Texas Q’s female pitmaster brings craft barbecue to Kingwood
Sloan Rinaldi has spent most of her adult life working in maledominated industries. Most notably, she worked for 32 years in the commercial landscape construction business.
“I’d show up on a job site, and it would be me and 50 guys,” says Rinaldi.
This experience prepared her for the next career choice: barbecue pitmaster. Rinaldi is one of only a handful of female pitmasters in Texas who own and operate their own barbecue business.
In August, she opened her barbecue trailer in a small foodtruck park in the northern reaches of Kingwood. This accomplishment has been almost 10 years in the making.
Rinaldi, 58, comes from a family of restaurateurs and pitmasters. Her great-grandfather, John Fowler, opened a general store in Crockett in the early 1900s where he cooked barbecue on weekends. The store was eventually taken over by her grandfather and later by her uncle. Fowler’s Restaurant is still open in Crockett today.
Though Rinaldi became known in her family as a great home cook, she only started cooking barbecue in 2013 after watching the “BBQ Pitmasters” television series. She began tinkering in her backyard and traveled to Memphis to take a class with pitmaster Mark Lambert of the Sweet Swine O’ Mine competition team.
By 2014, she commissioned a trailer-mounted smoker from the East Texas Smoker Company in Tyler and went all in on the competition circuit. The Texas Q Competition BBQ & Catering team became a force — and a rare example of an all-female cooking team.
Rinaldi also began making her own line of barbecue sauces. In 2015, she made a proposal to H-E-B representatives to carry the sauces in their stores. After a presentation at H-E-B’s headquarters in San Antonio, the supermarket chain began carrying her line in local stores. Though no longer sold at H-E-B, her sauce can still be purchased online as well as at Texas Q.
Like many competition pitmasters, Rinaldi made the jump to retail barbecue in 2015 by opening a pop-up restaurant called The Q Joint, later renamed Texas Q. She would eventually take her prowess nationwide, competing in the 2018 Grillmasters Tournament episode of the Food Network’s “Chopped” series.
From there, Rinaldi and her all-female staff began doing pop-ups throughout the Kingwood area, including at local H-E-B supermarkets. From there, she made the jump to a full-fledged barbecue trailer that is now open every weekend.
Though she credits the most famous female pitmaster of all, Tootsie Tomanetz of Snow’s BBQ, as her primary inspiration, Rinaldi notes that the traditionally male-dominated Texas barbecue community has always been supportive of her efforts.
Situated among an eclectic combination of seasonal businesses — a haunted house, fireworks stand and crawfish joint — Rinaldi’s Texas Q is the anchor tenant of a family-friendly destination that comes with a covered seating area as well as plenty of TVs and a bouncy house for kids.
Though the haunted house and fireworks stand are currently closed, the adjoining crawfish joint just opened up for the season. And what’s more Southeast Texas than crawfish and barbecue?