Texas Monthly Magazine
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Get in-depth coverage of news, reviews, and conversations about Texas barbecue. It's basically Christmas every day for barbecue lovers. We report on vital issues from politics to education and are the indispensable authority on the Texas scene, covering everything from music to cultural events with insightful recommendations.
Texas Monthly Magazine
2d ago
Texas Monthly Magazine
2w ago
All due respect to Ireland and its musicians, but the greatest trick the devil ever played was to permanently associate the phrase “take me to church” with Hozier. Before a milquetoast single by that name dominated the 2013 pop charts, the act of “taking ____ to church” was a colloquialism in African American Vernacular English that referred to a musical or sermonic performance so moving it could instill in both performer and audience a feeling of the presence of God. The exact origin of the phrase is unclear, but it was almost certainly born of the gospel traditions in Black churche ..read more
Texas Monthly Magazine
2w ago
Taylor Kearney’s cooking career makes one wonder why he’d want to come back to Texas. The chef has worked at restaurants by Thomas Keller and Charlie Palmer in Las Vegas, Michelin-starred spots in France, and high-end eateries in New York. Yet the East Texas native felt the pull of his home state while living in Boston. “My phone rang no less than ten minutes after I’d made up my mind,” he says. “It was one of the directors of operations and an old friend of mine who worked for Harwood [Hospitality Group] and said, ‘Hey, I’ve got a great opportunity if you’re interested,’ and the rest is histo ..read more
Texas Monthly Magazine
2w ago
The air had turned frigid thanks to an arctic front that had muscled its way down to San Antonio, but steaming hot water beckoned. My wife and I carefully climbed three icy wooden steps and then immersed ourselves in an outdoor cedar tub big enough for two. Submerged up to our necks, we spent the next hour soaking while we sipped wine and nibbled on charcuterie.The tub was filled with water from an underground reservoir that has been soothing Texans for 135 years. These days it is being tapped by Camp Hot Wells, which opened last year next to the ruins of a resort that once attracted pilgrims ..read more
Texas Monthly Magazine
2w ago
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
Texas Monthly Magazine
2w ago
State representative Glenn Rogers wants to confiscate your firearms and create a registry of firearm owners. So said the large, red-type message on a glossy mailer sent to voters’ homes in his rural North Texas district in late February. On the leaflets, Rogers’s head is clumsily pasted, via a photo editing tool, onto the body of a man in a suit carrying a leather bag full of assault rifles. The man is shaking President Biden’s hand, and a text bubble reads, “Their guns are yours.”Rogers was flipping through this mailer and others on a recent Friday in his study at his ranch office outside Gra ..read more
Texas Monthly Magazine
2w ago
Talk to anyone who’s ever worked with Jesse Plemons—a list that includes some of the biggest names in film and television—and they inevitably will tell you that he doesn’t act. “He simply becomes a character,” says Lesli Linka Glatter, who directed Plemons in the Texas Monthly–produced series Love & Death, which last year scored the Mart, Texas, native his third Emmy nomination. Plemons’s ability to make every performance, no matter how fleeting, feel immediately lived-in and real means you could be forgiven for knowing some of those characters’ names better than his. From Friday Night Lig ..read more
Texas Monthly Magazine
2w ago
When Jesse Plemons goes quiet—and here on the front porch of his childhood home, thirty minutes east of Waco, Jesse Plemons has just gone quiet—you don’t know if you’re at the end of something or the beginning. Nobody suggests so much by saying so little.Take his big entrance in Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon. Plemons, as a federal agent, knocks on the door of a grifter played by Leonardo DiCaprio, telling him he’s there to see about some murders. “See what about ’em?” DiCaprio asks. Plemons stops, considers just so. “See who’s doin’ it,” he says. In that half second, you fe ..read more
Texas Monthly Magazine
2w ago
Stuart Rowe has found himself revisiting a name tag pasted to a page in his old journal: “Hello my name is: Aaron,” it says. It had belonged to Aaron Bushnell, the young Air Force service member who died last month after setting himself on fire in front of the Israeli embassy in Washington, D.C., in an extreme act of protest against Israel’s actions in Gaza, which he called a “genocide” on social media prior to his death. In the journal, Rowe had written beneath the name tag: “Prayer: Figuring things out.”The writing is a memento from the pair’s first meeting, in August 2021 at an Anglican chu ..read more