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Stephan Nedwetzky’s circuitous path to becoming a barbecue joint owner in tiny Van Alstyne, about an hour north of Dallas, has been filled with pitfalls and second-guessing. The native of Dallas’s Pleasant Grove neighborhood spent his adolescent years in Rochester, New York, but after leaving the Marines in 1999, he came back home to Texas. “Being a Texan, I missed barbecue so much,” he said. He starting smoking in his backyard in Plano while running a landscaping company. After entering a barbecue competition in 2010 (even though Nedwetzky describes everything he turned in as “horrible”), he caught the bug. “It started to interfere with my landscaping business,” he said. So he shut it down to focus on barbecue.“Everyone either laughed at me or told me…

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