Eric and Jessica Mouton didn’t jump into the barbecue business hastily. The process to launch Mout’s Barbeque (pronounced like “moots”), in Winnie, started three years before its opening in August. The couple purchased an empty building just south of Interstate 10, between Houston and Beaumont, that had been a doctor’s office. Then Eric used the welding skills he developed in the marine salvage business to build a steel offset smoker. All the while they traveled the state with their four kids, researching the best barbecue joints in Houston, Austin, and Lockhart. Eric’s confidence in his own b ..read more

An unexpected bounty of barbecue awaits in the farthest northwestern reaches of the lower 48. Uprooted pitmasters and chefs from distant lands have converged here, between Seattle and Canada, to create everything from destinations where you can dine by firelight with a glass of cabernet franc to shacks with picnic tables just outside the front door. A decade ago, Dallas native and Texas A&M grad Jack Timmons opened the first Jack’s BBQ location in Seattle’s industrial SoDo neighborhood. Today he’s working on his seventh location, and has added Jack’s Chicken Shack and Jackalope, a Tex-Mex ..read more

There are only a couple of days left to visit Dozier’s Barbeque in Fulshear before it closes for good on March 30. Ed Dozier opened the barbecue joint in 1957, and Steve Baur and Jim Cummins purchased it in 2019. They told me in a joint statement via email that several challenges, including rising costs of labor, meat, and other goods, contributed to the closure. “We concluded that it was largely the things we could not control, rather than the things we could, that couldn’t be overcome,” they explained.Baur and Cummins hired pitmaster Jim Buchanan in 2020, hoping to bring the joint back to gl ..read more

Seven years ago, Evan LeRoy and Sawyer Lewis opened the LeRoy and Lewis Barbecue truck in Austin with the hope of opening a brick-and-mortar location as soon as possible. “The food truck was meant as a tool to get us to where we are today,” Lewis said. They didn’t expect it to take this long to open their restaurant, which began serving on February 28. Leasing an affordable space in the competitive Austin market and finding the right location were challenges, but their patience has paid off.So many of the food truck hindrances are gone with the new space. (The food truck remains open in its us ..read more

When Caleb and Matt Johnson opened Lockhart’s Mill Scale Metalworks, in 2018, customers had to spend the price of a small car to buy one of the company’s commercial offset smokers, sight unseen. Every project was made to order, so the brothers didn’t keep any inventory. The welding shop, northeast of downtown, didn’t even show up on Google Maps for several years. It relied on referrals to bring in orders, some from as far away as Aruba, Kuwait, or Singapore. But the shopping experience, for both backyard barbecuers and professional pitmasters, has changed with Mill Scale’s new 10,000-square-fo ..read more

MARCH PIT PERKS Brisket U | Get $15 off any Brisket U Class with code TXMNEWS24scTW La Barbecue | Happy hour on Wednesdays and Thursdays at 3:00 pm-6:00 pm Juan and Allie’s BBQ | Address: 114 Texas Spur 511 Sunset Texas 76270 Bar-A-BBQ | Easter pre-orders available; Will be open Easter Sunday, March 31. Tejas Chocolate & BBQ | 20% off merchandise, rubs, and sauce bottles.* Sundays offer brisket hash, and Mondays offer Cubanos. They are now open seven days a week! The post March 2024 Pit Perks appeared first on Texas Monthly ..read more

A plastic sign along the sidewalk in Lemon Grove, California, just outside San Diego, read “Texas BBQ” in bold red letters with an arrow that pointed to Coop’s West Texas Barbecue. I was way west of West Texas, but conspicuous restaurant names like Coop’s make it easy to find smoked brisket in a foreign land. The two steel smokers out front told me I was in the right place.Bradrick Cooper, a native of Midland, opened the place in 2010. He cooks with mesquite and coast live oak trees found in California. A big barrel smoker outside is where he gets the brisket so tender; the brick smoker behind ..read more

“Life-changing” is an overused adjective, especially when it comes to food. Though there are some restaurants where the experience can truly alter one’s professional trajectory. Louie Mueller Barbecue in Taylor was that place for me, and for many others. A bite of brisket there in 2006 changed my perspective on how good barbecue could be. It was the same year that Louie Mueller received the America’s Classics award from the James Beard Foundation, making it the second Texas barbecue joint to earn the distinction (the Original Sonny Bryan’s in Dallas was honored in 2000). The Best Chef: Texas c ..read more

New Year’s Day of 2024 was rough for Chris Magallanes. The co-owner of Panther City BBQ, in Fort Worth, received a call that morning from his son, Cristian, who’s also an employee of the barbecue joint, asking why their twin Moberg smokers that are mounted on a trailer, together worth about $30,000, weren’t parked outside the restaurant. Magallanes pulled up footage from a security camera and saw someone cutting the trailer lock at 5:12 that morning, then hitching it to a white van and driving away. “It’s hard enough to turn a profit, and when your equipment gets stolen,” Magallanes said, “tha ..read more

Every Thursday morning Charles Brewer procures sliced oxtails from his local H-E-B. He sprinkles them liberally with TexJoy barbecue seasoning, then adds extra dashes of paprika and onion powder. After that, he smokes them over red oak and hickory for twelve to fifteen hours at his joint, Charlie’s Bar-B-Que, in Beaumont. That’s how long it takes a much bigger brisket to cook, so it might come as a surprise that a three-inch chunk of meat is equally stubborn. “It’s a long process, but the payoff is worth it,” Brewer told me. “We never have any leftovers.” Oxtails are sliced from the tail of a ..read more