Remembering the ‘dark prince’ of Texas barbecue
John Mueller, influential Texas pitmaster and one-time heir apparent to the Louie Mueller Barbecue dynasty, died recently. He was 52. His family did not share the cause of death. He was living in Frisco and working there with Hutchins BBQ.
He grew up working alongside his father, Bobby, in the eponymous barbecue joint his grandfather, Louie, opened in the 1950s in downtown Taylor. By the late 1990s, however, due to disagreements with his family, he left the business. When his father died in 2008, John’s older brother Wayne left his job as a sports marketing consultant in Houston to take over the business.
John Mueller would go on to open his own barbecue joint on Manor Road in Austin in the early aughts. There he perfected a technique known as hot-andfast cooking, in which the barbecue is cooked at a higher temperature for a shorter period of time. Though the location would become a cult favorite among nearby University of Texas students and alumni, his time there was famously marked by who he hired as a kitchen assistant.
In 2004, he brought on an inquisitive young pitmaster from College Station named Aaron Franklin to chop onions. Franklin would go on to open Franklin Barbecue in Austin, now the most famous and lauded of all Texas barbecue joints.
John Mueller opened the JMueller BBQ trailer on South First Street with his sister, LeAnn, in 2011. He invited Franklin Barbecue alumnus John Lewis to help him out on the pits. When the partnership with his sister ended acrimoniously, LeAnn reopened the trailer, without her brother, as “La Barbecue” (her initials), with Lewis as the pitmaster. The siblings reconciled in later years.
La Barbecue is still one of the most highly regarded barbecue joints in Austin, and Lewis is now one of the foremost ambassadors of Texas barbecue in the United States, opening Lewis Barbecue in Charleston, S.C., in 2015.
John Mueller opened several other barbecue trailers and outlets over the years, with his barbecue often mirroring his state of mind, veering from lucid and focused to erratic and disjointed. He earned a reputation for an irascible personality that gained him the nickname “the dark prince of Texas barbecue,” a title he himself often embraced.
Anyone who got to know Mueller knew that was mostly just a persona. He was, more often than not, generous and charming.
Mueller was well known to the Houston barbecue community, participating in charitable events here and mentoring Houston pitmasters, including Jim Buchanan of Dozier’s BBQ and Wes Jurena of Pappa Charlies Barbeque.
In 2012, he began traveling to Galveston once a year to cook at his friend Neil Strawder’s charitable event at the St. Augustine of Hippo Episcopal Church. I attended that year and found Mueller sitting by himself in a lawn chair tending the fire in a trailer pit. We had met briefly the year before at his JMueller BBQ trailer, but he remembered me and waved me over to join him.
We sat for an hour talking, mostly off the record, about his family and Texas barbecue.
When I got up to leave he shook my hand and said, “See, I’m not really the bad guy everyone makes me out to be.”
Houston Chronicle critic Alison Cook remembers him similarly.
“I’ve always liked John and rooted for him once I got over the shock of our first meeting,” she said. “He was so talented, and so prickly.”
She explains: “Back when he had his place on Manor Road in Austin, I went to check it out for a piece I was doing for Gourmet. It was closed, no one there, so I got out of my rental car and went up to peer in the window. Suddenly this big Jeep roars up, slams on the brakes, and I hear this loud, challenging voice: “Can I HELP you? It was John.
“He struck me as so rude and unpleasant that I was reluctant to return. But when I did, I was bowled over by his brisket. It had this unforgettable aroma. I became a fan, and later, we laughed over our unfortunate first encounter.”