A revolution in barbecue tacos
Historically, change comes slowly to Texas barbecue.
Beef brisket, now considered the canonical dish, took 30 years to become a standard menu item for a typical barbecue joint.
Until the 1950s, beef shoulder (clod) was the chosen beef dish of Texas barbecue pitmasters and aficionados. By the 1980s, changes in the meat-packing industry as well as consumer tastes allowed brisket to permanently replace shoulder clod on menus.
But as in society as a whole, changes are coming at a faster and more furious pace. It was barely 10 years ago that Snow’s BBQ in Lexington was named the best in the state by Texas Monthly, ushering in the era of craft barbecue.
And it was only six years ago that Valentina’s TexMex BBQ opened in Austin to rave reviews for its creative combination of Central Texas-style barbecue and Tex-Mex cooking traditions, specifically its variety of barbecue-inspired tacos.
In Houston, John and Veronica Avila of El Burro & the Bull restaurant launched their Tex-Mex-inspired barbecue not long after Valentina’s, bringing their brand of “Smoked Texana” to the Bayou City.
Just in the past year, tacos have become a standard item on many Houston barbecue-joint menus. Established spots including Tejas Chocolate & Barbecue, The Pit Room and Killen’s Barbecue have become known for their smoked-meat-filled tacos.
And in the past six months, a band of new pitmasters and pop-ups have made Houston ground zero in the barbecue-taco revolution.
Over a recent weekend, I drove all around Greater Houston sampling tacos from new and established vendors.
The standard brisket taco has morphed from a pile of chopped brisket on a standard-sized tortilla to a single, thick-and-long slice cut from the point of the brisket on a pillowy, over-sized flour tortilla and topped with various accoutrements such as guacamole, red or green salsa and queso fresco.
Jose Palomo of Palomo Pit BBQ pop-up tops his brisket taco with onions, cilantro, queso fresco and an excellent serrano-and-jalapeño salsa verde.
Eddie Ortiz of Eddie O’s Texas Barbecue pop-up offers a “Tejano taco” with thick-sliced brisket, fragrant house-made flour tortillas, guacamole, salsa roja, lime, pickled carrots, jalapeño and onions.
Ortiz serves a Tex-Mex twist on a pulled pork taco, too, with the pork cooked carnitas style, served in corn tortillas with onions, cilantro, salsa verde and lime.
Joseph Quellar of JQ’s Tex-Mex BBQ also offers a thick-sliced brisket taco on a flour tortilla with pickled red onions and a creamy salsa verde.
Quellar is experimenting with a San Antonio TexMex cult favorite as well — a puffy taco filled with smoked chicken tinga. Shredded, smoked chicken
is stewed in a tomato-and-chipotle sauce and stuffed into a corn tortilla that’s been flash-fried so that it puffs up and becomes crispy.
Barbacoa (smoked beef cheek), which has a long tradition in Tejano barbecue history, continues to make inroads onto barbecue-joint menus. Tejas Chocolate & Barbecue serves an excellent barbacoa taco as a lunch special every Tuesday, and both Ortiz and Quellar make their own versions of barbacoa tacos.
Certainly many barbecue joints — especially in South Texas — have offered some version of a barbecue taco over the decades. Piling smoked meats including barbacoa, brisket and shredded pork or chicken on a tortilla has a long history in the Lone Star State.
But it is only in the past few years that the tradition has started to evolve at a faster pace with a new generation of Tejano and Tex-Mex-inspired pitmasters bringing their own contributions and innovations to the table. The Tex-Mex barbecue-taco revolution is well underway.