Houston barbecue shines in national spotlight
For better or worse, Americans will always see Houston as the home of Tex-Mex and barbecue. This can be traced to the presidency of George H.W. Bush who, starting in the early 1990s, flaunted his Texas bona fides with photo ops at Houston culinary institutions including Ninfa’s for fajitas and Otto’s for smoked meats.
Contemporary Houston barbecue’s turn in the national spotlight can be traced to 2003, when a little-known New York chef named Anthony Bourdain rolled into town and taped a segment of his “Cook’s Tour” series for the Food Network in an episode called “The BBQ Triangle.”
In addition to taping in Kansas City and North Carolina, Bourdain featured Houston’s Burns Bar-B-Q in Acres Homes. Bourdain’s interview with patriarch Roy Burns Sr. is the equivalent of a historical document for Houston barbecue. Bourdain would revisit Burns in 2016 when he taped a segment for his travel show “Parts Unknown.”
Houston barbecue remained a regional trend throughout the 2000s and began challenging Austin for Texas barbecue supremacy starting in the early 2010s as the craft-barbecue movement gained a foothold here with the opening of Gatlin’s BBQ in 2010.
Nationally, the Austin barbecue scene has always played up its cool factor against Houston’s more blue-collar, “Urban Cowboy” image.
But that all changed in August of this year when GQ magazine proclaimed “Houston Is the New Capital of Southern Cool.” The piece featured Houston barbecue front and center, with references to Ray’s BBQ Shack, The Pit Room, Turkey Leg Hut and the Bayou City’s pirate pitmaster Bookity Bookity Boudain man making a rare cameo appearance in the high-profile media spot.
I was fortunate to accompany the article’s author — GQ’s food critic and New Orleans resident Brett Martin — for much of his barbecue tour across Houston. This occurred almost a year earlier in May 2018, and among other destinations Martin was interested in the pop-up events hosted by Blood Bros. BBQ. Though no pop-ups were scheduled during that visit,
Martin returned to Houston in December, and we had lunch at the new Blood Bros. BBQ brickand-mortar location on its opening day.
Interest piqued, Martin returned to Houston this past June and spent a day trundling around southwest Houston with the Blood Bros. team of Robin and Terry Wong and pitmaster Quy Hoang. It is certainly a credit to Martin that the food critic of an upscale national magazine would be interested in touring blue-collar and ethnically diverse Houston neighborhoods such as Alief, where the Hoang and the Wong brothers grew up.
That visit resulted in what may be the most high-profile national coverage of Houston barbecue to date: Smithsonian Magazine features Blood Bros. BBQ in its November 2019 issue with a splashy, 2,000-word article by Martin titled “How Three Guys from Houston Are Cooking Up a Revolution in Texas Barbecue.”
And that’s only the beginning when it comes to recent national coverage. Chef and pitmaster Ronnie Killen was recently featured in a Washington, D.C., television spot as part of the Astros-Nationals World Series coverage featuring Houston and D.C. restaurants. (Who knew Killen was once in line to be the White House chef ?)
This past summer, “Good Morning America” ran a remote segment from Houston that featured host and native Houstonian Michael Strahan presiding over a friendly barbecue competition featuring Houston’s Southern Q BBQ and Pizzitola’s Bar-BCue.
The one common thread in the recent national interest in Houston barbecue is authentic stories. Starting with Roy Burns and family building a barbecue institution from a roadside stand to their current campus in Acres Homes, to the Blood Bros. BBQ story of Asian-American friends from a blue-collar neighborhood influencing the direction of Texas barbecue, Houston barbecue will always be about substance over flash.