Two legendary Houston restaurants are up for the Texas Treasures Business Award this year, and they credit perseverance with getting them this far.
Six years ago, we set out to answer that question and got inconclusive results. And while we’ve found new info, the mystery endures.
Barbecue has come a long way from being cooked in a hole in the ground. But how did steel offsets, less than 40 years old, come to define the state’s style?
From the Ex-Wife to the Mother Clucker, the sandwiches at Stanley’s Famous Pit Barbecue in Tyler hint at some legendary tales.
Founded as far back as 1886, these barbecue joints laid the foundation for the pitmasters of today—and what they’re serving is as delicious today as it was in centuries past.
Award-winning food writer Adrian Miller highlights their contributions in ‘Black Smoke.’
It was most likely the first Texas barbecue dispute to end up in court.
In 1942, the women of Borger protested their exclusion from the town’s barbecue cook-offs. Then a mysterious challenger emerged.
Built for the 1908 Elks National Convention, the structure played a role in the lynching of Allen Brooks, which the city will finally recognize with a memorial.
The “Green Books” guides helped black tourists avoid humiliation—and worse.
The history of our barbecue editor's favorite side dish.
Barbecue in the Texas Panhandle has struggled for a foothold in statewide prominence, and that’s not entirely because of its far-flung locale. The area is a relative newcomer to Texas barbecue history. Amarillo’s founding in 1897, after all, was a year after Southside Market opened in Elgin. The oldest barbecue
A Denison newspaper described Al Hall as “a magnificent specimen of physical manhood.” When a local alderman pistol-whipped him during an argument at Hall’s barbecue joint in 1891, Hall retaliated with two swift punches to the face, sending the alderman home in a carriage. “Blood flowed quite freely,” noted The
We mapped all 144 known barbecue stands and meat markets in Texas during the nineteenth century.
In the 1800s, smokehouses and BBQ pits popped up all over Texas, giving rise to the commercial barbecue industry.
In 1891, the S.S. Utopia departed Italy, headed for America. The ship, carrying 880 passengers, many of them Italian immigrants who boarded the Utopia in Naples or Palermo, was sailing through the port of Gibraltar when it struck another vessel. The hole created by the collision sunk the Utopia in just twenty minutes, and 562 passengers
Rose Diamond once ruled the world of smoked turkey. In 1938, customers in New York, Miami, and Hollywood enjoyed her smoked turkeys shipped out from her Fort Worth home. According to The Claude News, they brined for at least ten days before being smoked in a brick pit in Diamond’s
Protest season seems to be upon us after the recent election. Citizens are taking to the streets to show their displeasure with a new leader, which isn’t anything new in the United States. Before the original Brexit united us, we were anything but polite. Of course you remember the Boston Tea
When Charlie Geren opened Railhead Smokehouse in Fort Worth, he had already failed at his previous attempt at the restaurant business. Geren said he had just “lost his ass” in a “steak and beer joint” in north Fort Worth, but decided to partner with a pitmaster friend,
I have a Twitter follower who, for a while, enjoyed pointing out when a barbecue joint spelled their name “incorrectly.” Presumably, “Barbecue” and “BBQ” were acceptable, but not “Barbeque,” “Bar-B-Q,” or its slight variation “Bar-B-Que.” He’s not alone. The AP Stylebook, generally used by journalists, doesn’t like those alternate spellings either,
The contributions of African Americans to our country’s barbecue culture are often overlooked. The influences can be hard to trace, which make it tempting to ignore them. Throughout Texas and the rest of the country, records of black barbecue culture are either gone or never existed in the first place. Most newspapers and magazines were
For years, I’ve been on a quest to definitively answer a question that has plagued me since I began researching the history of barbecue: what was the first barbecue joint in Texas?Loyal readers of TMBBQ will remember that in August 2013, I wrote about the post-Civil War wave of butcher shops
It was six in the morning on Sunday, January 31, 1993, and Karl Kuby Sr. had just started cooking a couple of bison over an open fire in a Tom Thumb grocery store parking lot. Later that evening, after OJ Simpson flipped the coin and Michael Jackson entertained at halftime, the Dallas Cowboys would
Skylight Inn cooks whole hogs over wood coals in Ayden, North Carolina just like they did when they first opened in 1947. This past weekend I embedded myself with Samuel Jones, the third generation of the Skylight Inn family, at BBQ on the Neuse. The event
They’ve been smoking briskets over mesquite since Tony’s The Pit Bar-B-Q opened in 1958. Tony Vargas Sr. started the place, but according to Martha Vargas, it was her husband Tony Vargas Jr. that’s responsible for its most famous menu item – brisket hash.Mrs. Vargas recited the ingredient list without hesitation
For forty years, Paul Burka has been a part of Texas Monthly. His retirement officially begins today, on Texas Independence Day. His legacy will live on in Texas Monthly’s list of the best and worst legislators, and his celebrated career has made an impact on Texas politics. But what few know
The Texas Legislature designated Lockhart, Texas as the “Barbecue Capital of Texas.” That, you probably knew along with the fact that it is home to five barbecue joints. Kreuz Market, one of Texas’s oldest, opened all the way back in 1900, while Mad Jack’s BBQ Shack is just two years old.
Brisket may dominate barbecue menus in Texas today, but nearly a century ago, a Dallas institution built its mighty restaurant empire on a simple Tennessee-style barbecued-pork sandwich: the “Pig Sandwich.” Perhaps some already know that I’m referring to the signature item served at the Pig Stand, a Dallas-based chain that formed
Later today, after the inauguration of Greg Abbott as the forty-eighth governor of Texas, 17,000 hungry ticket holders clamoring for food will line up for lunch on the Capitol grounds in Austin. Forty-five minutes later, they’ll all have a full plate of barbecue. At least that’s what mega-caterer Eddie Deen has
Conventional wisdom holds that traditional Texas barbecue doesn’t need to be sauced. That Texans have an aversion to the stuff. Case in point? A recent primer on national barbecue styles in America on Eater noted that “while the rest of the nation is busy making barbecue sauces, many
The popularity of Texas barbecue—and specifically Texas-style smoked brisket—has launched a frenzy of new activity. New joints pop up all the time, and relatively new pitmasters are hailed as masters of craft. Many of these places and people are deserving of considerable attention and high praise, but we shouldn’t lose sight of what
This week on TMBBQ we’ll take a look at the Bryan family’s barbecue legacy. From Elias, to Red, to Sonny Bryan and beyond, the Dallas roots of this family tree run deep, but the branches extend well beyond Texas.With so much family history, there are plenty of artifacts and mementos that I’ve
During an interview with Steve Kapchinskie of Martin’s Place in Bryan (since 1925), he mentioned a copy of an old menu that he had in his records. The menu is from the forties,and he was kind enough to scan it and send it for us to post it here.
There’s a Beef Club in Theon, Texas, but good luck getting a membership today. All that’s left of this club that disbanded in 1949 is a tiny metal clad building with a slight lean. The birth and death date are recorded on the front of the building as if
Sixty-six years ago on January 29, 1948, rush hour in downtown Austin was given a jolt by an explosion. A small barbecue joint called the West Sixth Street Barbecue & Market was left in shambles. The news was reported as far away as Sweetwater where the snippet in the February
