Six years after a splashy opening in West Oakland and five years after getting national attention and a Food & Wine Best New Chefs honor, pitmaster Matt Horn’s Bay Area businesses are now all closed.<\/p>\n
Horn Barbecue in Lafayette is officially closed<\/a>, as the Chronicle reports today \u2014 a week after the paper reported<\/a> that Horn Barbecue’s Elk Grove location, near Sacramento, had closed, and the Oakland location on 8th Street also appeared closed.<\/p>\n A rep for Horn, Seneca Scott, confirmed to the Chronicle that the Oakland location \u2014 in the space that previously housed Horn’s short-lived sit-down restaurant Matty’s Old Fashioned \u2014 is “temporarily” closed, but offered no explanation for this. The restaurant had recently cut back hours from five days a week to three, and a handwritten sign on the restaurant door in recent weeks, which reportedly remained up for a week, had claimed it closed early due to selling out.<\/p>\n As Scott told the Chronicle last week, “Horn Barbecue is not a scandal \u2014 it is a working business navigating those same realities while continuing to rebuild after a devastating fire.” He added, “There is no perfect playbook in this climate.”<\/p>\n But scandal has seemed to follow Horn, and the Lafayette closure comes with the indignity of an eviction notice on the door, and a suspension of the restaurant’s liquor license \u2014 which was originally in the name of the previous tenant, All the Smoke BBQ. <\/p>\n Furthermore, the building’s owner, David Roberson, told the Chronicle that the restaurant “will not reopen as Horn Barbecue nor [with] anyone affiliated with Matt Horn,” but he declined to elaborate.<\/p>\n The earlier Elk Grove closure also came with a nontice of repossession by the building owner, who told the Chronicle that this came after several months of unpaid rent.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, a Fresno location of Horn Barbecue just opened last week<\/a> \u2014 though its existence is still not mentioned on the Horn Barbecue website<\/a>, which still lists the Elk Grove location as “new.”<\/p>\n Chef Matt Horn himself is in San Francisco today participating in a barbecue-themed, pre-Super Bowl party<\/a> at The Ramp in Mission Bay, hosted by Live Fire Republic<\/a>. He has not commented on the closures.<\/p>\n Horn began his “West Coast Barbecue” business as a pop-up, and quickly gained attention from the Chronicle, who named him a Rising Star Chef in 2019<\/a>. His brick-and-mortar business on Mandela Parkway in Oakland opened to immediate lines in mid-2020, and seemed to thrive in that takeout-heavy moment in the food scene.<\/p>\n Within a year, Horn was named in the prestigious Best New Chefs issue of Food & Wine<\/a>, and in early 2022, he was already opening his second restaurant<\/a> in West Oakland, the short-lived, fried-chicken-focused Kowbird. That would be followed a year later by Matty’s Old Fashioned, in Old Oakland.<\/p>\n Also in 2022, wage-theft allegations were made public<\/a> by former employees, and those were followed by a lawsuit from a meat vendor<\/a>, and further allegations of unsafe work conditions by employees.<\/p>\n A devastating fire destroyed the original Horn Barbecue<\/a> in November 2023, and Horn publicly declared this an act of arson, after some thefts and conflicts he had in the neighborhood. <\/p>\n It’s not clear if these legal troubles were the reason, or just a decline in the food itself, but the Chronicle notably snubbed Horn Barbecue<\/a> last summer when it published a list of the best barbecue spots in the Bay, and left Horn out.<\/p>\n