I was planning for this post to be a Charleston Notebook entry catching up on some local food and beverage topics, but that plan, as they say, was overtaken by events.
My last post (“Is Barbecue Stumbling in 2026?”) was a Cue Sheet dispatch discussing recent barbecue restaurant closures and pondering whether they signaled a secular decline in the barbecue business or just ongoing churn in a notoriously volatile industry. I ended the post on an ambiguous note:
So, is the 21st century barbecue boom turning into a barbecue bust? As the Magic 8-Ball would put it, “Reply Hazy. Try Again Later.”
This week, it seems, all sorts of prognosticators were shaking their Magic 8-Balls, too, and weighing in on the fate of the barbecue industry. They weren’t as reluctant to connect a couple of dots and come to firm, dire conclusions, and I decided I needed to address them.
The Sky is Falling and Everything’s Fine
Folks, we’ve got dueling barbecue business narratives. Here’s the headline of a story in the Washington Post last Monday:
Three days later, the New York Post weighed in with its own equally-dire take on the situation:
Things sound pretty bleak, don’t they?
But what about this headline from MySA.com last week?
The hook for the MySA.com story is that San Antonio-based Smokey Mo’s BBQ, which has around two dozen locations, is opening a new restaurant in Schertz. This is just one of many stories I’ve seen in recent months about Texas barbecue restaurants adding new locations within the state and even outside of it, as in the case of Terry Black’s BBQ’s pending expansion into Nashville.
Apparently Texas barbecue is either booming or on the verge of collapse.
The Washington Post story takes the doom-and-gloom view, leading with an interview with Russell Roegels of Roegels Barbecue Co. in Houston and the eye-popping prices he is currently paying (and charging) for brisket. “Owners and experts predict the closures will worsen this summer,” writes reporter Molly Hennessy-Fiske, “and continue for years, potentially reshaping the nature of Texas barbecue.”
The story in the New York Post rings even louder alarms, declaring, “wholesale beef costs, inflation and shrinking customer traffic are crushing margins and forcing some of the state’s most celebrated BBQ institutions out of business.” Unlike WaPo’s Hennessy-Fiske, who’s based in Houston, the NYPo’s Ariel Zilber doesn’t appear to have done much boots-on-the-ground reporting, for his piece opens with a quote borrowed from the other Post’s story:
“This is as bad as it gets,” Houston-area pitmaster Russell Roegels told the Washington Post.
Zilber’s story also borrows one of the WaPo quotes from Burnt Bean Co.’s Ernest Servantes on the ever-rising price of brisket.
The New York Post isn’t the only outlet leaning on Hennessy-Fiske’s reporting. On Wednesday Newsweek ran a story headlined “How Soaring Beef Prices Are Changing Texas Barbecue” that cites the Washington Post story. A story from Jessica Wong on the Yahoo! Finance and Moneywise sites opens with the Roegels “this is as bad as it gets” quote, too. Alicia Park’s “Rising Beef Prices Are Slaughtering Steakhouses” for Forbes cites the WaPo story three times. Park, a New York-based business and tech reporter, apparently doesn’t draw a distinction between barbecue joints and steakhouses, asserting that beef prices are “slaughtering steakhouses from Texas barbecue institutions to high-end Midwest chains.”
The end effect is a sort of rolling snowball of barbecue doom. Is the entire Texas barbecue scene teetering on the verge of extinction?
Dialing It Down a Bit
The Washington Post story names four Texas barbecue joints that have closed recently: Brett’s BBQ Shop in Katy, Kirby’s BBQ in New Caney, Sabar Barbecue in Fort Worth, and Wright On Taco & BBQ in Marshall. Note the headline in the screen cap above: “Some of Texas’s Oldest Barbecue Joints Close . . . ” (Emphasis mine.) The oldest of the four, Brett’s BBQ Shop, opened in 2018. The other three launched in 2024, 2023 and 2023, respectively.
Not to be outdone, the New York Post cites the same four restaurants and adds two more, Hill City Chop House in Tolar and Sweetie Pie’s Ribeyes in North Richland Hills. Not to cast aspersions on any of those establishments, but does that really look like a list of “some of Texas’s most famous BBQ joints” to you? (Also, Sweetie Pie’s Ribeyes, as the name suggests, was actually a steakhouse. What’s with New York reporters conflating barbecue and steak?)
Let’s take a step back and look at the big picture. I’m not trying to minimize the challenges facing barbecue restaurant owners today, which I’ve written about numerous times in recent Cue Sheet dispatches. They are real and thorny.
The WaPo story itself, though, notes that Texas has more than 3,000 barbecue purveyors. Four or even six of them closing is not what I would call “close to cataclysmal.” I think we need a little more data before concluding that we are “at risk [of] losing that community and culture” and that these forces are “reshaping the nature of Texas barbecue.”
As is suggested by the countervailing news about barbecue operations expanding and new restaurants opening their doors, the picture remains mixed. Depending upon which angle you choose to take, you can paint a bleak picture of impending collapse or a rosy one of a continued boom. The answer, as usual, is probably somewhere in the middle.
More Data Points
While I was working on this post, I kept getting overtaken by events. News broke on Wednesday that Harp Barbecue, which won plenty of acclaim for bringing Texas-style barbecue to Kansas City, was closing its doors on May 30. Owner Tyler Harp started out with a pop-up at Crane Brewing in Raytown in 2019, opened a brick and mortar in 2022, and in July 2024 moved the restaurant to Overland Park.
