Seventeen years ago, on assignment for The New Yorker, Calvin Trillin travelled through central Texas on a barbecue-themed road trip. He was with editors from Texas Monthly, which had just published its top fifty barbecue joints in the state, a list which it updates every four years, and which, among Texans, is met with Olympic-level anticipation. That year, the magazine decreed that the best brisket in Texas was being served in the hamlet of Lexington, at Snow’s, a humble spot whose smoked meats were overseen by a no-nonsense seventy-three-year-old pitmaster named Miss Tootsie. Snow’s was open only one day a week, and served up sausage, brisket, and pork ribs for $8.45 a pound. Trillin wrote, “I’ve heard it argued that, absent some slippage in management, a barbecue restaurant can only get better over time: many Texas barbecue fanatics have a strong belief in the beneficial properties of accumulated grease.”
Snow’s is still open, on Saturdays only; if you plan to visit, be prepared for a line that starts forming before dawn. But the once common idea that the best Texas barbecue comes from long-running small-town operations is increasingly obsolete. In 2003, the Texas legislature declared Lockhart, a small town about an hour south of Austin, the state’s official barbecue capital. Yet when Texas Monthly last published its list, in 2021, not a single Lockhart barbecue joint made the cut. Many of the places that are likely to make up this year’s list, which will be announced in May, describe what they do as “craft barbecue,” a term that gained traction around a decade ago. It has come to connote high-quality meats, attentively made sides, and a chef’s rigor applied to what was at one time considered humble food. When I asked Daniel Vaughn, Texas Monthly’s full-time barbecue editor, about craft barbecue, he told me that it was a label he generally tried to avoid. “It signifies that other barbecue people—old-school barbecue people—aren’t paying that close attention,” he said. “I usually just call it ‘big-city barbecue.’ And I call it that because it requires a population base of people who have enough money to support it. That just doesn’t happen in a small town.”
Vaughn didn’t mean this as an insult; to his taste buds, Texas barbecue is better than ever. Last year, when Michelin came to Texas for the first time, four of the fifteen restaurants that received a star served barbecue. This can result in a certain amount of cognitive dissonance; in some craft-barbecue restaurants, a serving of brisket may cost as much as a steak, even as the décor—neon beer signs, newspaper clippings on the wall—evokes a roadside shack. People who worked in restaurants where lunch could easily top fifty dollars nonetheless described barbecue to me as “American peasant food,” “working-class food,” and “poor man’s food.”
I don’t eat meat, so I recently took an acquaintance with an educated palate—Clayton Cook, the manager of LeRoy and Lewis Barbecue, in Austin—with me to Micklethwait Barbecue, the new brick-and-mortar iteration of a well-regarded food truck. The dining room was in a whitewashed former Baptist church, in a gentrifying East Austin neighborhood. Inside, there were paintings of hunting dogs on the wall, soul music playing on the stereo system, and brisket for thirty-two dollars a pound. Like most serious barbecue aficionados, Cook eschewed utensils. He eyed a pork rib appraisingly before digging in. “A lot of people talk about ribs falling off the bone—that’s not what you want,” he said. “I can bite into this easily, but you can see how it’s maintaining its integrity. Nice smoke on it, too.”
Texas is famous for beef brisket, which is traditionally served sauceless and simply seasoned, often with just salt and pepper. “It’s what every customer thinks they want,” Cook said. The high price of brisket is sometimes cited as a sign of a culture in decline. (A number of online venders sell MAGA-style red hats that read “Make brisket $1.97/lb again.”) LeRoy and Lewis was the first barbecue restaurant in Austin to charge thirty dollars a pound for brisket, a move that briefly sparked outrage. (The price is now forty dollars a pound.) Still, brisket is generally a loss leader. “If you run a steakhouse and you buy five pounds of good rib eye, you’re selling five pounds of good rib eye,” Cook said. “But you get a ten-pound brisket and you trim it—now it’s an eight-pound brisket. You throw it on the smoker and it cooks for twelve hours—now it’s a six-pound brisket. And not only are your products getting smaller and smaller, but your overhead, your labor, is getting bigger and bigger, right? You have to pay someone to trim the brisket, then you’ve got to pay two guys to cook the brisket—someone’s gotta light the fire in the morning and watch it for half a day, then the guy’s gotta come in and watch the fire for the second half of the day. Then you gotta pay another guy to come in the morning and slice the brisket. So it took four guys three days to sell this beef item.”
