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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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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A Puerto Rican flag and a Philippines flag flank the ordering window of the Yammy’s Filipino Letchon truck, in Round Rock, just north of Austin. Meriam Soto, the matriarch of the family business, hails from the Philippines, and her husband, Santos Soto, is Puerto Rican. Both cultures have distinct cuisines, but they share a love for lechon. At its most basic, lechon is a small pig cooked whole on a rotating spit until the skin is crisp and the meat is tender. Yammy’s serves a simplified version of just pork belly at the truck. It’s exceptional—but the business owes its genesis to a particularly bad lechon.A decade ago, Meriam wanted a whole roasted pig for the holidays, as is traditional for Filipino families. “I ordered…

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When I pulled up to Smoky Buns, in Round Rock, a suburb just north of Austin, on a recent Friday, I immediately recognized the silhouette of the food truck. Long before he was known as the Sausage Sensei, Bill Dumas fed me some of his early recipes from that window a decade ago, when it had the Smokey Denmark’s name painted on the side. Many of the best barbecue meals I’ve eaten were ordered from the vehicle after it was painted blue with the LeRoy and Lewis Barbecue logo in 2017. Jesse Escobedo saw the trailer for sale after LeRoy and Lewis moved into its brick-and-mortar last year. He admittedly lowballed co-owner Sawyer Lewis, but she eventually accepted. Now it’s home to Smoky Buns, which…

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In September 2022, Sara and Dustin Treviño called it quits on their barbecue venture, Treviño’s Craft Smokehouse. It had made an impression on North Texas diners from its opening the April prior. Customers came in droves, but whether the couple parked their food trailer in Graford or Haslet, both west of Dallas, the sales were barely paying the bills. “We hadn’t figured it out,” Dustin said. “We weren’t making sense of the business part of it.” They felt the smart financial decision was to return to Midland, where Dustin had previously worked in oil and gas. “We raised the white flag and retreated, and we regret that decision daily,” Dustin said.Two years later, Dustin was miserable doing work that he now hated, and he longed…

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