Hard Eight Pit Bar-B-Q
Brady, TX 76825
Hours: Open Sun–Thur 10:30–9, Fri & Sat 10:30–10.
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Texas Monthly rating: 3.50
TEXAS MONTHLY SAYS: This joint is closed. Meats are cooked cowboy style directly over hot mesquite coals.
BBQ SNOB SAYS: 2008: After my first Hard Eight experience in Coppell, I wasn’t expecting much. The meat is ordered in the same way, right at the pit, and the smell of sweet mesquite while waiting my turn made my mouth water. This is an intelligent business strategy: Display the entire menu to a load of hungry folks and dare them not to over-order. A friend and I took the bait with both lean and fatty brisket and pork ribs. The ribs were long and thin with a salt-and-pepper rub reminiscent of Cooper’s style, but this one had a better balance of more pepper and less salt. Every bite of the ribs contained some of that rub, so it was hard to detect any smoke flavor. The rib meat was nicely tender with well-rendered fat, but it needed to be thicker to stand up to that rub. The thick slices of brisket, however, made for a nice rub-to-meat ratio. The brisket proved mildly smoky with little difference in overall flavor between the fatty and lean brisket (we suspect the meat needed more time on the smoker to adequately render the fat).