Outside, we found Tom Micklethwait, the owner, standing by a smoker, adjusting oak logs in the firebox. On the grate, a half-dozen hunks of beef were slowly smoking. Cook and Micklethwait lightly shit-talked a recently opened cocktails-and-barbecue spot, which they declared too high-concept; the idea of truffle-oil macaroni and cheese provoked particular outrage. “They’re missing the point,” Micklethwait said. What was the point? “Barbecue, when it’s done well, it’s like folk art. It’s the people’s food, definitely unpretentious. A lot of it is very regional. It’s a way to explore local culture,” he said, spreading the coals. The fire was on the verge of burning too hot. “That said, Austin culture is now a lot of tech bros. So maybe, in that context, it makes sense.”
Daniel Vaughn, the barbecue editor, grew up in Ohio, where beef brisket was typically “corned and boiled and served with a side of limp cabbage,” he wrote in his 2013 book, “The Prophets of Smoked Meat: A Journey Through Texas Barbecue.” In 2001, he followed his now wife to Dallas where his first taste of Texas brisket, at Peggy Sue BBQ, was a “revelation.” He began taking drives across the state and pulling over wherever he saw a sign featuring a cow or a flame. On his blog, Full Custom Gospel BBQ, he ranked barbecue joints on a scale from one (“don’t bother”) to five (“worth planning a trip around”).
In East Texas, Vaughn ate hot links drenched in sweet sauce, and in South Texas he tracked down one of the few places that still slow-cooked whole cow heads, to make barbacoa. The most celebrated Texas barbecue came from the center of the state, where German and Czech immigrants had established a tradition of slow-cooked, wood-smoked meats.
Vaughn uncovered some hidden treasures during his road trips. But the delectable small-town barbecue joint was increasingly an endangered species. Vaughn ate at places like Jake N’ Boo’s Backdoor Bar & Grill (“just a sad plate of barbecue”) and Big Daddy’s Rear of the Steer (dry pork, overcooked brisket, too-sweet greens ). People and money were now concentrated in cities, and Texas’s rural areas were struggling. (Eighty-four per cent of Texans now live in urban areas, a share comparable to Maryland.) The state’s farms and ranches were reckoning with urban sprawl, competition from a globalized food system, and the effects of climate change, including persistent drought. It wasn’t surprising that Vaughn found some down-home joints serving up store-bought sausage, powdered banana pudding, and potato salad that came in vats from a food distributor.
Still, Vaughn concluded at the time, “Texas’s best barbecue is a rural creation.” Then, in the early twenty-tens, an enthusiastic back-yard cook named Aaron Franklin opened a restaurant in East Austin, after outgrowing his acclaimed food truck. Franklin had learned the ropes from John Mueller, a member of a storied Texas barbecue family. In his own establishment, he applied a rigorous—some would say obsessive—attention to his product. Barbecue had been a way to make use of leftover and low-grade cuts of meat; Franklin Barbecue insisted on fattier, pricier prime-grade brisket. The restaurant broke Vaughn’s evaluative scale, meriting his first-ever six-star rating: “Reconsider your honeymoon destination.” In short order, a Bon Appétit editor named it the best barbecue in the country, and Franklin became the first pitmaster to receive a James Beard Award for best chef.
The restaurant opened at an opportune time, catching the Austin real-estate boom and feeding a hunger for regionally distinct dishes. The barbecue tray, with its juicy meat, purple slaw, and heaps of potato salad arrayed on a butcher-paper background, turned out to be perfectly suited to Instagram. The multi-hour lines to get into Franklin Barbecue became a part of the accumulating legend. (The only person allowed to skip the line, apparently, was President Barack Obama, who, in 2014, ordered three hundred dollars’ worth of barbecue to eat on Air Force One.)
