Texas BBQ Adventure Guide: A Road Trip Through the History & How-to of Lone Star 'Que

By Jason Weems

From backroad barns to big city spots with a line around the block, Jason Weems sets Texans up with the recipe for a successful barbecue-centric adventure

From the bayous of the east to the dusty deserts of the west, embark on a journey through the countless smokehouses, roadhouses, and BBQ food trucks that line the backroads and main streets of Texas. Dive into a history that dates back to treasure hungry conquistadors and swashbuckling buccaneers. Learn what divides the state into five main flavor regions and read your plate of BBQ like a roadmap through history. Author Jason Weems journeyed over 3500 miles around the highways and byways of Texas to bring you a guide that's dripping with pro-tips and sizzling with backstory.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The History Press
• Release date: Oct 31, 2022
• ISBN: 9781439676592

Jason Weems

Jason Weems, author of A History Lover's Guide to Austin, is the "Face of Austin," according to the local visitor and convention bureau. He is a longtime Texan, passionate tour guide and lover of barbecue, and to his thousands of tour guests, Jason is renowned for breathing life, levity and accessibility into the stories of Texas. An award-winning singer-songwriter, voice actor, podcaster and event/festival producer, Weems has honed his skills as a weaver of tales and spinner of yarns over a lifetime of live performances and through years of providing immersive guided tours, in person and online. For more information about the author, please visit www.jasonweems.com.

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

Welcome to the Texas BBQ Adventure Guide, where you’ll learn to get the very most out of your barbecue experience. As a lifelong Texan, backyard grill master and lover of Texas barbecue, I know this is a cuisine that offers many styles, flavors and destinations to explore. All restaurants and regions have some similarities at their core, but the differences abound. From back-road barbecue barns to big-city craft barbecue spots with a line around the block, you’re about to get the secrets and tips to successfully set off on the barbecue-centric adventure of your dreams. With this guide, you’ll be able to plan a perfect barbecue trip around the Lone Star State, where you’ll find all your next favorite hidden gems or simply learn how to add barbecue to your next Texas road trip while avoiding the dead ends and make it the highlight of your adventure. Perhaps best of all, you’ll uncover the deeper history of Texas-style barbecue that has often gone overlooked, which will make each bite a little juicier.

I’d like to admit that to even attempt to write a book that encompasses all of Texas barbecue is a futile task. Instead, the approach of this guide will be to use the story of my travels pursuing the best of the state’s offerings to give you the tools that you’ll need to get the most out of your own barbecue adventures. You may be wondering what there is to learn. Well, maybe more than you’d guess! I took a series of trips around Texas in preparation for this project, and when I parked the car at the end of that last leg, I was certain of two things. First, that I needed a nap, and second, that there will always be more to learn about Texas barbecue.

Speaking a bit more about my own big barbecue tour that so informs this book, for research purposes, I traveled about 3,500 miles on several excursions over the course of ten weeks, and over those miles, I saw some of the most breathtaking beauty and met some of the kindest people this world has to offer. I ate at over thirty very different, all welcoming and most delectable barbecue restaurants in the state (sometimes up to five in a day) and delivered many pounds of leftovers and more than a few restaurant koozies to friends and family along the way. I learned the most by talking to pitmasters, the folks who run the registers and, of course, the local regulars.

I also spent a fair bit of time chasing down the history of barbecue because, to be honest, the popular narrative that we’ve long been told—that story of barbecue coming to us from the old West cowboys and their chuckwagons out on the cattle trail—is, at best, far from accurate and omits some of the most relevant parts of the tale. The more I traveled, read and gabbed with those locals and pitmasters, the more I found that the popular narrative I’d always been told just wouldn’t hold water (or barbecue sauce, for that matter). Throughout this guide, I’ll do my best to help unravel that history and set the story straight along the way.

That brings up another point regarding my research for this guide; in addition to utilizing academic resources and speaking with pitmasters and barbecue restaurateurs all over the state, I was also most fortunate to have a dialogue and interview with the BBQ editor of the vaunted Texas Monthly Magazine, Daniel Vaughn. Here’s some context for the uninitiated reader: TMM curates a yearly edition of its magazine that focuses on Texas barbecue. That issue is widely regarded as the definitive go-to source of the barbecue hotspots in Texas each year. It offers adventurers like you and me resources such as a Meat Map that plots out this annual top 50 list. The list is unranked with a small exception; there is a ranked top 10 list chosen from the rest. If a joint can land one of those top 10 slots and be acknowledged as first among equals, it can be a business-bumping honor. Though, in truth, if any business has made it that far, the word about it has already likely gotten out. After all, it’s hard to keep great barbecue a secret in Texas for long.

Vaughn curates that big list and manages the army of contributors who help assemble it. As the man at the center of the effort, there’s no one else around with as keen an eye on the current and future state of this cuisine as him. His efforts steering that Texas top 50 is in addition to the significant historical research he performs for his regularly printed articles, not to mention his constant barbecue-tasting adventures as an acclaimed judge and critic. Daniel may well be the busiest man in the biz, and he has clearly earned his spot as the Kingmaker of Texas Barbecue.

