Owner/Pitmaster: John Mueller Meat Co.; Opened 2013 Age: 46 Smoker: Wood-fired Offset Smoker Wood: Oak Mercurial is often the word chosen to describe John Mueller. Verbal attacks on customers and employees are a regular occurrence, but they keep coming back for his famous barbecue. There’s a famous name involved too. John’s father was…
John Mueller Meat Co.

The Dark Prince of Texas barbecue smoked beef ribs for the POTUS. John Mueller is in Dallas today along with President Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi for a barbecue fundraiser at the home of Marc Stanley just southwest of Forest and 75. John Mueller commented on the president’s…

Two weeks ago Cranky Frank’s Barbeque in Fredericksburg finally bit the bullet. They raised their prices for barbecue and posted a sign on the door explaining the change to their customers. Not two days later I received a question over Twitter with a photo of the sign.
Jimmy Kimmel and his sidekick Guillermo Rodriguez came to Austin for some SXSW scouting over the weekend. Kimmel will be taping his popular late night show in Austin during SXSW, and he was doing some advance barbecue scouting. Saturday began with Franklin Barbecue followed by Micklethwait Craft Meats…

“Line are overrated.” This is the conclusion of economist Tyler Cowen in a recent article where he shared some of his principles for finding good restaurants. For Cowen, standing in line is a conformist activity, and the presence of a line is a not a good indicator of the…

IF YOU’RE EATING BRISKET in Texas, chances are that your favorite pitmaster is ordering Item No. 120: a beef brisket, deckle-off, boneless. The number corresponds to the cut of meat defined by the Institutional Meat Purchase Specifications, or IMPS. No. 120 is “boneless,” meaning that ribs one through four have been…

If there’s a dark prince of Texas barbecue, it’s probably John Mueller, the famously irascible, hugely talented, at times erratic master of meat who left his family’s legendary joint—Louie Mueller Barbecue, in Taylor—and set out on his own in 2001 with John Mueller’s B-B-Q, on Austin’s East Side. By 2003,…
You may remember last October when John Mueller was shut out of his well-regarded JMueller BBQ trailer on South First Street in Austin. He wasn’t happy about it, to say the least, but stayed quiet, plotting his return. That…