Three years ago, Gregg and Casey Lee Ring watched as a building burned uncontrollably in Flatonia, a town about midway between Houston and San Antonio. Once the damage was cleared, the owner put the empty lot up for sale. Gregg, a budding barbecue cook at the time, saw the potential of the prominent location along Main Street and bought it to set up the trailer for Casey Lee’s Family Craft BBQ. Casey, noticing that locals had criticized the volunteer fire department online about the incident, joined Flatonia Fire & Rescue.“That unfortunate day spurred on a lot of things in our life,” Gregg said. It also allowed Flatonia to get some remarkably good barbecue.Don’t expect smoked brisket every time you visit the Saturdays-only joint. Gregg said…

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Tifany Swulius and Antonio Guevara originally partnered to seek glory at the State Fair of Texas. In a shift that surprised both of them, they ended up opening a barbecue joint instead. Now they’re serving some of the best breakfast tacos in Dallas.Swulius and Guevara had worked together at Lakewood Landing, a Dallas institution that describes itself as “an upscale dive.” Swulius was a bartender who often brought in home-baked treats for coworkers and customers. Guevara ran the kitchen while also operating his own barbecue and taco pop-up, Tejas BBQ & Tacos, which became Tejas Brisket Co. after a similarly named Texas barbecue restaurant sent him a cease-and-desist letter. “I wasn’t making any money, but I was getting my name out there,” he said.While working…

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When Jereis Khawaja launched Truboy BBQ with nationwide shipping in 2020, he wrote a mission statement for the website that promised to give everyone in the U.S. the opportunity to enjoy Texas barbecue. The Houston native read the statement every day, but he eventually realized it wasn’t true for many Muslim and Jewish customers because of cross contamination with Truboy’s most popular item, pulled pork. “By eliminating one product from my menu, my mission statement could become a true statement,” Khawaja says. In March 2021, he switched to only smoking halal meats, including brisket, lamb, and chicken.Last month brought the next big transformation of Khawaja’s business. Truboy BBQ Market, the first physical location for the brand, opened in Missouri City, outside Houston. Inside, a wall…

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Wanalee “Nan” Gorelick grew up without electricity in the town of Rangsit, outside Bangkok, in Thailand. She moved to the U.S. in 2008 with just $100 to her name, eventually making her way to Cypress, northwest of Houston, where she met her now-husband, Adam Gorelick. When the subject of marriage came up, Nan demanded Adam spend some time in the Thai countryside living like a local. “I wanted to make sure he knows who he [is marrying] and where I came from,” she explained.Besides making a request for a window-unit air conditioner (which Nan’s family mercifully granted), Adam rose to the challenge. He took showers with a bucket of warm water poured over his head and lived with few of his usual comforts. While still…

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Hit the blinker as soon as you spot the trio of BBQ flags waving outside Kirby’s BBQ. The speed limit is 50 miles per hour on Loop 494, and there’s just a wide strip of gravel between the low-slung, metal-roofed shack and the two-lane road. Kirby’s may have the look of a long-standing establishment, but it opened in May, the newest barbecue joint in New Caney, just northeast of Houston.After the cloud of dust settled from my sudden stop in the makeshift parking lot, I walked up the steps to the screened-in porch, where employee Svea Bailey greeted me and took my order. The building only houses the kitchen, so the dining area is limited to the picnic tables lining the porch. I found a…

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Editor’s note: This segment first appeared on Texas Monthly Presents, a television program airing on Texas PBS stations and on PBS.org. It will also be featured in a national PBS special on October 31, 2025. Blake Barrow is the chief executive director of the Rescue Mission of El Paso, the homeless-services organization that runs Hallelujah! BBQ, a unique barbecue joint that doubles as vocational training for residents of the Rescue Mission’s shelter. When the operation grew from a catering service into a restaurant, barbecue editor Daniel Vaughn had to check it out for himself.