I mentioned Daniel’s well-researched articles on the history of barbecue, and that’s what really led me to contact him. Those articles fill up countless tabs on my computer when I do my digging, so I knew there could really be no better source for clearing up my historical understanding of our subject. I reached out to him for a chat, and he was kind enough to respond. After some email exchanges where he graciously forwarded a few relevant research links for me to investigate, we spoke on a video call for nearly an hour, truly nerding out over the finer points of the Texas barbecue story the whole time. His encyclopedic knowledge of the topic was endlessly helpful to my deep dive into our subject, and the clarity gained from that exchange will come up throughout this guide. This book certainly owes a debt of gratitude for his perspective on the topic and his willingness to share his insights.

You can see that a lot has gone into how I came to write this guide, and it’s my hope that by the end, you’ll have a solid understanding of this complex meal that was made from so many historic ingredients and traditions. Before we dig into the history, and before you head out on that long drive to your first few barbecue destinations, there are three main things to consider right out of the gate.

First, and this may go without saying, but barbecue is quite popular, and these restaurants are often busy. What may come as a surprise, and possibly an unwelcome one at that, is that they also usually keep to their own schedules. You’ve got to know going in that if you don’t do a little research into the best days and times for a visit and plan your trip accordingly, you may not have the experience you were hoping for. There are many ways that barbecue joints may differ from other types of restaurants, but the hours they keep is surely one of the big ones, a pretty good reason to do a little research first. For example, some only operate on the weekends, and it’s a common practice to take Mondays off. A beloved haunt may only open on seemingly random days, and it will often sell out of its menu and close up shop well before dinner. All of this is to say that many of the best barbecue restaurants are doing what works for their crew and the locals, so they are rarely committed to being open until 9:00 p.m., seven days a week. They’re often smaller operations, and they neither want nor, frankly, do they need to follow a traditional restaurant schedule. You can usually count on most of these restaurants to be open as a weekend lunch spot, and that also means you might be met with a line out the door or down the block. It’s best to assume there’s going to be some detail or other that you’ll want to know before you make the journey, so get into the practice of starting each trip by checking websites and social media pages ahead of your trip to get the best and most up-to-date information. Your new favorite place for barbecue may be some food truck with a smoker trailer outside a brewery or maybe a shack off a dirt road crowded with locals and replete with taxidermized hunting trophies on every wall; you’ll just never know until you try. But to get your taste of the best, you’ll have to know their rules and play by them. So, to recap—since timing is everything and knowledge is power, you should always do a little research before you go.

The second thing to keep in mind when you really start to dive deeper into exploring the world of Texas barbecue is that even though we are dividing the state into five main regions, we can simplify things a bit by identifying three main styles of barbecue that have come to define the food. East Texas, South Texas and Central Texas are the main regional flavors that we find. It’s from the blending of all three of those styles that we get the barbecue of Coastal Texas, and it’s with the blending of Central Texas style with flavors of the South Texas style that we get the barbecue of West Texas. The tales of how these flavors mixed and came to define their regions are fascinating, and we’ll be delving into those styles and their histories at length. At this modern stage in the evolution of the cuisine, you’ll find the influences from one region will often show up on the menus from another, but despite the subtle merging of menus, the flavors are still distinct and unique, and each is worthy of your attention.

On a related note, it might raise an eyebrow that in my regional map, I’m omitting North Texas as its own separate area, even though two of the largest cities in the nation—Dallas and Fort Worth—are located there. Instead, we allow the line between the East and West Texas regions to continue a not-so-straight path all the way up to the Red River. For our purposes, that northern part of the border between East and West Texas partitions the city of Dallas itself, which is a decision that deserves an explanation since no one would really consider Dallas a city in East Texas. While it’s true you can find all the regional barbecue styles represented in that thriving metropolis, it’s the Black-owned barbecue restaurants that have come to define the local flavors of South and East Dallas. The barbecue spots in these parts are spectacular, and the menus more closely reflect the offerings of Beaumont than the offerings of any other part of the Metroplex. Meanwhile, in places such as the North Dallas suburb of McKinney or in the Cow-Town of Fort Worth, the heavy hitters are much more aligned with the influences of the West Texas region. It’s because of these important subtleties that we’ve divided Dallas and placed the south and east parts of the city into the East Texas region, while the North and West Dallas areas, along with Fort Worth and then on and on westward, fall into the West Texas region.

With that explanation in mind, you can see that if we understand the three main Texas barbecue styles—East, South and Central—and their influence over the other regions, and especially if we can get a feel for the context of the story behind the bites, then we’ll be able to read any plate of barbecue that sits before us as if it were a delicious book.

The third consideration that you should factor into your plans is that, as I mentioned earlier, there are a lot of very different dining options available for you to dive into. This point goes beyond the basic regional styles or flavors and more into the atmosphere of the meal. Whether you’re searching for a specific type of dining experience or simply open to any adventure, it helps to be aware of the options. As a way of slicing up this giant subject into more bite-sized pieces, let’s first divide all the myriad barbecue dining options into two simple groups: celebration barbecue and restaurant barbecue. Celebration barbecue