Brett’s Backyard Bar-B-Que brings stellar smoked meat to small-town Texas
There’s not a lot happening in the small town of Rockdale, or so it would seem. A highway runs through the middle, populated with the usual gauntlet of fastfood joints and rural Texas staples such as Brookshire Brothers, Tractor Supply and Dollar General.
Like many small towns in Central Texas, Rockdale is having to reinvent itself. Recent years have seen the local coal-fired power plant as well as the city’s main hospital close down. Hightech companies including Amazon have been poking around for possible investment, but nothing has taken hold.
Taking a cue from other reinvented small towns — think
Round Top and Smithville — there’s an antiques store prominently located at the town’s main intersection. More significantly, though, the rebirth of rural Texas is dependent on a tradition that has been there all along: barbecue.
Fortunately for Rockdale, it is now home to one of the best new barbecue joints in Texas: Brett’s Backyard Bar-B-Que. Owner and pitmaster Brett Boren decamped from the booming metropolis of nearby Austin and Round Rock to open his dream barbecue joint in this sleepy community 40 miles to the east. The move represents a recent trend in which traditionally urban craftbarbecue operations are opening in rural areas of Central Texas.
Boren grew up in nearby Round Rock, which is now just a northern neighborhood of everexpanding Austin. Round Rock is a company town — Dell Computer is headquartered there — and like the industrial towns of the past where young men went to work at the local steel factory or coal mine, Boren ended up working as a product specialist (a fancy name for a salesman) at Dell.
Boren’s barbecue bona fides began years earlier when he joined friends for backyard barbecues to grill chicken and ribs, drink beer and watch Texas Longhorn football games on television. This escalated to participating in weekend barbecue competitions, and from 2004-11, he hit the competition circuit hard, including a stint as a guest cook for the Chisholm Trail Cookers team at the World’s Championship Bar-B-Que Contest at the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo.
During his competition days, he met the Moberg family, who had a metalworking business outside Austin. Among other things, they built direct-heat and offset barbecue smokers. Boren was one of the first to use their commercial smokers. Today, Moberg Smokers is the go-to commercial offset-smoker provider for elite Texas barbecue joints.
As the Moberg Smokers business grew, Boren accompanied owner Sunny Moberg when he delivered the colossal 1,000pound smokers to various clients throughout Texas, including Killen’s Barbecue in Pearland and Tejas Chocolate & Barbecue in Tomball. During these trips, Boren became friends with pitmasters.
He also began visiting Lexington, another small town boosted by the presence of Snow’s BBQ, named the best barbecue joint in the state by Texas Monthly. He struck up a friendship with owner Kerry Bexley and pitmaster Tootsie Tomanetz.
“We’d just sit around and talk about the barbecue business,” says Boren, who soaked up the experience of the state’s top barbecue purveyors. Even today when you visit Brett’s in Rockdale, you may run into Kerry or Tootsie having lunch there — perhaps the greatest compliment any Texas pitmaster can achieve.
In addition to the many connections he’s made in the Texas barbecue community, Boren depends on a local crew, starting with his girlfriend, Kelli Timmerman, who is from Rockdale. Assistants Fernando Austin and Ryan Young help out at the order counter and in the pit room.
On a recent Saturday morning, I drove into Rockdale and pulled into Brett’s parking lot, the smell of post oak wafting through the windows and the sound of gravel crunching under the tires. My buddy and I ordered a full tray of brisket, ribs, chicken and sausage, along with sides and desserts. It was all on point and some of the best in the state.
As we sat at a picnic table under a shady pecan tree, sipping Lone Star beer and picking the last remnants of silky meat off an exemplary beef rib, it felt like we were hanging out in the backyard of an old friend who just bought a weekend place in the country, far from the hustle and bustle of big-city life.