Barbecue aficionados speak about “the pre-Franklin era” as if it were a different geological epoch. Now restaurants that had been open for decades suddenly had lines out the door; customers were asking pitmasters for autographs. “It was, like, holy moly, we’ve got a thing here,” one fourth-generation member of a barbecue family told me. New restaurants opened up, serving craft barbecue in the Franklin mode; established ones stepped up their game. Within a few years, nine of the top ten places on Texas Monthly’s list served prime brisket. In the pre-Franklin era, “the Top Fifty list would come out and maybe fifteen of them would be legitimately very good,” Cook told me. “Today, there will be maybe forty places that make great barbecue and still don’t make the list.”
In 2012, Vaughn talked the editors of Texas Monthly into a freelance job helping compile the next year’s list; Franklin Barbecue took the top spot. Vaughn soon parlayed the gig into a full-time job. He pointed out to me that his career has risen in tandem with Franklin’s—the barbecue chef and the barbecue analyst, together teaching diners to appreciate a food that they’d long taken for granted.
By the end of the judging for the 2025 list, Vaughn will have visited more than a hundred and eighty barbecue restaurants across the state in the span of six months, or an average of at least one plate of barbecue every day. (He’ll eat at some places more than once.) The judging period is one of high alert for barbecue restaurants. Cook has been watching Vaughn’s Instagram stories for clues about his travels: “If he’s having lunch within a hundred-mile radius of Austin, you send it out to the whole group chat—like, Alert! Daniel is in the area!”
But, when I spoke with Vaughn over Zoom at the end of January, he seemed glum. I wondered whether he was growing disillusioned with barbecue after more than a decade of marathon consumption. It turned out, instead, that he’d had to scrap a trip to eat East Texas barbecue; he had a cold, and decided it wouldn’t be fair to show up with dulled taste buds.
It’s hard to overstate the weight that the list carries in Texas. I spoke to multiple people who could rattle off previous years’ rankings with remarkable facility. In part, that’s because earning a spot can make the difference between a restaurant staying afloat or not. Like anyone who’s converted a hobby into a career, Vaughn is ambivalent about his influence. He’s one of the forces helping to optimize the world of barbecue; on the whole, the quality is better, even if the surprises are fewer. A few years ago, Vaughn told me, he made a lightly critical comment about a restaurant’s chicken. The restaurant then changed suppliers, managing to track down one of the last small-scale, hormone-free chicken farmers in central Texas. When Vaughn returned recently, the smoked chicken was “really delicious,” and also quite expensive, he said. “It was a 1.67-pound half-chicken, and it was $53.44. I was, like, Are you fucking kidding me? But it’s directly in response to what I said, so how can I complain?”
In my conversations with barbecue people, there was often uneasy tension about whether craft barbecue is something new or a return to an old way of doing things. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Lockhart, Texas’s official barbecue capital.
The Web site of Black’s Barbecue, in Lockhart, calls it the state’s oldest family-operated barbecue restaurant, promising a dining experience evocative of “the good ole days”: “People talking to other people, phones are put away, and the smell of brisket fills the air.” The copy invokes family, belonging, and tradition, with an emphasis that verges on the defensive. In fact, it’s skirting the edges of a bitter family feud.
Black’s Barbecue was founded in 1932 by Edgar Black, Sr. In the midst of the Depression, barbecue was a good strategy for making use of every possible scrap from the animals. In “The Prophets of Smoked Meat,” Vaughn credited the restaurant with “the best bite of brisket” he’d ever had.
Mark Black, a great-grandson of Edgar, Sr., grew up eating barbecue at least five days a week. “It was everyday-man’s food,” Mark told me. “They’d have butcher knives attached to the table by a chain. You’d get a big chunk of meat and you’d eat it there, with some crackers.”
