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John Bates couldn’t find the South Texas flavors that reminded him of home. But now, the Austin pitmaster, who grew up in Corpus Christi and gained renown when his restaurant, InterStellar Barbecue, was named a 2021 Texas Monthly Top 50 joint, is dishing out those hometown flavors with his new Yellow Bell Tacos trailer. “By getting closer to my heart and doing things that I really, really loved, we found a lot of success,” he says. “Tacos are kind of the same thing for me as well.” If Interstellar’s consistently long lines are any indication, Yellow Bell will follow suit. But customers will have to locate the trailer first.The seven-month-old mobile operation is tucked behind Austin Beerworks’ taproom in Sprinkle Valley. The location, in the…

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Get in-depth coverage of news, reviews and conversations about Texas barbecue. It's basically Christmas every day for barbecue-lovers.

My mother has been sending me letters lately. Not letters intended for me but rather letters she has been writing to various people in her life—important influences, she calls them. Relatives, friends, former classmates, coworkers. She has been writing two or three letters a week and sending them to me via email to look over and send back to her with comments. You’re a professor, she tells me, you know the right way to put these things. She says she wants me to be brutally honest with her, to pull no punches, but I rarely have anything negative to say. These letters are beautiful, after all. Not only beautifully written but filled with genuine emotion, honesty, thoughtfulness, insight. Each one is like a little portrait of…

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Get in-depth coverage of news, reviews and conversations about Texas barbecue. It's basically Christmas every day for barbecue-lovers.

Texas moms will be able to stay on Medicaid for a year after childbirth, after the federal Centers for Medicare & Medicaid approved the state’s application on Wednesday, according to emails obtained by the Texas Tribune.The move caps a years-long effort to extend coverage for low-income moms. Medicaid covers half of all births in Texas, but coverage currently expires after two months.In 2021, the federal government found Texas’s application for continued coverage “unapprovable” due to medically inaccurate language intended to exclude women who had abortions.But when Roe v. Wade was overturned in 2022, giving states the right to ban abortion, the idea gained traction. During the last regular session, lawmakers worked to reach a proposal that the federal government would approve.The Centers for Medicare &…

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Get in-depth coverage of news, reviews and conversations about Texas barbecue. It's basically Christmas every day for barbecue-lovers.

On Sunday afternoon, the Dallas Cowboys humiliated themselves in the first round of the NFL playoffs. Facing the hated Green Bay Packers, the team surrendered a 27–0 first-half lead that, by the fourth quarter, had metastasized into a 48–16 embarrassment. (The team narrowed the margin to 48–32 by the end, once the opposing sideline was secure in the knowledge that the outcome was assured.) There was plenty of accountability to go around for the Cowboys’ collapse. Head coach Mike McCarthy may well have been fired by the time you read this; quarterback Dak Prescott declared after the game that “I sucked tonight”; the entire defense was laughably bad. But one unlikely figure has shouldered a surprising amount of blame on social media for the team’s…

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John Brotherton passed away on Monday while hospitalized following a cardiac event that occurred on January 4. He was 49. You may have seen the #JMFB hashtag on social media along with the massive outpouring of support for the beloved pitmaster. There’s a long, expensive road ahead for his wife, Brenda, and son, Braeden. John’s friend Russell Roegels started a GoFundMe page for medical expenses. Brotherton’s Black Iron Barbecue, in Pflugerville, the restaurant John opened in 2017, remains open and operating.Back in 2019, I called John Brotherton the day before the Texas Barbecue Town Hall at Texas A&M. He was tasked with preparing the meat for the hundred or more attendees, and I offered to help him cook the following morning, with a major caveat.…

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