Houston barbecue and the sprawl factor
I get a lot of requests for where to eat great barbecue in Houston, especially from out-of-town friends and acquaintances.
I usually respond with two questions: “Where will you be staying?” and “How far do you want to drive?”
Ultimately, I’ve decided that Houston barbecue, especially as it is perceived by visitors, is a game of geography. Consider that two of the best barbecue joints in the area — CorkScrew BBQ in Spring and Killen’s Barbecue in Pearland — are an hour’s drive from each other without traffic and an hour and a half during rush hour.
Now let’s compare that to Austin. Arguably the two best joints there, Franklin Barbecue and La Barbecue, are a quick five-minute drive from each other, or a leisurely 25-minute walk. Several other top spots, including Micklethwait Craft Meats, John Mueller Meat Co. and Kerlin BBQ, are in the same neighborhood. You could visit them all in an afternoon (and I have).
This is significant in how our respective cities are perceived when it comes to smoked meats.
Certainly, Austin is still the capital of Texas barbecue. The main reason for this, of course, is that it has great barbecue. But it’s also because Austin barbecue is easily manageable. An out-of-town news crew can fly into Austin and do a comprehensive tour in a couple of days. The logistics of putting together a compre- hensive story about Austin ’cue is relatively easy — in journalism parlance, it’s “easy to package.”
Not so in Houston. Southern Living contributing barbecue editor Robert Moss visited recently and, to his credit, he remained unbowed by our city’s sprawl, hitting Ray’s BBQ Shack in the south and venturing as far north as CorkScrew in Spring, with several stops in between. His commitment paid off with a fulfilling experience.
“Houston’s barbecue scene is really, really interesting,” he wrote for the magazine. “It may require hours of driving around The Loop and up and down I-45 to find it all, but there’s a wide variety of barbecue out there to be sampled.”
That’s to be expected for a hardened barbecue explorer like Moss but perhaps not for a news crew flying in from the East Coast. My impression is that the scale and sprawl of Houston make it more difficult to “package” the scene here. Though the city has many more barbecue joints than Austin, national media tend to focus on the same Houston places over and over again.
The result is that the one thing that makes Houston barbecue unique — its incredible diversity of styles — tends to be ignored when it comes to national media coverage.
Houston’s sprawl does have some benefits, however.
In Austin, the market is generally thought to be saturated. Because of the city’s current number of high-profile Central Texas-style barbecue joints, it seems unlikely we’ll see any splashy new openings in the near future.
That’s not the case here — new barbecue joints continue to open in all parts of the city. The geographic separation means there is rarely direct competition among businesses.
For those neighborhoods that are beginning to see a concentration of barbecue joints, there still seems to be plenty of demand to soak up the supply. Recent visits to downtown standouts Pappa Charlies Barbeque, Jackson Street BBQ and the recently opened El Burro & the Bull in the Conservatory food hall on Prairie revealed busy dining rooms.
The scene north of Houston continues to grow, with more room for new entrants. CorkScrew BBQ and BBQ Godfather in Spring and Tejas Chocolate (and BBQ) in Tomball are raising the bar in that area. Goode Co. Barbecue just announced it will be opening an outpost in The Woodlands in early 2017.
In the FM 1960 area, SouthernQ BBQ & Catering has been a standout on Kuykendahl, and Wayne Kammerl has opened the third location of The Brisket House on Cypress Creek Parkway.
Beyond these concentrations in the central and northern areas of the city, Houston barbecue continues to be relatively spread out. So for any out-of-towners hoping to experience our barbecue offerings, a willingness to spend a little more time driving our highways will be rewarded with unique diversity of delicious smoked meats.