something to talk about
San Antonio's Reese Bros makes Southern Living's best new barbecue list
Austin's LeRoy & Lewis is one of the South's best new barbecue joints.
As Texans, it is our cultural birthright to argue about where to find the best barbecue. A new list that ranks Texas barbecue joints against other Southern states is sure to spark plenty of good-natured debate.
Southern Living magazine has published its list of The South’s Best New Barbecue Joints of 2024. To be eligible, a restaurant must have opened after Southern Living’s last best new list, which was published in September 2021.
Written by contributing barbecue editor Robert F. Moss, the list includes 22 restaurants from seven states.
Texas ties South Carolina with five restaurants on the list. They are:
At Reese Bros, Moss recognizes the restaurant's Tex-Mex touches such as queso fundido sausage link, flour tortillas, and poblano mac & cheese. Open since February, LeRoy & Lewis’ brick and mortar location gets a shout out for preserving the best dishes from its food truck days while adding cocktails, and, perhaps even more important, air conditioning.
Brisket & Rice makes the list for transforming a former Church’s Chicken into a destination-worthy joint serving barbecue fried rice (natch) and “Poor Man’s Macaroni — noodles wok-fried with bacon and a sweet tomato sauce,” Moss writes.
At Dayne’s, Moss finds exceptional brisket, a standout smash burger and “Fritos-pie beans — savory cowboy-esque pintos that are topped with cheese, crunchy Fritos, pickled jalapeños, and squiggles of lime-infused crema.”
Finally, Barbs gets hailed for its brisket, beef ribs, and turkey as well as smoked lamb chops and the signature green spaghetti in a poblano-cream sauce.
While each restaurant approaches barbecue from a slightly different perspective, Moss finds some common threads for all of his choices.
“For starters, most are traditionalists in at least some sense. Most cook on wood-fired pits, and many have embraced and championed the long-running specialities of their [particular] regions,” he writes. “At the same time, each is doing their own thing, experimenting with new flavors and techniques, adopting less-common cuts of meat, and drawing upon family recipes and their own culinary heritage.”
All of these restaurants are used to drawing a certain amount of media attention. Three of them — LeRoy & Lewis, Brisket & Rice, and Barbs B Q — made the New York Times’ 2023 list of “The 20 Best Texas Barbecue Restaurants From the New Generation.” Similarly, Reese Bros joined Brisket & Rice and Barbs B Q on Texas Monthly’s 2023 list of the “Top 25 New and Improved BBQ Joints in Texas.”
