories of his mother's Tex-Mex cooking, taking her classic recipes and adding mesquite. To the seafood restaurants, he brought his passion for fishing and the Gulf Coast. Of everything he cooked and served, Gulf Coast shrimp and seafood were his favorites, Levi Goode said. He was a lifetime member of the Coastal Conservation Association, founded in the same year he opened his restaurant.

Beyond the food, Goode brought his interests, creativity and philosophy to his restaurants.

He decorated each location with items he collected driving across Texas to western collectible shows. Once, in Amarillo, he bought so much he had to rent a van to bring it back.

In Waco, he tracked down the owner of a Coca-Cola crate left by the side of the road before he attached it to the back of his truck to drive back home. He drove to New Mexico to buy authentic rugs on Navajo reservations.

"We called him 1890 because he loved everything about the Old West," said longtime friend Don Jones, who joined him on many of those trips. The pair met on a Conroe fishing trip in the late '70s, and Jones eventually joined Goode in 1990 as a manager at his retail store, the BBQ Hall of Flame, now the bar the Armadillo Palace.

Goode loved Texas history and culture, and he traced his own family's heritage through multiple generations of Texans. He bought a chuckwagon, and took it across Texas entering cooking competitions. He was a lifetime director of the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo, often bidding on the grand calf and steers to support the young participants from Texas farms and ranches.

At his restaurants, he treated his few hundred employees like family, offering second and third chances and building an environment where people stayed for decades.

As the company grew, he remained committed to that kindness and to quality. If the crawfish that came in wasn't up to standard, he wouldn't serve crawfish that day.

"At the end of the day, we weren't brain surgeons or heart surgeons or curing cancer," said Tom Dayton, the chief operations officer of the company who Goode first hired as a manager in 1987. "We were just trying to put out a plate of food every day. His philosophy was we're only as good as the last plate of food we served today."

His influence on Texas cuisine is long-lasting. "He had a deep understanding of what it meant to eat like a Gulf Coast Texan," said Alison Cook, the Chronicle's restaurant critic, who has watched Goode's restaurants grow since the late '70s.

"Nobody was better on a grassroots level at weaving together the disparate Texas culinary genres fundamental to Houston cuisine. People responded to that. It was almost like he knew us better than we knew ourselves."

Visitation will be from 5 p.m.-7 p.m. Wednesday at Geo. H. Lewis & Sons, 1010 Bering. Funeral services will be at 3 p.m. Thursday at Geo. H. Lewis & Sons.