In college, Mark and his twin brother, Mike, both studied finance; in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, finance jobs were hard to come by, and Mike returned to Lockhart to help with the family business, alongside his father, Terry. Around the time that craft barbecue took off, Mike says, Terry received an ominous fax summoning him to a board meeting later that day. What happened then, and why, is a matter of contention, but the result is that Terry’s brother, Kent, ended up in control of Black’s Barbecue and the family split into two factions that, more than a decade later, are still not on speaking terms.
Kent and his sons are still affiliated with the original business. “Our business plan is to not change a thing,” the Black’s Barbecue Web site proclaims. “Our nineteen-thirties style of cooking is something I don’t want to see disappear, because a lot of people have never tasted real barbecue,” Kent told me.
For their part, Mark and Mike have embraced the craft-barbecue world. In 2014, the twins, along with their sister Christina, opened Terry Black’s Barbecue, in Austin, catering to what they sensed was an expanding market for better-quality meats and handmade sides. (Terry, the restaurant’s namesake, doesn’t play much of a role in its daily operations; the family drama “destroyed him,” Mark told me.) There are now Terry Black’s Barbecue restaurants in Dallas, Fort Worth, and Waco; it may be the closest thing Texas has to a craft-barbecue chain.
The Austin location of Terry Black’s is popular with what one employee described as “the lanyard crowd”—people in town to attend one of the city’s many conventions. On a recent visit, when I paused to take a closer look at the barbecue pits, which are situated prominently, near the entrance, a pitmaster in a tie-dye shirt leaped up to give me a practiced, enthusiastic speech about the virtues of wood-smoked meat: “It’s about using the local protein, the local woods, and then just keeping the traditions alive of how your parents used to do it and their parents used to do it.” That’s a little misleading: for the past half century or so, the Black family patriarchs have used a time- and labor-saving rotisserie to cook brisket, a method which the new generation has eschewed in favor of a more attentive style of indirect smoking, which requires a pitmaster on site twenty-four hours a day. But even craft barbecue needs to frame itself in terms of tradition; part of what you’re buying at all the Black family operations is the idea that the past was a more nourishing, coherent time, and that the best things don’t need to change, even as the world changes around them. That said, doing things differently seems to be working out; Terry Black’s restaurants in Dallas and Austin have both made the Texas Monthly list, while Black’s Barbecue, though still a Texas barbecue mainstay, hasn’t merited a mention since the schism.
Kent, who is now in his early seventies, seems to harbor a dream that the family will one day be able to gather around the table together. “There is no feud,” he told me. “I’m really wondering why they keep bringing this up. It’d be so nice if they would start talking to their grandmother again—she misses them.” The Black twins seem unlikely to forgive and forget what they understand as a coup against their father.
In 2022, Mark and Mike announced a new Terry Black’s location in Lockhart, less than a mile from the original Black’s Barbecue. If you drive into town from Austin, Terry Black’s is the first barbecue restaurant you’ll see. I asked Mark if the Lockhart outpost was a “spite shop.” (On an episode of “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” Larry David’s character is so peeved about being served a tepid latte at Mocha Joe’s that he opens Latte Larry’s next door.) “I’d be lying if I said there wasn’t a little bit of that,” Mark said. The two branches of the family occasionally lob insults at one another via the signs outside their restaurants. (Black’s: “only 1 original Black’s BBQ in Lockhart.” Terry Black’s: “Pitmaster. Where the title is earned not because mama said so.”)
Mark and I were speaking in Terry Black’s Austin offices, which has an expansive view of the city skyline. Soon, he had to go: it was time to meet with representatives from Uber, who wanted to rent the restaurant for an event at South by Southwest—I didn’t catch the full details, but they involved synchronized swimmers, a live bull, and Willie Nelson. The subject of barbecue and family feuds seemed hard for him to shake, however. “Our grandma’s never stepped foot in any of our places,” he said. “It’s terrible.”
“Barbecue is so rooted in tradition and history,” he went on. “It’s just who you are, and the more diluted it gets—maybe people grasp onto that identity, and they don’t want to lose it, and don’t want anyone else to mess with it.” ♦
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