At 25, Toronto Pitmaster Andrew Golden Just Won a Michelin Award for Texas Barbecue

On September 22, the Michelin Guide held its Toronto ceremony, the night the city’s best kitchens find out whether they made the book. Most of the names called that evening belonged to tasting menus, sushi counters and wine lists. One of them belonged to a 25-year-old who cooks brisket in a parking lot.

Andrew Golden went home with two honors. His restaurant, Golden Horseshoe Barbecue, earned a Bib Gourmand, and Golden himself took the Michelin Young Chef Award. Four years earlier he was a kid in a Toronto backyard with a small smoker his mother had bought, selling the brisket his family could not finish to friends and relatives.

“It feels fake”

Golden did not see the second award coming. “I blacked out. It was surreal; to be honoured at that level is…I can’t even put it into words,” he told YourCityWithIN. Then he tried again: “It feels fake. Shock, joy, I’m extremely grateful, just wow…truly just wow.”

He had some warning that something was coming. Michelin reached out at the beginning of August to say the restaurant was being considered, and a week or two before the ceremony an email asked him for personal information. He had read about the Young Chef Award, he said, “but there are endless young cooks in the city who are more classically trained and more talented, so I would never put myself in that conversation.”

The Bib Gourmand is Michelin’s value distinction, given to restaurants that serve good-quality food at a fair price, and Golden Horseshoe was one of five new Bibs across Toronto and the surrounding region this year. The Young Chef Award is rarer still, one of four individual honors handed out on the night alongside awards for cocktails, service and wine. That is how a pitmaster ended up sharing a stage with the sommelier of a Michelin-starred dining room.

Michelin’s own write-up of Golden reads like an origin story, describing a young cook who “became interested in Texas-style barbecue at a young age” and “brought the smokey, juicy style of grilling up to frigid Toronto.” The inspectors call the food “true Texas-style barbecue.” To understand how it got there, you have to go back to the backyard.

A smoker in the backyard

In 2022, Golden’s mother, Doris Golden, bought a small smoker for the family’s yard, and he took to it right away. “I took a loving for it,” he said. Because a family of three could not get through a six-pound brisket, he started selling the extras to friends and relatives, which is how a hobby quietly turned into a customer list.

He wanted to learn from professionals, and the door that opened was Carbon Bar, a Toronto restaurant known for its smoked meats. By one account, Golden first turned up there as a curious diner and asked a server so many questions about the barbecue that she introduced him to the chef, Kris Hansen. In 2023 he took a job in that kitchen. Hansen became his mentor, and later his business partner.

Later that same year, Golden went to Texas to study the style at its source, and the trip was supposed to be short. “I was debating potentially moving there to cook barbecue the ‘real way,’ which is the way we take pride in doing it here, and I stayed longer than I thought I would. I spent the entire summer down there and just fell in love with it and learned a lot,” he said.

He came home with a conviction and a plan, because what he had eaten in Texas did not exist in his hometown. “No one was cooking barbecue the way I wanted to cook it. I put a down payment on a smoker and started pop-ups out of my mom’s house.”

Seventeen feet of steel in the driveway

The smoker was not small. Golden bought a 17-foot rig and parked it in his parents’ driveway. “They thought I was nuts and I thought maybe I was nuts spending that much money on a piece of metal,” he said.

The first brewery to host him, the now-closed Muddy York, settled the question in a single afternoon. It was a family place that always drew a big crowd, and the barbecue ran out early. “We sold out by 4 p.m., and that was the moment I knew I could do this; I could do this full time; I had something there.”

Two years of pop-ups followed, most of them at local breweries, and that stretch became his real apprenticeship. He bought his first live-fire cooker, and once he was cooking over nothing but wood, he noticed the flavors coming through more fully. “I knew what I liked and what I didn’t like, and that’s when I learned what’s what and where it should be,” he said.

