On Sunday, Texas Monthly threw its third annual BBQ Festival, in Austin, on the open air terrace of the Long Center. Twenty-one barbecue joints handed our samples to an estimated crowd of 3000, who listened to live music, swigged beer and other adult beverages, bought T-shirts,  got tips from the “barbecue genius” booth manned by Texas A&M, and ate till they were bug-eyed.  The participating pits had been featured in our 2008 story on the fifty best barbecue joints in Texas, plus there were two newcomers of the year representing places that opened after 2008. The heat, in the nineties, drove many fans inside the Long Center for some air-conditioning, which is where we found most of these folks below.

Daniel Delaney, Brooklyn, mastermind of the Brisketlab project, a series of brisket-by-the-pound pop-up restaurants in New York. “We missed all the meat! We came up here to the VIP Lounge and started talking, then the floodgates opened for the general admission crowd, and that was that.” [Delaney, below right]

Daniel Vaughn, the “Barbecue Snob,” and Texas Monthly barbecue blogger, Dallas. “The biggest surprise of the day was Stanley’s brisket. Nick [Pencis, owner] said he was going to do a salt-and-pepper-seasoned brisket and it is really great. I could gush about Pecan Lodge, too. And the line to get Franklin’s was longer here than at the restaurant.” [Vaughn, above left]

Max and Andrea Castillo, Houston. Max: “We ran from place to place getting samples without stopping to eat them. When we sat down, we couldn’t remember which was which! I saw one guy with a Sharpie and Ziploc bags, labeling them. Smart.” Andrea: “We should sell bibs!”

Matt Diffee, cartoonist for the New Yorker and Texas Monthly’s “critter page.” “I tried to talk Jake [Silverstein, editor of Texas Monthly] into letting me do portraits of the pitmasters on butcher paper using a piece of fatty brisket instead of a pencil, but he just said, ‘How’s that critter page coming?’”

Doug Wallace, defense contractor, Fort Worth. “I got to all 21 booths—the first 12 I ate the whole sample. After that I just tasted it. I use the Texas Monthly barbecue app, and today I rose from number 13 to 8 on the leaderboard rankings of who’s visited the most barbecue joints. Back in 1997, my dad had a heart attack [and we knew his time was limited]. He and I started visiting barbecue joints every Saturday. We’d leave at 8 and get back at 5 or so. It was all about the drive and the visit.”

Jo Ann, Chris, and Isabella Bjornson. JoAnn: “Chris made all 21 tents at the festival today—he is a connoisseur. Brisket was one of the first meats our daughter Isabella ever ate. She’s been tasting it all today. I’m from Virginia so I was only familiar with pork. After I tried barbecued beef, I told Chris it was a religious experience.” Chris: “I’ll be in a meat coma by the end of the festival.” [JoAnn and Isabella pictured]

Esaul Ramos and Kristen Toscano, San Antonio. “This is our first TM BBQ Festival. We saved up all our money to spend on food and then we found out the samples were free! We love it. We’ve had everything.”

Ginger, Jason, and Addison Bolen, just moved to Austin from Texas City. “We kept the hand fan from the Texas Monthly festival last year and our four-year-old daughter Addison uses it as a menu in her play kitchen now. She calls it her ‘barbysauce.’ Actually, that means both a menu and sauce.”

Cole Newman, 15 years old, Austin. “The festival is pretty good, but there aren’t enough people. I expected it to be in a park, with grass and trees, like on Town Lake. So far Big Daddy’s ribs are my favorite, but I haven’t gotten into the brisket yet.”

The White Family: Inman White, community behavioral health administrator, Longview, with Banks White, son and chef in Berkeley, Breia White, daughter and film editor in Los Angeles, Kathy White, sister and schoolteacher in Nashville, and Frances White, mother and retired school teacher in Palestine. Inman: “We are a barbecue family. I was born in Luling and I guess I’m just steeped in it. We know that at Thanksgiving we will be scattered all around the country, so we decided to get together here. This is our second barbecue Thanksgiving at the festival, and you can count on us next year.”

Davey Griffin, Professor of Meat Science, Texas A&M University, College Station. “We had a guy from New York last year who asked us, ‘Can I do barbecue up there where it’s so cold?’ He was using a small home smoker. We told him sure, it was a matter of keeping the temperature consistent, no big swings. He came and found us this year and said it worked! The most common error in cooking brisket is inconsistent temperature, followed by having the temperature too hot—lack of patience.”

Adrienne Newman, aka “Madame Cocoa,” craft chocolate maven, Austin. Question: Barbecue or chocolate? Answer: [long pause] Chocolate.

Aaron Franklin, Franklin Barbecue, Austin, and Harold E. “Buzzie” Hughes, Buzzie’s, Kerrville. Franklin: If Texas Monthly throws a dinner to honor the pitmasters, we want a salad bar.
Hughes: With some shrimp. Or maybe have a fish fry. Franklin: Just don’t make us have barbecue.”

