FROM THE OUTSIDE, from every photo and video you’ll find online, Leonard Botello IV looks the part of Texas pitmaster: backward baseball hat, black t-shirt and jeans, bearded and muscled. He talks about brisket fat caps, splaying whole hogs over coals, and splitting Texas oak to pull the most heat from the wood.
And then he also talks about his panic attacks. They arrive as he’s laying down to bed. The fear of being outed as a fraud pollutes his mind. It’s impostor syndrome, landing like a truckload of wood dropped on his chest.
Botello, 36, is on an often duelling quest, first to make his Houston area restaurants, Truth BBQ, the new standard of what he calls craft barbecue. Along the way, he also wants to be among those talking publicly about mental health. He says it’s a largely unspoken crisis in the restaurant industry. But when he’s successful in seeking publicity, when he’s asked to do an interview or speak to a group, it’s like a spike driven deeper in his skull. “I had this dream to bring attention to what we were doing at the restaurant,” Botello says. “Now that it’s here, I have to figure out how to deal with it.”
The worst began six years ago. At the time, Botello’s first location of Truth BBQ was no bigger than a single-wide, across from a bowling alley on a dusty five-lane in Brenham, Texas. The place had earned notoriety since Botello opened it in 2015, at just 24 years old. It’s a place that took the traditions of Texas barbecue and did something new with it: boudin smoked sausage, pastrami brisket, tater tot casserole, Carolina-style whole hog. Botello had a cot he’d roll out into the dining room so he could man the smokers overnight, sleeping little, wrecking his back and his mind from the stress.
In 2019, he took over the lease on a 6,500-square-foot space in the centre of Houston for Truth’s second location. He was right in the middle of the build-out one night when he woke up having a heart attack. No, not a heart attack, he realised, but he was definitely dying. He could feel his chest heaving. Sweat soaked the sheets. His body just no longer obeyed. He felt a hand on his chest.
His girlfriend at the time, Abbie Byrom, could feel Botello’s heart racing, like a boxer on a speed bag. She’d met Botello in a New York City bar when she was a marketing executive and he was just out of college. He was on vacation, partying with a mutual friend. Like a Southern gentleman, he waited for her outside the bathroom, and she wondered why the hell he was standing there. Five months went by before he texted her: “Hey stranger.” She’d saved his name in her phone as “Texas,” and the long-distance thing they developed turned serious quick.
Eyes glazed over, Botello looked awful. Byrom asked him what was wrong. “I don’t know.” She asked him his name, his address, anything she could think of. “I don’t know.” She got him dressed, walked him around the house, and then over to a playground in a park across the street. The walking seemed to help, and over the course of two hours, she got his mind reset. That’s how she talks about it now, like an operating system that needs to be rebooted. Unplugged, off-line, and then a slow return to normal operation.
It continued like that for months, with Botello waking up many nights sure he was dying, Byrom bringing him back to living. Growing up, Byrom says she’d seen undiagnosed mental illness in her father, an Air Force top brass who believed “feelings were not a thing.” She had what she calls “functioning anxiety” herself, so she went into triage mode trying to Google her way to help her boyfriend “assess and address,” just as dad had taught her. She remembers thinking: “Let’s figure out a plan for ongoing management.”
Not long after Botello opened the Houston restaurant, he had a buddy drop by. Chris Shepherd is a chef and co-founder of the nonprofit Southern Smoke Foundation, which sets restaurant workers up with free mental health in 10 states. He’s a big-brother-figure for Botello and could see something was wrong. Shepherd said, “Hey, kid, you can’t bottle up all this stuff. It’s helpful to talk about it and good to have a therapist on hand. Sometimes you can find the answers by just saying it out loud.”
The first two therapists Botello tried didn’t work. Then he found a woman who helped him figure out how to deal. What he learned was that he wasn’t ever going to get over his problems. He still wakes up at night with his heart racing. He still sees a new email arrive and assumes it will outline how he’s a sham. When he broke the top three of Texas Monthly’s list of the state’s best barbecue in 2021, he figured the attention would just lead to somebody outing him as a fake. When the invite arrived in October to the Michelin Guide’s awards dinner, he pictured a room full of real chefs laughing when he walked in. “All these accolades, to me, it doesn’t make sense. They think what I’m doing is special, and for me I can’t justify it,” he says. “I’m always wondering why I got picked to be prom queen, because I’m not pretty enough.”
He knows now, in those moments when the imposter syndrome feels overwhelming, to breathe, long breaths in and out, with the goal of 10 seconds in, 10 seconds out. Long walks, late at night, when everybody else is asleep. Workouts, sometimes a couple hours in the morning, burning off the nervous energy. Then there’s meditation, where he’s able to relocate his mind to a cabin, to see leaves drifting down from the trees, hear rain pattering the roof, smell the dampness of the forest. “You can’t beat the demons,” Botello says, “but you can live with them, you can even thrive as they’re right there in the seat next to you.
Botello married his girlfriend during Covid; she’s now Abbie Byrom-Botello, and the two of them run the business together. There’s three restaurants after they added Merritt Meat Co. and the boutique Hotel Bebe, both in Round Top, Texas. Meanwhile, Botello is on a quest to bring attention to mental health issues among restaurant workers, a group that generally doesn’t talk about such things. That leads to people wanting him to come talk to some group or conference or speak to them for an article, and then he has to picture himself standing up there at a podium or taking the call from a reporter, the moment maybe when the world figures him out for who he really is.“That’s where we are now, and that’s the monster I’ve created. I have to be OK with that,” Botello says.
He also knows that he can be a symbol of something. If a pitmaster, if the owner of a roadside barbecue joint off a federal highway in Texas, can live with sometimes-crippling anxiety, and can deal with an impostor syndrome that comes on no matter all he’s accomplished, perhaps it’s normal for the rest of us to feel the same way. Maybe then it’s just fine for anyone to feel not OK.
