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

Murry Kimball never wanted to be a shrimper. The 64-year-old spent much of his childhood learning the ways of the ten-legged crustacean; anytime school wasn’t in session, he and his younger brother would be dragged out to work on their father’s boat in the Gulf waters of southeast Texas. “I stayed seasick,” Kimball remembers. “I hated shrimping so much, I wanted to become a game warden and shut my daddy down.” Instead, after high school Kimball went to work in Port Arthur’s shipyards and refineries and stayed there, until declining health forced him to retire seven years ago. Now he plies the trade he once rejected, because it’s the only other job he knows. Most days, he gets up at sunrise to cruise the inland…

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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.

Bobby Pulido is the definition of tejano royalty—he grew up in the golden age of nineties tejano, and he’s been one of its biggest stars ever since, including a three-year reign as the Tejano Music Awards’ Male Entertainer of the Year from 1998 to 2000.On the first episode of Viva Tejano, Pulido talks about the influences that shaped his musical sensibilities—his grandfather, Mario Montes, played in the norteño band Los Donneños, and his father, Roberto Pulido, basically created the progressive conjunto movement in the seventies by adding saxophones to his band. After starting out as a saxophonist/roadie for his father’s band in the early nineties, Pulido launched his own career in the immediate aftermath of Selena’s death, a tragic moment that changed the genre forever.…

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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.

As dusk settled over a Fort Worth city park in June 2022, Manuel de Oyarzabal Barba joined a rotating crew of collaborators for a ritual the group would repeat multiple times a week until September. The team set up its equipment: two large thermal cameras and a microphone connected to a field-recording system. That summer and the following spring, de Oyarzabal Barba, then a master’s student in environmental science at Texas Christian University, and his colleagues made repeat visits to thirty sites across two Tarrant County parks, where passersby often mistook their high-tech gear for telescopes.“People thought we were looking at the moon,” de Oyarzabal Barba said, adding that parkgoers usually reacted with fear when he explained that the team was recording bats in flight. “Since the…

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When I walk into Willow Park Baptist Church fifteen minutes early, I know I’m late. The assembly room is filled with mostly older men sitting at round tables covered in red, white, and blue tablecloths. On their heads are caps embroidered with letters that designate which branches of the military they joined, which ships they served on, which wars they fought in.The participants at Roll Call, a Fort Worth veterans group, look forward to their monthly meetings, and the parking lot is full well in advance of the event’s scheduled 11:30 a.m. start. Many visitors arrive in vans from retirement communities and assisted living facilities, while others carpool with friends.The nonprofit’s luncheon started with fifteen World War II veterans getting together in a restaurant in…

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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.

Nobody believes me when I say I’ve decided to retire. “What?!” they exclaim. “You have the best job in Texas!” Yes, I know. My job is fantastic. For the better part of fifty years I have been Texas Monthly’s designated eater, exploring and writing about this state’s rowdy, brilliant, perennially shape-shifting food scene. The pace has been relentless. On a typical day I might roll out of bed in the morning thinking about the lamb kebabs I’d eaten in Houston the night before. Sixteen hours later I would shut my laptop with images floating in my head of the fried seafood platter I’d devoured in Galveston. I’d be having filet in peppercorn sauce in Dallas while scrolling through a list of new restaurants in Fort…

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