The Texas Monthly Top 50 as a Dated List

What the Editions Actually Show

Texas Monthly has published its Top 50 BBQ list roughly every four years since 2008, with Daniel Vaughn — hired in 2013 as what the magazine calls the country's only full-time barbecue editor — shaping every edition since. The list is widely treated as an authoritative current guide. It functions more usefully as a series of dated photographs.

Compare the 2008 edition to the 2013 one and the geographic shift is already legible: the older Hill Country and Lockhart corridor anchors — Kreuz Market, City Market in Luling, Smitty's — hold their positions, but Austin-metro entries multiply as the city's population and disposable income surge. By 2017 Franklin Barbecue on East 11th Street, which opened as a trailer in 2009, is a fixture, and the list has absorbed a wave of urban pitmasters whose craft owes as much to internet food culture as to any regional tradition.

The 2021 edition was compiled and published mid-pandemic, when dining rooms were restricted or closed. Several joints on the list were operating at reduced capacity or abbreviated hours at the moment the ink dried. Goldee's, in Fort Worth, appeared for the first time — a debut that felt like news, and was, for that moment.

The problem with reading any edition as a live guide is the gap between research and publication, compounded by the years before the next update. Pitmasters retire, die, or sell. Ownership changes alter the product. Some pitmasters have stepped away from the joints that bear their names. Damien Brockway's Distant Relatives — a menu built around the African diaspora's fingerprints on barbecue — opened in 2021, after the 2021 list closed. The list can only catch what it catches when it looks.

That limitation is not a flaw. It is what makes the list historically interesting. Stack the four editions and you can read the trade's migrations: the move of prestige from the old meat-market towns along U.S. 183 toward Austin and then outward again to suburban and exurban operations; the rising visibility of pitmasters from outside the Central Texas Anglo lineage; the slow pressure of wholesale brisket prices on who can afford to stay open.

Vaughn and Texas Monthly are tracking a living industry with a document published every four years. The document is valuable. Mistaking it for a current map is how readers end up driving to a place that closed eight months ago.