Diane and Justin Fourton, with son Henry, owners of Pecan Lodge barbecue, Newcomer of the Year for the 2012 Texas Monthly BBQ Festival. Diane: “It’s a little surreal that we’re here at all. At one point, we were within two days of closing. We had had to stop cooking barbecue at Pecan Lodge [until they satisfied a city of Dallas regulation] and our business had dried up. We took all the money we had in the bank and bought meat and our customers came back. Then the Food Network called, and Southern Living called. When you guys called and asked us to be the Newcomer at this year’s festival, we just about freaked out.” Justin: “We used to wait for the Texas Monthly barbecue issue to come out. The pitmasters who were in the top fifty had been around for years. To be part of that group—we never imagined it could happen.”

Tagged: Barbecue Snob, Daniel Vaughn, Franklin Barbecue, Matt Diffee, Pecan Lodge, Third Annual Texas Monthly BBQ Festival

Enjoying his fifteen minutes (hours, days, whatever) of fame, self-declared “BBQ Snob” Daniel Vaughn is in Austin today hanging out with the big dog, Anthony Bourdain, of the Travel Channel’s “No Reservations.”  They’re  seen here at Franklin Barbecue, along with Vaughn’s photographer Nicholas McWhirter, Vaughn’s book agent David Hale Smith, The Tony, and Daniel. (For the record, Vaughn is Texas Monthly’s barbecue partner, which means he writes on the barbecue page of our web site  and will be working with us on our next top-fifty barbecue joints story in 2013—although at the rate he’s going, we will be basking in his glory.) Bourdain’s imprint Ecco Publishing has optioned Vaughn’s book-in-progress, to be entitled Prophets of Smoked Meat. Vaughn has already declared his love for Franklin Barbecue in his  Full Custom Gospel BBQ  blog (and who hasn’t fallen in love with Franklin’s  celestial brisket?—Aaron Franklin was the newcomer of the year at the second annual Texas Monthly BBQ Festival in 2011 and Bon Appétit named it the best barbecue in the country or maybe it was the galaxy or the universe, I can’t really remember). What did Bourdain think: “Un-f*cking-believable,” quoth he, during his SXSW panel on interactive media this afternoon, right after eating at Franklin. Apparently they’re also going to Austin’s  JMueller BBQ at some point, although the timing of that little excursion is probably a more tightly guarded secret than the arrival of Barack Obama to visit troops on the other side of the world. (Photo lifted from Vaughn’s Twitter feed; thanks to Side Dish blog for photo  IDs.)

Tagged: Anthony Bourdain, Daniel Vaughn, Ecco Publishing, no reservations, Prophets of Smoked Meat

The luminaries of Texas barbecue are justly revered—from Lockhart’s century old Kreuz Market, to Taylor’s estimable Louie Mueller Barbecue to the ever-popular Cooper’s Old Time Pit BBQ in Llano. For the BBQ dabbler these names are familiar, but their pitmasters may as well be Hollywood celebrities to the smoked meat enthusiast. There is little more that can be added to their exaltation, but what about those hard working pitmasters whose toils aren’t lit by the same spotlight? Demand is so high for the offerings of the Texas all-stars that most of these towns have a few other joints to serve the hungry locals. These places may put out good, even drive-worthy barbecue, but they are destined to remain in the shadows, always obscured by the thousand-pound gorilla down the block. They are as Scottie Pippen was to Michael Jordan and Andre Agassi to Pete Sampras. But remember, Pippen and Agassi had game.

Some of these joints have been recognized for their well-smoked meats, and most are known to the serious BBQ hound (as defined by his or her willingness to eat more than two lunches in a single day), but for average tourist these restaurants will rarely win out over their more famous counterpart in the same town. That’s too bad. My advice is, when BBQ-ing, to always consider multiple (small) meals in quick succession, and to make these particular joints your second or third stop while in any of these hallowed barbecue towns.

Chisholm Trail, Lockhart

“Starting a barbecue place here was like putting a ballpark across from Yankee Stadium.” These are the words of owner Floyd Wilhelm on his decision to open Chisholm Trail Bar-B-Que in Lockhart, home to three legendary joints, Kreuz Market, Smitty’s Market, and Black’s. Wilhelm worked at Black’s before opening the doors here, and over thirty years later his son Daniel does most of the cooking. They do many of the same things their more popular competitors do down the street like making their own succulent beef and pork sausage and smoking their meats in an all wood-fired smoker. They also change things up a bit by offering a wider menu of main courses and a large salad bar. This helps Chisholm Trail stay popular with the locals as evidenced by them winning the title of Best Barbecue in Caldwell County in a reader’s poll conducted by the local paper. (more…)

Tagged: barbecue, Chisolm Trail, Daniel Vaughn, Davis Grocery, Laird's Bar-B-Q, Llano, Lockhart, Luling, Luling Bar-B-Q, taylor, Taylor Cafe