Award-winning 25-year-old pitmaster runs one of Toronto’s best new restaurants

The backyard barbecue is a summer tradition for anyone with a grill, but what began as a home cook’s passion project has, in just a few years, culminated in the acceptance of not just one, but two awards at the recent Michelin Guide ceremony in Toronto.

“I blacked out. It was surreal; to be honoured at that level is…I can’t even put it into words,” Andrew Golden, the 25-year-old owner of Golden Horseshoe Barbecue in Toronto, tells YourCityWithIN. 

“It feels fake. Shock, joy, I’m extremely grateful, just wow…truly just wow.” 

Golden and his restaurant, which opened about a year ago in The Annex, both received prestigious accolades at the Michelin Guide ceremony, a glitzy and much-anticipated event held on Sept. 22 that invited restaurateurs and other guests to watch Michelin Stars and distinctions be awarded to a diverse mix of restaurants both within and outside of the city.  

Golden, whose restaurant received a coveted Bib Gourmand distinction–which rewards restaurants that offer good-quality food for good value–also received the Michelin Young Chef/Culinary Professional Award. 

While Golden says he had some inkling recognition was coming, he was blown away to receive the young chef accolade. 

“Michelin reached out to us at the beginning of August to say we were being considered and a week or two ago, I got an email asking for some personal information. I had an idea; I read about the young chef award, 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,” he says. 

“I never could have imagined.”

But while the award came as a shock, Golden’s humble journey from home grill aficionado to the chef at the helm of one of Toronto’s hottest new restaurants has been making headlines for some time. 

Golden’s pitmastery started at home in 2022, when his mother, Doris Golden, who is Golden Horseshoe’s pastry chef, bought a small electric barbecue smoker for the yard. 

“I took a loving for it,” he says, adding that since his family of three couldn’t finish off a six-pound brisket, he’d sell to friends and relatives. Eventually, he became interested in cutting his teeth in restaurant kitchens in the city and took a job at Carbon Bar in 2023, where he met fellow Golden Horseshoe chef Kris Hansen.

Later that same year, he travelled to Texas to ‘study’ barbecue in what many consider its true homeland. 

“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 says. 

“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.”

Golden says the pop-ups let him gauge people’s joy in real time. 

“I think the first pop-up was such a spontaneous idea, to buy a 17-foot smoker and park it in my parents’ driveway. They thought I was nuts and I thought maybe I was nuts spending that much money on a piece of metal,” he says.

The now-closed Muddy York was the first brewery that Golden hosted a pop-up at, and the response was immediate. 

“They always pulled a big crowd, and it was a family-oriented place. 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.” 

Golden says it was during his two-year pop-up period that he started getting creative with cooking and grilling techniques. He bought his first live-fire cooker, and while cooking with just wood, he noticed the flavours starting to announce themselves 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.” 

The nomadic life made Golden realize he was ready to take the leap and open a permanent brick-and-mortar space of his own that would showcase the kind of authentic Texas barbecue that, as far as he knows, had really only been perfected by the now-closed (and controversial) Adamson Barbecue in Etobicoke. 

“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 says, adding that while his all-encompassing goal is always to get that ‘10/10’ brisket, he also loves making sausage because the ingredients in the meat can reflect the backgrounds, experience and tastes of everyone in the kitchen. 

“There’s a certain level of practice, but our menu reflects everyone here and everyone’s cooking past here.” 

Now that Golden Horseshoe is a year old and earning extraordinary accolades from one of the most prestigious tastemakers in the world, Golden says he can’t believe his luck–especially since the smokers he used are so unique in the city that it took months to have the proper permits approved. 

“Every day I pinch myself. The neighbourhood reception was incredible; for the first little bit we had lineups down the block for two to three months, which was surreal,” he says.

While he says that the chef life involves a ton of work and sacrifice–he and his team have spent countless hours, for example, pickling vegetables in–house–he has no plans to stop doing what he’s doing anytime soon. 

“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 says. 

“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.”

Cover by Zach Hilty at BFA