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BJ Bradford’s jump start to becoming a barbecue entrepreneur began with 25 briskets gifted to him by the universe. In 2016, while working as an over-the-road trucker and hauling a load of beef from Kansas to Florida, a customer rejected five boxes from the delivery because they were damaged. When the company told him to keep or get rid of them, BJ’s choice was clear. Adopting those orphaned briskets would end up altering his career.He picked up four big coolers from a nearby Walmart, packed them full of briskets and ice, and headed back home to Bryan, Texas, where his family was waiting for him. “I got a lot of training from those briskets right there,” he says. Smoking meat wasn’t new to BJ. His…

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About a year ago, Marc Fadel sat across from me as I burst his barbecue bubble. The then-eighteen-year-old begged for an honest assessment of the smoked meats from his three-week-old Habibi Barbecue trailer. I began with some light, constructive criticism. But then he asked me to be more blunt.“If you keep at this for a year, you’ll look back at photos and be embarrassed of the barbecue you’re serving now,” I told him. His mouth said he understood, though his face looked crestfallen. I didn’t mean any disrespect. Any experienced pitmaster trying to improve with every cook will know what I meant, and the good news is that Fadel did keep at it. A year later, he has matured into one heck of a pitmaster.“I…

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Salahodeen Abdul-Kafi remembers traveling from his home in Columbia, Missouri, to Kansas City as a boy. As Muslims, his family kept to a strict halal diet at home, but when they traveled, the rules were relaxed. “Back then, there were literally zero halal options at any restaurant,” he says. They usually sought out beef, and he was fond of the brisket at Oklahoma Joe’s BBQ (now Joe’s Kansas City Barbeque). As halal options became more plentiful over time, the family stopped eating non-halal. Abdul-Kafi recalls the burnt ends he ate as a fourteen-year-old with a unique sort of reverence, because it would be another fifteen years before he would eat barbecue again.In 2019, Abdul-Kafi was living in the Bay Area of California, where he had…

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At the end of last year, Hop and Sting Brewing, in Grapevine, lost its longtime barbecue partner. Trey Sanchez moved his mobile Vaqueros Texas Bar-B-Q operation into a new physical location, in Allen, but he had a suggestion for his replacement. The duo of Christian Martinez and Paul Pizana had grown Pasión BBQ from pop-up to food truck in two short years and needed a new spot. “They were happy to have us here, and we were blessed to be here,” Martinez says.Martinez and Pizana were childhood friends growing up in Arlington, and they bonded as adults over barbecue. Together in their backyards, they smoked ribs and briskets for their friends and family members before moving on to beef tongue and cheeks. “We would try…

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Justin Spencer thought his chances of being asked to work in a pit room were behind him. Loading a firebox and seasoning a brisket aren’t usually called for from a business’s head of food and beverage, a position he holds at New Waterloo, a company with five hotels and around a dozen restaurants over five states. Junebug’s Barbecue, at the new Albert Hotel, in Fredericksburg, was a different kind of project—one that has Spencer working as a pitmaster. “I never imagined this would happen unless I left this job and decided to do my own thing,” he says.The design for Albert Hotel kicked off back in 2018. Spencer was touring the property with some executives before construction. An existing stone building known as the Sunday…

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The stress of running a barbecue trailer is nothing compared with keeping the country’s nuclear arsenal safe. “It’s not work if you love what you’re doing,” Charles Carr, owner of Class-1 Barbecue, in Amarillo, told me when he explained why smoking meat became his retirement plan. He had been a facility manager at the Pantex plant, northeast of Amarillo, “where the U.S. arsenal for nuclear weapons is assembled and disassembled,” Carr explained. That position followed thirteen years of military service and three tours in the Army for Carr. “I got tired of running and gunning,” he said. He opened the trailer with his wife, Maria, last November.You could say he went from Class V (ammunition and explosives) to Class I (food and water), which are…

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When Andrew Peña’s job as a refinery inspector in Corpus Christi was paused during COVID-19, he went looking for a smoker. He found one nearby via an online ad and hauled it back to his driveway. Peña had been grilling steaks and ribs since he was twelve, but smoking brisket became his new challenge. By mid-2020, he was confident enough to sell his barbecue for preorders on Facebook. Needing a name and a logo, he sketched one out for Full Send BBQ. “It means one hundred percent. Don’t take shortcuts,” he explained. “What you put into it is what you get out of it.”Peña started dating a woman named Desirae Hill, who happened to be a great cook. They’re no longer a couple, but they…

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It was the hottest day of the summer thus far in Houston, and Chicano BBQ‘s pop-up tent offered little shade from the late-afternoon sun. Serafin Ramirez stood sweating in the parking lot of Tikila’s bar, surrounded by a portable flattop with sizzling burgers, a roiling deep fryer on wheels, and a hot box filled with barbecue. I yelled my order over the roar of a crawfish vendor’s propane burner next to where Ramirez has been setting up five days a week for the last two months. It was a scene that folks who are considering becoming pitmasters should witness before they take the plunge.But Ramirez doesn’t seem fazed. The 24-year-old Houston native has been making money from barbecue since high school. He used to take…

