Central Texas barbecue.

Beef goes on with salt and pepper and nothing else, over post oak, in an offset smoker. Texas Monthly prints the wood and the pit beside every joint on its Top 50, and the same line repeats down the page: post oak, offset smoker, at Franklin Barbecue, LeRoy and Lewis Barbecue, Interstellar BBQ and la Barbecue. 1 The meat is sold by weight over a counter and lands on butcher paper. Brisket is the cut everything else is judged against, and The Infatuation's line on Franklin's is that it is "the beef that started a movement and put Central Texas-style barbecue in the conversation about America's most famous regional specialties". 2

The pits came out of butcher shops, and three of them still stand on the same ground. Kreuz Market was Jesse Swearingen's Lockhart meat market in 1875, and it sold barbecued pork and beef out of the butcher counter. 4 Black's Barbecue Lockhart opened as a market and slaughterhouse in 1931, and smoke was how the family kept meat without refrigeration. 5 Smitty's Market cooks in the brick building Kreuz occupied for 99 years, after a 1990 inheritance split the business from the walls. 4 So the beef is sold by the pound because a butcher sold it that way, and the sides were somebody else's business.

The fire is post oak and it burns in an offset, which means the meat never sits over the coals. Rub is salt and pepper. Texas Monthly's account of Louie Mueller Barbecue in Taylor says one of its original pitmasters, Fred Fountaine, "was among the first ever to wrap brisket in butcher paper, a standard practice today". 1 Nicolai McCrary puts the wood at the center of what a good one tastes like: "It's rich and tender, with the intense flavor of post oak that penetrates even the deepest regions of every bite." 7 A cook sets the number of briskets the night before and they go on overnight.

Aaron Franklin came in off a trailer beside an interstate. He took Best Chef: Southwest at the 2015 James Beard awards, the first pitmaster in any best-chef category, and read it as the trade's rather than his: "It is a monumental shift for the culinary world to recognize barbecue like this." 8 The other route is the family that never left. Five generations run Black's, and the brick pit Edgar Black Jr built is the one still burning. 5

The counter closes when the meat runs out, and Texas Monthly prints the closing hour as sold out at Franklin Barbecue and at Burnt Bean Company. Barbs B Q trades that way on Saturday and Sunday only. 1 Diego Duan of Camino Alamo told the Chronicle he wanted the same shape of day: "I also want to do the business like Franklin BBQ, every day open five hours and sold out every day." 3 LeRoy and Lewis charge forty dollars a pound against a twenty-nine dollar state average, and Franklin's weekend beef rib is forty-four. 1 13 Goodstock is the supplier worth knowing by name. Daniel Vaughn reports that Mum Foods Smokehouse And Delicatessen buys every brisket from it, calls it Nolan Ryan's beef company, and found a Dallas counter billing the same beef under its own name. 6

The oldest rooms are not the highest ranked, and the state's own magazine said so in print. Texas Monthly's 2021 edition dropped every Lockhart joint and wrote it as a regret: "For the first time, sadly, no Lockhart joints made the list (though the venerated Kreuz Market does appear in our Honorable Mentions, page 106)." 10 Lockhart is still absent from the 2025 list, and Barbs B Q is the town's entry on it, open two days a week since 2023. 1 Then MICHELIN arrived in Texas and gave la Barbecue a star in November 2024. Vaughn went back on a weekday morning: "the line was as long as it typically is on a slammed Saturday". 1