A Golden Age in Texas Barbecue

Lockhart is the Barbecue Capital of Texas. This has been officially true since 1999 — thanks to a proclamation passed by the Texas House of Representatives — and unofficially true for years before that, thanks to how long people have been eating smoked meat in the central Texas town. Three of Lockhart’s most famous barbecue joints have been open for a combined 289 years.

The owners of Barbs-B-Q joined this history when they opened on the Lockhart town square in May. At the same time, their female-owned business is challenging assumptions about Texas barbecue — how it is defined, who created it, who is entitled to make it.

Two of Barbs’s three owners (Alexis Tovías Morales, 24, and Haley Conlin, 30) are former vegans. The third, Chuck Charnichart, 25, grew up in the border town of Brownsville, where barbecue meant barbacoa. She didn’t taste central Texas-style smoked brisket until she moved to Austin for college.

The partners were attracted to Lockhart in part because of its lineage, but they were inspired by a new generation of Texas barbecue entrepreneurs who are ignoring rules that historically applied to anyone who wanted to be taken seriously in barbecue.

“We feel so empowered now to do things our own way,” Charnichart said. “And there is so much history in Lockhart, it just kind of made sense for us to be here.”

Barbs’s menu follows orthodoxy — its brisket and beef and pork ribs are excellent — but isn’t bound by it, featuring items like lamb chops, blue corn tortillas and green spaghetti, a dish sparked by the roasted poblano cream Charnichart ate growing up.

Barbs is part of a Texas barbecue renaissance that began roughly 15 years ago. It has slowly transformed a cherished but hidebound local tradition, once confined to a fixed set of dishes (notably brisket, beef sausage and pork ribs, otherwise known as the Texas trinity), into arguably the country’s most dynamic vernacular cuisine.

The technical rigor and freedom of expression that animates Barbs’ barbecue permeate the country’s second-largest state.

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Texas barbecue today is no longer primarily associated with central European immigrants and white male pitmasters. It is a malleable cuisine, one that is open to newcomers and includes the traditions, notably Black and Mexican American styles, that have long thrived here.

The new Texas barbecue gives voice to a population that has been diversified by new arrivals from other states and countries, and to a cultural dialogue between rural and urban artisans; much of it nods to American barbecue’s origins in the live fire cooking of Indigenous people and enslaved Africans.

The broader narrative flows from more Texans sharing their home cooking with the public at large.

“In south Texas, we never had barbecue sauce, and it wasn’t just white bread,” said Ernest Servantes, a co-owner of Burnt Bean Company, in Seguin. “We had charro beans, guacamole, tortillas, pico de gallo. We had a lot of cabrito.”

The spice palette, once confined to salt and pepper, has gone Technicolor. Pitmasters are incorporating lemongrass, fenugreek, gochujang and turmeric into their cooking. Kimchi and salsa negra have elbowed their way onto barbecue trays, along with char siu, lamb chops, tuna collar and smoked doro wat.

You’ve got brisket curry, brisket enchiladas, brisket shawarma, brisket ramen. Tortillas are on their way to becoming as common as sliced bread in Texas barbecue joints — an overdue development in a state where barbacoa predates meat markets in Lockhart.

There is exceptional, distinctive barbecue not just in central Texas, home to established barbecue hot spots like Lockhart and Austin, but also from Lubbock to Weslaco to Beaumont.

The tapestry created by these pitmasters and restaurateurs still bears the marks of Texas’ ranching history. The quantity and quality of the “trinity” meats have never been higher (same goes for side dishes), as the standards and practices of fine dining find homes in Texas pit rooms.

Brisket, the “king” of Texas barbecue proteins, still reigns. In fact, the cut is now prevalent even in pork-centric barbecue regions where Texans’ love for beef has been mocked as a function of their inability to lasso pigs. Texas barbecue has essentially become so pervasive across the country as to end debates about which region can claim American barbecue supremacy.

Within the state, new strains of barbecue are fervently embraced, if not always with the intensity as at Barbs, where lines form on Lockhart’s town square before it opens. Charnichart made her name working the pits at Goldee’s, in Fort Worth, which Texas Monthly named the state’s top barbecue joint in 2021.

Opened by a multiracial group of 20-something friends, Goldee’s provided something of a template for Barbs, and is a case study in how reputations are made in the hothouse of Texas barbecue media coverage. Before its Monthly ranking, Goldee’s pitmasters made 20 briskets a week.

“We got No. 1 on a Monday, and that weekend we did 50 briskets a day,” said Jonny White, a co-owner. “And we sold them all.” Hourslong lines are now the norm.

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The idea that barbecue can be good enough to justify a long wait to eat is nothing new in Texas. But it became a modern phenomenon in 2009. That’s when Aaron Franklin started serving, from a trailer next to an Austin highway, beef brisket that hit a career-making, culture-shifting trifecta of tenderness, beefiness and juiciness.

By the time he opened Franklin Barbecue with his wife, Stacy, in 2011, the bespectacled Aaron Franklin was on his way to becoming the country’s most recognizable pitmaster. His bestselling cookbooks and media savvy created home-schooled pitmasters and raised Texas barbecue’s national profile.

“Franklin made it cool for young folks to get into this, at the same time people were making pickles and craft cocktails and everything else,” said Robert Moss, the South Carolina-based author of “Barbecue: The History of an American Institution” and barbecue editor for Southern Living.

Texas Monthly also helped draw a wider array of practitioners to the craft. The magazine hired Daniel Vaughn as its first barbecue editor in 2013.