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The parking lot of Salty Sow looks a lot busier during lunch these days. The restaurant only serves dinner, but six weeks ago, a West Texas pitmaster pulled in with a new trailer and a thousand-gallon smoker. The side of the building got a new paint job announcing the arrival of Waylon J’s Barbeque. The restaurant-within-a-restaurant is open Friday through Sunday, serving some remarkably good barbecue.Pitmaster Chad Deen spent a decade in Midland surveying well sites for oil companies. Starting in late 2020, he’d take off early on Friday afternoons to fire up his smoker to cook barbecue for lunch on Saturdays at Tall City Brewing under the name Bury Me in Smoke Barbecue. The barbecue bug had bitten him the year prior. He watched…

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Fernando “Fred” Mendoza needed a smoker, and he had some Longhorn cattle to trade. Mendoza owns M3 Longhorn Ranch, near Valley View, less than twenty miles from Oklahoma. Nolan Belcher owns B4 Barbeque, in Mabank, with his wife, Emily, and they had a five-hundred-gallon smoker for sale. “He wanted some Texas Longhorns, and I wanted a barbecue pit,” Mendoza told me. Belcher ended up with seven head of livestock in the deal, and he moved them to join the rest of the small herd on his land in Mabank, about 120 miles southeast of Valley View.Mendoza has grown his herd of Longhorns for years, using a breeding program to produce cows with exceptionally long horns. Whereas other breeds are prized for milk production or marbling,…

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There are plenty of wife-and-husband teams who run barbecue joints, but at El Tejas Twist, in Forney, a town about 25 miles east of Dallas, the whole family is involved. Customers order from Esmeralda Alaniz, who patiently explains the vast menu. Her husband, Fernando Serrato, prepares the orders. Fernando’s sister Carolina Benavides makes the sides, while her husband, Victor Benavides, mans the smokers outside. Carlos Serrato, Fernando’s brother, is the utility man who helps in all roles. Together, they produce a unique variety of barbecue and Tex-Mex dishes at a joint that remains inexplicably under the radar after three years of being open.“People love the menu because they can mix it up,” Fernando explained. Barbecue platters, stuffed baked potatoes, and Texas Twinkies are just the…

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If you pull up to Outpost 36 Texas Barbeque, in Keller, about an hour northwest of Dallas, and think the building looks familiar, you might be on to something. The former Golden Corral location is full of surprises (but no buffet line), including cold-smoked salmon on the menu, TVs displaying live footage from the pit room, and a market selling raw beef from a ranch owned by the same folks who run the restaurant.Outpost 76, near Sulphur Springs, about two hours east of Keller, is home to 1,800 head of Angus and Wagyu cattle. The ranch produces beef that’s a cross between both breeds. Much of the product is served at its two sister restaurants, which share a parking lot: Outpost 36, which will soon…

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John Baines cannot tolerate a dirty pit. The owner of JB’s Barbeque & More, on the northeast side of Houston, gets calls from aspiring pitmasters in the area who are looking for advice. He tells them the first step is for him to get a look at their cooker. “When they open their pit and I see all that gooey stuff,” Baines said, referring to the buildup of soot and grease some people call seasoning, he tells them, “If you want me to mentor you, clean it up and call me back.”Baines has been cooking barbecue for 25 years, but he’s been a pastor for longer. He started with a small Christian congregation on the northeast side of Houston in 1995. His Heart of Faith…

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For the Heffernan family, 2017 was a tumultuous year. Bob Heffernan, the patriarch and pitmaster of their barbecue trailer, Heffernan Bar-B-Que, learned he had lung cancer in the spring. His oncologist estimated he had seven months to live. Bob’s wife, Jeannie, helped run the business, but Bob was the one who made the barbecue. The couple’s older son, Cole, had already graduated college and was starting his career. If the torch were to be carried, it would fall to their younger son, Evan, to do it. “I knew if I said no, it would be gone forever,” Evan said. He felt a responsibility to sustain what his father had started, so he dropped out of college and tied on an apron.“I had really no aspirations…

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