A bank building on Dupont Street

In September 2025, Golden, his mother and Hansen opened Golden Horseshoe Barbecue at 657 Dupont Street, at the corner of Christie on the edge of The Annex, inside a Depression-era bank building that had most recently been a Popeyes. Getting there took longer than planned. “We found this place coming up on a year ago. If this process has taught Kris and I anything, it’s patience,” Golden said the week it opened.

The pits tested that patience again. Golden’s smokers were so unusual for the city that it took months to get the permits approved, and they now sit in the parking lot beside the old bank, a set of custom-built cookers that includes one for whole hogs. Before opening, he promised the cooking would be “completely wood-fired, no gas, no electric,” which he called unprecedented in the city.

Toronto answered right away. “For the first little bit we had lineups down the block for two to three months, which was surreal,” Golden said. The lines were the proof of concept, and the Michelin inspectors arrived later to confirm it.

What is on the tray

The menu is built on what Michelin calls the holy trinity of brisket, ribs and sausage, with pastrami as the reward for anyone who shows up on a Thursday. Pork ribs, pulled pork, turkey and house-made sausage fill out the meat side, and the sides run from coleslaw and potato salad to charro beans and esquites. Doris Golden handles the desserts and the cornbread, which means the kitchen Michelin singled out is, at its core, a mother and her son.

The service follows the Texas model too, which is exactly what Golden came home wanting to build. “Texas barbecue is fast, messy at times and very abstract. We cut and weigh the meat in view of the customer, something that screams Texas barbecue to me,” he told Michelin.

He is not a purist about the rulebook, though. “Honestly, as a Canadian looking at Texas barbecue, we don’t get an accurate view of what it is. You watch YouTube and TV shows, and it’s all salt and pepper, but the rules are bendable. A chef should have a menu that reflects him and not the rules,” he said. His constant goal is a perfect brisket, but the sausage is where the kitchen gets to speak, because the ingredients can carry the backgrounds and tastes of everyone cooking with him. “Our menu reflects everyone here and everyone’s cooking past here.”

An arena, not a business plan

One year after opening, Golden says the whole thing still has not sunk in. “Every day I pinch myself,” he said. The team pickles its own vegetables in-house and puts in long hours, and he talks about the sacrifices of the chef life without complaint, because this was the life he chose.

For barbecue, the night was a signal. The same guide that hands out stars to kaiseki counters and white-tablecloth dining rooms looked at a smokehouse in an old bank and named the man running its pits the region’s Young Chef. As Michelin put it at the ceremony, “Inclusion in the MICHELIN Guide is a great accomplishment and elevates these new restaurants onto the global culinary stage.” A Texas-style barbecue joint in Toronto is now on that stage.

Golden insists none of it was the plan. “Cooking barbecue for me, opening the restaurant for me, was never a business plan or get-rich-quick plan; it was to give myself an arena to do what I love,” he said. “We have such a long way to go to be perfect; things are constantly evolving and changing, and I want to do what I love, however that presents itself.”

It started with a brisket too big for a family of three and a mother who brought a smoker home. Four years, one Texas summer and a 17-foot bet later, it ends up in the Michelin Guide, with the same two people still cooking side by side on Dupont Street.

Sources

MICHELIN Guide, “Meet the Winners of the 2026 Michelin Guide Toronto & Region Special Awards”; MICHELIN Guide, Golden Horseshoe Barbecue restaurant page; Michelin North America, “The MICHELIN Guide Announces Its 2026 Toronto & Region Selection”; YourCityWithIN, “Award-winning 25-year-old pitmaster runs one of Toronto’s best new restaurants”; Streets of Toronto, “A 25-year-old chef just won a Michelin”; blogTO, “Top Toronto pitmasters launching new barbecue restaurant this weekend”; WhatNow Toronto, “Golden Horseshoe Barbecue Opening Brick-and-Mortar”; Golden Horseshoe Barbecue. Images courtesy YourCityWithIN, the MICHELIN Guide, GTA General Contractors and Toronto Life.