Smoked brisket shows up on menus beyond barbecue joints
The worldwide popularity of Texas barbecue continues to grow apace, with smoked-meat emporiums in cities such as London and Paris offering legitimate brisket, ribs and sausage to even the most discerning expatriate from the Lone Star State.
But it’s also making inroads on a more granular scale, specifically on restaurant menus featuring Japanese, Tex-Mex, Italian and Cajun cuisines. In some cases, an established restaurant will partner with a local barbecue joint to provide a main ingredient, usually brisket, as the focus of a new dish. In another trend, entirely new restaurants featuring a fusion between barbecue and a seemingly unrelated cuisine have opened recently.
Japanese cuisine, specifically ramen, has been a particularly rich area of collaboration. In Austin, the restaurant Ramen Tatsu-ya collaborated with Franklin Barbecue to make a smoked-brisket ramen that was so popular it opened a sister restaurant called Kemuri Tatsuya that combines barbecue and Japanese izakaya (pub cuisine).
Meanwhile, Aaron Franklin partnered with chef Tyson Cole of Uchi restaurants to create Loro, a new “Asian smokehouse,” also in Austin.
Closer to home, several restaurants are teaming up with barbecue joints to offer smoked-brisketinfused dishes. In Tomball, Tejas Chocolate + Barbecue provides brisket to nearby Caroline’s Kitchen for the brisket tamales. Pallotta’s Italian Grill in Spring features CorkScrewed Ravioli, with cheese ravioli served on a bed of “barbecue cream sauce” and topped with chopped brisket provided by nearby CorkScrew BBQ.
In the Heights, Hugs & Donuts sells a brisket and cheese kolache with brisket provided by Willow’s Texas BBQ. Downtown, the Four Seasons hotel incorporates Feges BBQ brisket into its Sunday brunch service.
When it comes to barbecue fusion, Houston is well known for dishes that feature Cajun specialties combined with traditional smoking techniques. Indeed, smoked boudin is a specialty of many East Texas-style barbecue joints, including Ray’s BBQ Shack and Triple J’s. But on a recent trip to Austin, I visited The Switch, an ambitious restaurant in nearby Dripping Springs that explores the relationship between Texas ’cue and Cajun cuisine.
The Switch is a sister restaurant to the highly acclaimed Stiles Switch BBQ in Austin proper, known for its canonical Central Texas-style barbecue menu.
The Switch features a traditional Texas-trinity menu of brisket, pork ribs and house-made sausage. But that’s where the similarity to traditional barbecue ends. From the “Cajun specialties” menu, brisket is prominently featured in a brisket and sausage gumbo — brisket replacing chicken in this case.
Any restaurant that claims a Cajun pedigree will live or die by its gumbo. So that was the focus on my lunch visit.
The gumbo here is very good, especially if you are a dark-roux connoisseur. The chocolate-colored roux features a slick surface over a thick soup densely populated with chunks of smoky brisket and spicy discs of sausage. And in a surprising homage to true Cajun gumbo, a dollop of potato salad is hiding under the surface.
Yes, potato salad in gumbo. If you grew up in Southeast Texas like me, you know gumbo is always served over rice. But if you trek farther east into Louisiana, potato salad is often the side dish of choice with gumbo. I liked The Switch’s tribute to this lesser-known Cajun tradition.
Other dishes fully explore the Tex-Cajun fusion — a blackened catfish using a dry rub usually reserved for pork ribs, a sausage and crawfish pot pie, beef rib and grits, and a smoked chicken piquant.
As Texas barbecue continues to expand in the culinary conscious of American diners, collaborations and fusions of this type will become more commonplace. Smoked brisket is a versatile protein that inventive chefs and pitmasters can combine with other cuisines to build new dishes or even whole new restaurants.