The barbecue corridor
8 open around Austin
Market towns southeast of Austin where the meat counter came first and the restaurant came second, or never.
The towns
Known for, here
The Central Texas pit4 here
- Barbs B Q — Post oak in an offset, run by three women who learned the pits at Franklin, with a Brownsville accent laid over it. On the 2025 Texas Monthly Top 50, a 2024 MICHELIN Bib Gourmand, and on The Infatuation's twenty-one-room statewide list in April 2026.
- Kreuz Market — Post oak, salt and pepper, and pits lit in 1999 from coals dragged up the street in a steel wash tub. Texas Monthly's barbecue editor keeps eating here and has put the room in the honorable mentions twice, in 2021 and 2025, without ever putting it on the Top 50.
- Black's Barbecue Lockhart — The brick pits Edgar Black Jr built, still running the 1932 rub on brisket, beef rib and hand-tied link. The Infatuation put this room second of five in Lockhart and carried it onto a twenty-one-room statewide list in April 2026.
- Smitty's Market — The 1900 Kreuz building and its original brick pits, still burning, with the queue routed down a hallway a few feet from the fire. Trading as Smitty's since 1999, when the family split the business from the building.
Elsewhere around Austin