Texas Monthly's 2025 Top 50 BBQ list
Right, so the thing about the canonical Texas BBQ joint — the Franklin's, the Snow's, the whole post-2009 prestige circuit — is that it is doing something almost completely unrelated to what Texas BBQ was for most of its history, namely Czech and German meat markets in central Texas selling whatever cuts didn't move that day, smoked because smoking was the preservation technology you had, served on butcher paper because plates were a fixed cost they didn't want to absorb and besides, you were supposed to be eating it standing up and leaving.
Lockhart, Luling, Taylor, the whole I-35 corridor between Austin and Waco — these were towns where the cotton economy collapsed, with no pretensions to being culinary destinations, and a bunch of central European immigrants who'd come over in the 1850s-80s to escape the Habsburg conscription and various failed revolutions ended up running general stores with meat counters in the back, and the meat counter outlasted the general store because Americans, even rural Americans, will pay for protein cooked by someone else.
(The German and Czech part matters because it explains the sausage — actual sausage, with casings, with technique, distinct from the smoked-tube-of-mystery you get in Memphis or KC — and it also explains the absence of sauce, which is the single most defamiliarizing thing about Texas BBQ to anyone whose mental model was formed by Kraft commercials and Famous Dave's.)
What happened in the late 2000s was that Aaron Franklin opened a trailer in Austin and applied a kind of obsessive-perfectionist single-cut focus — the brisket, prepared with a precision that nobody in Lockhart was bothering with because they were running a business, they had pork ribs and sausage and turkey and beans to also worry about — and the food media, which had just spent a decade canonizing the chef-as-auteur in fine dining, immediately recognized the structural template. Single product. Master practitioner. Cult of personality. Lines around the block as proof of authenticity. Texas Monthly had been ranking joints since the 90s but the rankings entered a genuinely inflationary spiral around then.
And the inflationary spiral did real things. Brisket prices tripled. The prestige joints started doing things — wagyu, dry-aging, custom-built smokers from Mill Scale Metalworks that cost more than a house — that nobody in 1962 would have recognized as continuous with the practice. The 2025 list (which I've now skimmed) has a place doing brisket-fat-washed cocktails, which, fine, but.
A further wrinkle is that the Texas BBQ canon now exists in two parallel universes that pretend to be the same universe. There's the prestige universe — Franklin, Goldee's, Interstellar, the new wave of Houston joints, places where the brisket is genuinely transcendent and you're paying $40/lb and waiting three hours and the proprietor has been profiled in the New Yorker. And there's the actual living tradition — Kreuz, Smitty's, City Market in Luling, places that haven't fundamentally changed their operation in 40 years, where the brisket is fine, sometimes excellent, sometimes mediocre, and the whole point is that you're eating it in a room that smells like it's been smoking meat continuously since the Eisenhower administration because it has.
The prestige universe absolutely depends on the existence of the living tradition for its mythology — the whole "central Texas style," the butcher paper, the no-sauce, the pickles-and-onions-and-white-bread, all of it is borrowed iconography from Lockhart — and the prestige universe is also slowly killing the living tradition by inflating customer expectations to a point where Kreuz Market on a weekday afternoon feels disappointing. Which it isn't, particularly. It is exactly what it has always been. You're the one who changed.
(The Black-owned East Texas tradition, which is older than the central Texas Czech-German thing and uses different woods and different cuts and actually does have sauce, is its own whole other story — it gets one or two slots on the Texas Monthly list as a kind of acknowledged exception, but the canonical "Texas BBQ" coverage is overwhelmingly about a specific German immigrant practice that got rebranded as the state's authentic folk cuisine sometime around 1985.)
Anyway the new list has Goldee's in Fort Worth at the top again, which, sure. The Burnt End in Kansas would object to several of the underlying premises but they're not on the list because they're in Kansas.
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