San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
2M’s country barbecue cousin
New joint from the the smokehouse team stands deliciously on its own
Barbecue is about so much more than barbecue. It’s a sense of place, a sense of history, a sense of connection between families forged in fire and smoke.
For Blu Lacy Smokehouse in Castroville, barbecue is all those lofty things. But it’s also about one other thing. A basic thing: Being its own thing.
Sounds simple, but Blu Lacy comes straight from the chromosomal lineage of 2M Smokehouse, the new-school San Antonio barbecue joint built by Esaul Ramos Jr. and Joe Melig in 2016. It’s the one with the line out front, the one with two James Beard nominations. And the one with the very best barbecue in all of San Antonio.
So when Ramos and Melig thought about expanding their empire, they had to reconcile one key question: Would the new shop be another 2M Smokehouse?
The dangers of doing that stack up like cords of firewood. The danger of the new shop draining talent, money and business from the original. The danger of the new shop becoming solely a vehicle for comparison to the old one, and vice versa. The danger of oversaturating a market that’s come to see 2M as destination barbecue, whether that means driving from the north of San Antonio, the west of Houston or the south of Austin.
So they read those signs and looked 30 minutes to the west to Castroville, where a willing coalition of developers helped them turn a corner of the city’s Houston Square into Blu Lacy Smokehouse. It’s about a halfmile from Haby’s Alsatian Bakery, not far from the weekend flea market selling firewood and roasted corn by the side of the highway.
The stone building at Blu Lacy’s core is the former home of Dan’s Meat Market, while the adjacent pit room is a modernist temple of steel and breathable screening that houses twin 1,000-gallon Cen-Tex smoker pits and a 3-ton M&M BBQ box painted stock-car blue.
They added a bar, a playscape, a courtyard full of picnic tables and the coup de grace: a bakery tucked into a brick building bearing the name of the Culinary Institute of America graduate and wife of Esaul Ramos: Baked by Chef Grecia Ramos.
That’s a lot of backstory for a barbecue joint named after a dog. But it’s an important jumping-off point for discussing Blu Lacy on its own terms. Blu Lacy is not 2M2, not 2MSquared, not 2M: The Empire Strikes Back. A cutter at the new shop put it to bed like this: Blu Lacy is “country barbecue.” 2M is “Tex-Mex barbecue.”
So what is country barbecue? It’s barbecue broken down to its basics: salt, pepper, meat, heat, repeat. It’s barbecue that puts aside “sold out” economics and coordinates the cook times so there’s enough food for lunch and dinner. At Blu Lacy, it’s brisket in the hands of pitmaster Marcus Cruz that was the same on a showoff Saturday as it was on a workaday Tuesday, an oil-paint strata of black volcanic glass on the bark, shy rosy blush on the ring, rippled mahogany gloss across the middle and pearled opal fat at the deckled core.
Country barbecue at Blu Lacy means three kinds of beef sausage, all of it ground and cased in-house, all of it as fat as payday and smoked to a spring break sunburn. I liked the “hot guts” version best, with a blush of cayenne pepper added to the basic beef mix, a mix that found the right balance between fat and lean over and over. And I liked how the jalapeño-cheese version shifted that balance to the shiny side.
Sometimes the risk of ordering pork ribs by the pound without getting specific about size means getting the knob ends of the rib. And those hard, chewy knobs cost the same $22 a pound as the sleek St. Louis ribs from the center of the rack. Those center ribs told the story better, a story informed by hours of postoak
smoke that glazed their surface in rippling shades of ruby-red beach glass.
I’ll never understand turkey as Texas barbecue. Take a bird that struggles to keep from drying out at Thanksgiving no matter how much butter you bring to the fight. Then leave it to sulk over a smoker for a few hours. Blu Lacy doesn’t have the answer to that dilemma, either. But it scored a championship win in the alt-Texas category of pulled pork, with a glossy tangle of fat, lean and bark piled on a brioche bun made fresh at the bakery next door, at least until those
buns sell out.
A conversation about country barbecue has to include beans and potato salad. Blu Lacy turns that conversation into a celebration of Alsatian influence with tangy potato salad in shades of wildflower yellow and beans in a bronzed pot liquor of bacon, onions and house-pickled serranos.
I like the other sides just fine, the Mexican-style esquites, the feathered coleslaw, the properly crusty mac and cheese. But those beans and potato salad rounded out the picture of the perfect plate of Texas barbecue at Blu
Lacy, with brisket, sausage and ribs, a tabletop fresco of the Texas Trinity, with pickles and onions.
There’s novelty at Blu Lacy, too. Not the novelty of steak nights, parisa and picanha the founders envisioned just yet. But they make brisket nachos and a burger on Saturdays. And it’s one of the few country barbecue shops where you’ll find a full bar in addition to bottled beer in the cooler, a bar with a solid fairground frozen margarita and a smoked jalapeño old-fashioned I’d pay twice as much for at a steakhouse.
It’s not a novelty, exactly, but Blu Lacy does a three-meat combo plate with two sides for lunch on the weekdays for a fixed price of $22. If not a novelty, a combo plate’s at least a rarity in the world of breathless hype surrounding Texas barbecue by the pound.
There’s some of that here. They sell those war-club “dino” beef ribs every day. For $35 a pound. Was it like a perfectly seasoned bone-in rib-eye? And was it enough to feed two, maybe three if they’re not linebackers? Yes and yes.
But know this: In the new economy of good Texas barbecue, there’s no such thing as cheap barbecue. Not that long ago and not that far away — at 2M Smokehouse in 2016 — a beef rib went for $22 a pound, and brisket was outrageous at $20 a pound. Now you’ll pay $32 a pound for brisket at Blu Lacy, and that single dino rib set me back $76. The disconnect between your eyes and your appetite adds up faster than numbers on a butcher scale.
But I’m not driving to Castroville for cheap barbecue, and neither are you. I’m driving there for Blu Lacy barbecue, the same way I saw a couple from Atlanta get out of their Uber from the airport to eat at 2M. And here’s the only comparison I’ll draw between Blu Lacy and 2M, separated by 34 miles, united in the fight to get it right: They’re both destination barbecue.