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5 smoking hot Texas BBQ joints make Southern Living's best new 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.
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 importantly, 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.
Written by contributing barbecue editor Robert F. Moss, the list includes 22 restaurants from seven states. 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 particularly 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.”
