Burnt Bean top notch for barbecue

Seguin spot excels with brisket, pork ribs, sausage; don’t miss the breakfast

SEGUIN — Supply and demand is a cruel sport. I watched it play out on a Sunday morning here as I stood in line at the barbecue hot spot Burnt Bean Co. for the second time in a single day.

On Sunday mornings, Burnt Bean opens at 8 a.m. for breakfast. I was the first in line at 7:15, determined not to miss out on menudo, barbacoa and brisket huevos rancheros. Lunch usually kicks in around 10:30. So at 9:15, I rejoined the line, which by then stretched 30 people long, out the door and onto the sidewalk.

About 20 minutes into the slow penguin waddle toward the counter, the news surged through the line like smokestack lightning: The barbacoa’s gone; the menudo, too.

And suddenly the space opened in front of me like the parting of a blue-jean sea. Six people in front of me left. Six people who had gotten up early on a Sunday, driven to Seguin’s main square and waited 45 minutes for a breakfast that never came.

That’s a hard way to start a Sunday, but it’s the first-comefirst-served reality of Burnt Bean Co., the barbecue joint started late last year by competition pitmaster Ernest Servantes and business partner and acolyte David Kirkland. It’s an overnight success that unfolded after more than a year of overnights tending their barbecue pits for the pop-ups that would become Burnt Bean, in a building with clean, rustic lines and front windows that soak in the Guadalupe County morning sun.

The sellout game is my least favorite restaurant business model. I prefer “be open, have food.” Everybody does.

A place like Burnt Bean is why we play the game anyway, and the game starts with brisket. I’m a fatty brisket man, one who cringes at the more common term “moist brisket.” At Burnt Bean, it’s the chocolate cake of brisket, all velveteen mahogany lush with melted fat frosting that absorbs and refracts oak smoke like light through a prism.

But I’m a changed man after Burnt Bean, a leaner man, because their lean brisket rippled like silk fibers embroidered with a thin ribbon of amber fat encrusted with salt and pepper like gems. It’s just as lush as the fattier stuff.

The menu’s not complicated. Brisket, pork ribs and turkey are sold by the pound, house-made sausages by the link, with half a dozen sides, a few sandwiches and desserts.

The pork ribs come dry or glazed, the difference being a thin, tangy-sweet sauce Servantes adds as he’s plating them. I liked the extra, syrupy sweetness, and the meat clung to the bone just enough to give the pork structure — because you don’t want it falling off like the jangling bones of a cartoon skeleton.

A tawny lacquered dome of turkey breast came armored with salt and pepper that gave the opaline meat good smoke

flavor without the smoke sucking all the life out of the meat.

Burnt Bean passes the sausage test that so many other big-league barbecue contenders fail: They make their own. It’s lean but not dry, snap-cased but not chewy, spicy in the regular and jalapeño flavors and smoked long enough to let the heat work its alchemical, caramelizing magic.

Sides are never the reason to make a barbecue road trip, but they can sweeten the deal, especially the street corn pudding at Burnt Bean, with the texture of Thanksgiving stuffing spiked with a Mexican street dress of crema and chile salt. They do respectable potato salad, cowboy beans and stewed green beans, but my tray will always include hash-brown-style baconranch potatoes and spiral mac covered in queso dusted with Hot Cheetos. They’re the carbloaded yin to the protein-centric yang at Burnt Bean.

The menu shifts to suit the moment. On Thursdays and Fridays, you can get a one- or two-meat plate with two sides for an approachable price of $14 and $18, respectively. The plates give the locals a streamlined option, Servantes said, and I saw guys in hardhats and reflective vests reinforcing that idea.

On the weekends, the plates

are gone, replaced by barbecue showboats such as a full-bone beef chuck rib and bone-in pork chops. My pork chop was perfect, rendered like a two-bone golden bauble with a heart of blushing ivory. But after paying $36 for a single beef chuck rib, let me say that the beef rib in general is without a doubt the most overrated barbecue stunt meat in Texas, even if this particular

beef rib did its job. I mean, who doesn’t like pot roast on a stick? But $36 sucked all the Fiesta spirit right out of me.

Sundays chime in with breakfast that starts at 8 a.m., and that sometimes includes one of the best barbecue dishes I’ve ever had: brisket huevos rancheros, layered here with crispy corn tortillas, a full slice of brisket,

two eggs and tomato sauce that any Tex-Mex joint would claim. Pair that with luscious smoked barbacoa, some of the best beef sweetbread and tripas tacos in the area and properly funky menudo pearled with pozole, and Burnt Bean might be the Sunday breakfast king of South Texas.

To the people who ring the alarm that Burnt Bean’s line is like Austin’s infamous Franklin Barbecue line, I say, cool your jets. An hour’s not the same as five hours.

But the tension’s there, the anxiety over missing out, the fear of the “sold out” sign. Is it worth it? You can have 96 percent of the Burnt Bean experience at any of the best barbecue places in San Antonio. So what do you get with the other 4 percent?

It’s been said we share something like 96 percent of our DNA with chimpanzees. The other 4 percent gave us written language, the Colosseum, the

White Album — and barbecue like this.

Photos by Mike Sutter / Staff Burnt Bean Co.’s two-meat plates with two sides include choices such as sausage, brisket, bacon ranch potatoes and cowboy beans.

The Brass Monkey sandwich at Burnt Bean includes chopped brisket, sausage and queso mac.

Competition pitmaster and Burnt Bean co-owner Ernest Servantes cuts pork chops.

Among the sides offered at Burnt Bean is street corn pudding, lower right.