In a post on Instagram, Harp explained, “It’s just kind of a cube that all the pieces don’t fit together.” His restaurant lately has had the fewest employees they’ve ever had and the fewest customers, but he pointed most strongly to excessively high beef prices, which he blames on the four giant companies that now control the packing industry. Harp says he may try to return to the pop-up approach if he can find a brewery, distillery or similar location that “already has foot traffic.”
There were other closures in the news last week, too, though the reasons for each vary. WDRB in Louisville reports that Rubbin’ Butts BBQ in Sellersburg, Illinois, is closing not because business is bad but because their landlord, despite “our pleas to continue,” refused to renew their lease. Out in Sonoma County, California, the Santa Rosa Press Democrat reports that A&M BBQ in Sebastopol has shuttered after neighbors filed dozens of complaints with the city over the smoke from the restaurant’s cookers. Owner Kris Austin is currently looking to move to a new location.
Meanwhile up in Raynham, Massachusetts, 2 Jerks BBQ Kitchen and Bar was forced to close for a very different and somewhat gross reason: an outbreak of norovirus, a.k.a. the “vomiting disease.” On the bright side, it was just a 72-hour temporary closure mandated by the health department and they are apparently back open now.
The restaurant business, in other words, is a tough one, and owners have long faced stiff challenges on any number of fronts. At the same time, the people in that industry — and barbecue, in particular — are well known for their resolve and resiliency. It’s a community that pulls together again and again to help out fellow members in need, whether it’s because a pit house burned down or a family member suffered an illness or just because they’re having a run of bad luck.
There are plenty of second lives — and third and fourth ones, for that matter — in American barbecue. Let’s not over-catastrophize the current situation.
I’m Huge in Altoona
May was a pretty busy month for me on the media front. For Southern Living I filed a report on “SOST 350 - Barbecue: Southern History and Culture on a Plate,” a class taught by instructor Matthew Simmons of the University of South Carolina’s Institute of Southern Studies. They celebrated the end of the semester with a big barbecue feast on the Horseshoe catered by Robbie Robinson of City Limits Barbeque, which alone would be incentive enough to enroll.
Dave Roos interviewed me about the history of grills and backyard barbecuing for a feature at History.com, where I touch on Henry Ford’s pioneering charcoal briquettes and the original outdoor kitchen fad back in the 1930s.
Since Memorial Day marks the traditional opening of the media’s barbecue season, I was much in demand for interviews and appeared in news stories on barbecue in newspapers across the country, including the Altoona (PA) Mirror, the Owensboro (KY) Messenger-Inquirer, and the Decatur (AL) Daily as well as stories from television news outfits like ABC News’s national site, KCRA3 in Sacramento, WBALTV11 in Baltimore, and WPTZ MyNBC5 in Burlington, Vermont. I even showed up in unexpected places like Food Manufacturing (“ accessible, authoritative information tailored specifically to the food and beverage processing industry”) and the illustrious Washington Times, the newspaper founded in 1982 by the Rev. Sun Myung Moon and the Unification Church.
Ok, I wasn’t quite that busy in May. The History.com story by Dave Roos was a separate interview, but all those other outlets ran the same syndicated feature by Deepti Hajela, a writer on the Associated Press’s Trends+Culture team. I love getting picked up by the AP.
Quick Bites
Eight Decades of Smoky Sliced Pork: Couch’s BBQ in Ooltewah, Tennessee, is celebrating its 80th year in business. ABC News Channel 9 in Chattanooga has a video report that includes not just interviews with owners Kenny Stiner and his daughter Sarah but some great old photographs of the restaurant from back in the early days.
Barbecue on Trial: A jury in Oklahoma found Brent Swadley, the owner of the eight-restaurant Swadley’s BBQ chain, guilty of felony conspiracy to defraud the state. The charges relate to invoices Swadley submitted to the state while operating a now-cancelled concession called Swadley’s Foggy Bottom Kitchen in five Oklahoma state parks between 2019 and 2022.
Burnt Ends
Surely This Means Brisket Has Finally Jumped the Shark, Right?
Hard-hitting food news site Sporked reports that Panda Express, the American-Chinese fast food chain, is jumping onto the brisket bandwagon with its new Cantonese BBQ Brisket.
“It’s all built around the soul of BBQ: the bark, the tenderness, the smoky finish,” stated Jimmy Wong, Panda Express’s Executive Director of Culinary Invention, in the press release announcing his latest culinary invention. “Cantonese BBQ Brisket is the most ‘American Chinese’ dish we’ve ever made.”
I can’t dispute that.
I Guess This is How Kudzu Spread, Too
The state of the barbecue business in Texas may be “close to cataclysmal,” but the Phoenix New Times reports this week that Arizona is enjoying a barbecue boom. “Some [Salt River] Valley barbecue,” it asserts, “is hailed among the best anywhere in America.”
The New Times does note that the region’s pitmasters “all discovered their taste for smoked meat in some faraway place” and are “importing other styles from other states.” This is not particularly surprising — it is Arizona, after all. What really caught my eye is where Travis Taylor, the CEO of the four-location Caldwell County BBQ chain, experienced his first bite of brisket, which he says “was just life-altering for me.”
Five years ago, Travis Taylor stood outside the acclaimed Lewis Barbecue in Charleston, wondering why his friend had dragged him there. . . . Taylor had no idea that a single mouthful of beef would change his life forever.
John Lewis, of course, is a native of El Paso and made his bones manning the pits at Franklin Barbecue and La Barbecue in Austin before bringing his acclaimed Texas-style brisket to South Carolina ten years ago.
Perhaps we need to implement contact tracing.
Always steering us right, @Robert F. Moss !