Vaughn, 45, is not from Texas. (“I knew brisket as corned beef in Ohio,” he said.) The fresh eyes he has brought to the beat has helped validate the work of pitmasters from all backgrounds. The top 50 joints list, which appears every four years — “like the Olympics,” Vaughn said — is especially influential.

Joel Garcia grew up in the Rio Grande Valley, and “didn’t even really get into barbecue until I moved to Austin in 2013 and picked up a copy of the Monthly list,” he said. “I’d never had homemade sausage, or brisket that was rendered well and still really juicy.”

Garcia immersed himself in Austin’s post-Franklin barbecue scene. He landed a job at Freedmen’s Bar under Evan LeRoy, a culinary school graduate in the vanguard of pitmasters who brought a broader array of skills to the craft. The menu at LeRoy and Lewis, the barbecue truck he opened in 2017, captured the precedent-busting sensibility: smoked beef cheeks and barbacoa, kale Caesar slaw, a cheeseburger made with smoked brisket.

LeRoy said the vitality of Austin’s barbecue scene is something new. “Growing up here,” he said, “we’d go to Lockhart to get the good stuff.”

LeRoy is among a number of pitmasters inspired by Valentina’s Tex Mex BBQ in Buda, which opened in 2013 and helped to push fajitas, tacos, housemade salsas and more into the state’s barbecue mainstream.

“The idea was to express what was happening throughout Texas, from the valley to El Paso to East and West Texas,” said Miguel Vidal, a co-owner of Valentina’s. “And that involved Mexican American culture.”

Garcia opened Teddy’s Barbecue in his hometown, Weslaco, near the Mexican border, in 2020, with his brother, Jesse, and wife, Bernardina. The menu combines central Texas barbecue staples with Mexican dishes like beef-fat tortillas and menudo, both made by the Garcias’ mother, Ana Maria.

“We serve things we grew up eating at home,” Garcia said. “We’re here because I was homesick.”

Texas barbecue’s innovations are often simple reflections of immigrant Texans’ experience, said Tatsu Aikawa, co-owner of Kemuri Tatsu-Ya, in Austin.

His family moved from Tokyo to central Texas in 1989. For a time, he lived next door to John Lewis. Lewis went on to open Lewis Barbecue in Charleston, South Carolina, after having been pitmaster at Franklin and La Barbecue, a trailblazing, female-owned business in Austin.

“Sometimes he’d slide me a plate of barbecue over the fence,” Aikawa said. “In Texas, barbecue is part of everyone’s life.”

Damien Brockway, who opened the Austin barbecue truck Distant Relatives in 2020, said he was inspired by the creative ferment of Austin’s barbecue scene. After a career spent in fine dining, he began to study cuisines of the African diaspora and his own heritage. Brockway’s team uses techniques enslaved Africans brought to plantations in the Caribbean and American South to cook dishes like roasted peanuts and pulled pork with tamarind molasses barbecue sauce.

“It wasn’t like I set out to educate folks,” he said. “It was more like the process educated me.”

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Regional distinctions in Texas barbecue today go beyond what kind of wood fuels the smokers — post oak? hickory? mesquite? — and often reflect the demographics of the areas where the barbecue is made. This is particularly true in Houston, the state’s biggest city, and one of the country’s most diverse.

It is home to East Texas barbecue, a style forged mainly in Black communities and found in local joints like Ray’s and Gatlin’s. East Texas menus pair common barbecue dishes with soul food staples, like fried catfish and oxtails, and often include hints of Cajun influence — especially when you get closer to Louisiana, as at Charlie’s, in Beaumont.

Quy Hoang became the city’s first working Vietnamese American pitmaster when he opened Blood Bros. with his Chinese American partners in 2018. It’s where to go for Thai green curry boudin balls and thit nuong pork belly burnt ends.

Phong and Hong Tran, who still also works as a machinist, opened Brisket &amp; Rice inside a working gas station in northwest Houston last year. “This is the epitome of Houston barbecue,” said J.C. Reid, the barbecue writer for the Houston Chronicle. “We don’t care if the nerds show up.”

Reid was taking aim at rival Austin while also noting restaurants in the area mainly serve blue-collar employees of nearby oil-service companies.

“Everybody loves brisket,” Hong Tran said, standing near the pit behind the restaurant, “but not everyone has the time to make it.” Tran’s brisket is juicy, with a tight, salty crust, and best eaten as he did growing up: over rice, with a drizzle of tomato-based sauce.

Texas barbecue’s success has been a double-edged sword outside the state. Moss, the South Carolina-based writer, credits Texas’ influence for “bringing back the pits, bringing back the attention to craft and detail, for side dishes not being an afterthought. That’s all been very good.”

But the spread of Texas barbecue has also had a homogenizing effect. “If it blows up too much, barbecue starts to get derivative, and it paves over some of the regional variations. That becomes a problem,” Moss said.

Back in Lockhart, the warm reception of Barbs is just one sign that Texas barbecue is continuing to evolve and improve, though. The restaurant’s early success isn’t a surprise to White, of Goldee’s, who has called Charnichart “the best brisket cook in Texas.”

This doesn’t mean he’s willing to relinquish Goldee’s status as Texas’ top barbecue joint. “Our main focus, for now and in the future, is to get No. 1 again,” White said. “We still don’t feel like we’ve reached our prime.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/03/dining/texas-bbq.html">The New York Times</a>.