That’s the Truth: Barbecue joint takes it up a notch
Tasteful restaurant serving remarkably textured, flavorful meats, sides and desserts
It was a busy, busy Mother’s Day at Truth BBQ, the cult favorite from Brenham that opened a second location in Houston this past January.
A church lady in Delft-blue lace strode past in high heels, balancing a loaded aluminum tray. A middle-aged son clutching a bouquet of flowers made his way toward a big family table in the back of the vast dining room.
Special packets of Mother’s Day macarons flashed their pastel hues at the opulent dessert counter, where Truth’s celebrated three-layer cakes were sliced to order, then garnished to a fare-thee-well, with whipped cream and fruit and a starshaped tuile. Business was brisk.
That’s where Houston is at the midpoint of 2019: A barbecue restaurant has become a perfectly reasonable place to take Mom on her special day.
Item one: Our collective appetite for smoked meats has grown exponentially since Ronnie Killen threw down the gauntlet at his
Pearland joint in 2013, establishing new local technical and quality benchmarks. Lo, six years on, the genre has exploded. Houstonians are lining up all over town without complaint — indeed, as a badge of courage — to acquire the good stuff, and paying premium prices for it, although there’s some grousing about brisket at $23 a pound. There’s something a little feverish about the way we chase the latest and greatest. Moms are not immune.
Item two: Truth may have started as a little roadside joint, but its Houston build-out is the grandest physical expression I’ve seen of the modern artisanal barbecue restaurant. Mom could never complain that you’ve taken her to some dingy, grease-soaked dive. Truth is huge and super-tasteful with its austere charcoal paint job, which matches the charcoal gravel of its minimalist xeriscaping.
The ever-present line may extend outdoors, but it does so beneath a broad covered porch, to the tune of piped-in classic blues. On weekends, a smiling line wrangler cruises through with fistfuls of iced-down local beers you can grab and pay for, on the honor system, at checkout.
Inside, under high ceilings and whitewashed brick, a gleaming 20-foot custom cooler separates pilgrims from the butcherblocked meat line. Big steel-framed windows, inside and out, afford a view of the three hulking, matte-black smokers in the pit room. They waft the soft aromas of post oak, but they look like brooding weapons of mass destruction.
At one of two chopping blocks, most days, is pitmaster Leonard Botello IV, trim and unflappable, his ball cap clamped backward, his beard impeccably barbered. I had been impressed by his work two years ago at a Texas Monthly barbecue event here, and by his mother’s stupendous cakes. But I wondered how the business would fare at a vastly increased urban volume.
Just fine, thank you very much. Early on, when demand was at fever pitch, they might run out of meats by noon-thirty or so. But lately they’re more in tune with demand, and though they had run out of pulled pork, ribs and turkey by 3 p.m. on a recent Friday, they still had brisket and three kinds of sausage.
Botello’s style may be far subtler on the smoke than I prefer, but he and his crew generally achieve remarkable textures and rich flavor with their meats. The pork ribs, in particular, have been jawdroppingly good on three different occasions: the meat so tender it slips off the bone as clean as a whistle, with barely a sigh. Yet it remains barky, too, with a sticky-peppery chew. A final painting of sauce as the rib is sliced off the rack — just a thin gloss — makes the meat shine.
With its sharp vinegary kick agitating an underlying tomato sweetness, that sauce is one of Truth’s delights. They sell the stuff on their imposing merch wall (that, too, is part of Texas barbecue 2019), along with an equally exuberant mustard sauce dotted with crinkly seeds and sweetened with a bit of honey. It’s great on the juicy slices of turkey, which seem to soak up more smoke flavor than the other meats; and on the worthy pulled pork, which is actually pulled to order right off the butt, which leaves it as fresh and moist as can be, with enough exterior char to punch up the flavors.
And what about the famous Truth brisket, the new standard by which Texas barbecue tends to be judged? My first sample was a disappointment. I had a mix of moist and lean on my plate, but the fatty side slice had insufficiently rendered fat and a certain dryness at its edges. The lean was just too dry for me.
But two subsequent brisket samples, and a sumptuous Saturday-only beef rib, made me see what the fuss is all about. That rib was as perfectly rendered as the best I’ve sampled; the rendering and moisture content on both fatty and lean beef slabs passed muster, too.
A prodigiously stuffed sandwich of sausage and brisket chopped to order in front of me, so that I could see the beef shearing apart into perfect long, skinny shards, turned out to be glorious. Its shiny brioche-type bun had its own gravitas. The brisket had just enough charry edges and a subtle squeeze or two of sauce mixed in that brought it all to life.
I loved the obstreperous longitudinal slices of the house-made garlic sausage, too, with their cargo of crunchy mustard seeds and their red-and-black pepperiness. The casing stretched before it snapped, and the meat grind was smoother than I like, but the flavor was all there.
The spicy links another day were too hot and dry for pleasure. But jalapeñoand-cheddar sausage proved to be a joy: juicy and cheese-slicked, with a lilt of clean green chile flavor.
The meats are artfully laid out on butcher-paperlined half-trays that snug together with cardboardboated sides on their own half-tray, so that the result is a meat-and-veg mosaic of uncommon grandeur. This may be the most Instagrammable barbecue serving style in town, made for the kind of overhead shots that gain a jillion “likes.”
But those pretty emerald-green beans are not just for looks — poised delicately between crisp and soft, they jump with porky bits, onion and tomato. My favorites of the well-conceived sides are the black-eyed peas sharpened with the hottest pico de gallo; the corn pudding that reads almost like a custardy cornbread stuffing; and long shreds of cabbage slaw in a not-toosweet dressing tinged with horseradish.
Everyone seems to love the oniony, cheesy tater-tot casserole, and so do I — except on the one day out of two that mine had too much salt. Seasoning seems a bit unpredictable on this ambitious spectrum of sides; potato salad that tasted bland one day was pickly and slightly funky the next time I tried it. The collards were too bitter even for me, and undercooked, besides. The hugely popular mac and cheese left me shrugging, its fat, striated corkscrews lounging in a salty quesotype sauce, with add-on bacon bits and cheddar shreds for texture.
At the end, you really should spring 8 bucks for a monumental slice of layer cake, each flavor put together with frosting that is miraculously smooth and uncrystalline. I am a big believer in the deep, dark Triple Chocolate Cake, with its acres of glossy dark-chocolate icing. German Chocolate and a lavishly nut-laced carrot cake rang my bell, too. I have friends who swear by the Banana Caramel and the Italian Cream, but both were too sweet for me. Your mileage probably varies.
Also worthy of note: a brand-new Tres Leches option cloaked in the swooniest, silkiest fluff of meringue; and a solicitous semi-service style that makes the whole operation feel almost extravagantly well-run. For that, thank general manager Corey Stewart, whose genial, folksy style and eagle eye filters down to every staffer.
Thank the Botello family, too. I used to wonder mildly if their “Truth” moniker was self-important, or perhaps self-deprecating. Now I’ve realized it’s just plain earnest, and that the quality really does shine through everything they do.