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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.

Fill Station reviewThe steel cabinet smoker at Brian’s Bar-B-Q in Clute, about an hour south of Houston, holds a thousand pounds of meat. Brian Devine helped build it and installed it with his wife, MaryAnne, when they opened their joint in 1988. Twenty years ago, they added a rotisserie smoker, also built by Brian, to handle pork shoulders and briskets. Now those smokers pull double duty, producing all the meat for both Brian’s and the Fill Station, another joint less than five miles away, owned and operated by Devine’s sons, Kent and Kyle, along with their cousin Kevin Rosenbohm.After finding a seat at Brian’s Bar-B-Q, I took in the menagerie of fish, fowl, and fauna hanging on the walls. A framed article announcing its opening explained 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.

An Ode to the BeautyberryThe natural world isn’t beholden to our lines of logic. As the question (and popular meme) “If not friend, why friend-shaped?” reminds us, plants and animals don’t always act—or taste, for that matter—the way they look. Tragically, you can’t pet everything soft. And sadly, you can’t eat everything that looks delicious. But, as evidenced by the magenta beautyberries lately seen adorning yards and the edges of forests around Texas, sometimes you can. The American beautyberry (Callicarpa americana) is aptly named. Its purple berry clusters are bright and nearly metallic, and they stand out against Texas’s otherwise drab fall landscapes—awash in dead grass and crunchy leaves—making them easy to spot. The shrubs look almost fake, like artificial decorative plants you could buy at a craft store. Maybe…

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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.

In the relationship of former Miss Texas USA Taylor Kessler and gummy-candy entrepreneur Maxx Chewning, three isn’t a crowd. Kessler, Chewning, and Chewning’s vlog camera have been happily together since the couple met, in 2021. A combined social media audience of close to one million followers watched their love story unfold, witnessing date nights, family introductions, and even Chewning’s proposal, documented in a YouTube video titled “So Yeah, We Got Engaged.” The couple swears that content doesn’t rule their lives, though the word “sponsorships” was uttered during their vows. The Insta-ready couple wed on a Saturday in late October at Houston’s Briscoe Manor, a short drive away from where Kessler grew up. Their 150 guests (with an alleged combined following of 26 million) comprised a who’s…

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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.

Report from the Cowboy Mounted World Shooting ChampionshipsPerhaps it shouldn’t be such a surprise, given cowboys’ reputation for straight talk. Still, when heading to Amarillo’s annual Cowboy Mounted Shooting World Championship, it is difficult to shed the suspicion that there must be a caveat of some sort. Surely, one thinks, if the event were anything close to the image that “cowboy mounted shooting” brings to mind, it would be either too unsafe to be legal or too watered down to be interesting (or possibly too gimmicky to be credible).It is therefore refreshing (and more than a bit thrilling) to realize that the event is exactly what it sounds like—cowboys and cowgirls firing guns at targets while racing around on horseback. The guns are real (although they fire blanks—more on that shortly), 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.

College Station-Bryan Trip Guide“The password will be on the receipt. Take a right into the alley and look for the door with the mask.” I’d just finished a nightcap at a cigar-and-cocktail bar in charming downtown Bryan, twin city to Texas A&M University’s College Station, when the server asked if my husband and I had tried out the speakeasy around the corner. My long-ago memories of nights around the A&M campus are littered with shots at the Dry Bean, in Northgate, and dinner at the Dixie Chicken. No, I had not tried out the speakeasy. Mashing a four-digit code into the keypad of an alley door was not how I was expecting things to go that weekend, which was meant to be a quick family trip to see a…

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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.

Maybe it’s the giant crab. If you’ve been to Gaido’s, or just driven past the building at Thirty-Ninth and Seawall, in Galveston, you know the crab. Twelve feet wide and anatomically correct, the gargantuan crustacean atop the roof has awed children for decades. I was one of them. I’m a BOI (“Born on Island”), and that blue crab was as big a part of my childhood food memories as braving my first raw oyster. (It was around the same time my mother, raised in Harlingen, got me to try the menudo she always ordered at La Galvestonia.) My version of a cornucopia was the Gaido’s Gulf oyster platter, with its bounty of bivalves fried, grilled, and seared with bacon. Gaido’s opened in 1911 and quickly established a reputation…

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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.

Our Next Supreme Court Justice? opening spread imageOriginal SinsAs a longtime reader of Texas Monthly, I expected a serious left lean in Michael Hall’s “Our Next Supreme Court Justice?” [September 2024]. It did not take long! Mr. Hall quickly defines originalism as a concept rooted in the eighteenth-century U.S. Constitution.Are the amendments to the Constitution chopped liver? They are one of the great feats of the founding fathers, who realized that changing times could necessitate revisions to the original document. Our governance should not be left to a minority of elites, be they business monopolies or a press made up of like-minded individuals who rely on groupthink to push their beliefs on a vulnerable public.Juan Campo, HoustonJames Ho’s idea of originalism makes me believe he longs for a return to the 1700s,…

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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.

Although more than sixty years have passed since President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in downtown Dallas, visitors still come daily to Dealey Plaza to pay their respects (or discuss conspiracy theories). They take tours—on foot, on Segways, by trolley, in electric cruisers, and even in a restored 1963 midnight-blue Lincoln Continental convertible. And each year, about 350,000 pay a fee ($25 for adults) to enter the Sixth Floor Museum, located in the former Texas School Book Depository, to see the “sniper’s perch” from which Lee Harvey Oswald fired the fatal shots. Other must-sees include the FBI’s 3-D model of Dealey used during the Warren Commission investigation, the Jack Ruby trial transcripts, and Lee Harvey Oswald’s wedding ring.“That year, 1963, unites generations of Dallasites,” says…

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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.

Lexington BarbecueThe constellation Orion was still twinkling in the sky when I plunked down a folding chair to claim a spot in line at Snow’s BBQ, in Lexington, about an hour’s drive east of Austin. The joint’s fame has grown in part because Snow’s has won high marks in Texas Monthly‘s past four Top 50 barbecue lists. In 2008, the barbecue world was shocked by the number one ranking of this previously unknown establishment.That was quickly followed by a New Yorker feature from legendary writer Calvin Trillin, but the star power of beloved pitmaster Tootsie Tomanetz surpassed anything in the sky after her episode of the Chef’s Table: BBQ series aired on Netflix, in 2020. Hordes of new fans arrived to fill their bellies and meet…

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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.

family painting essay illustrationIt was only a painting, a medium-sized framed canvas that hung in the living room of my grandparents’ house, in Oklahoma City. But to my child mind it was mysteriously alive, a scene and setting that felt not just depicted but real. I didn’t so much look at the painting as visit it, taking my place in the stillness of a foreign glade, where a young woman in a yellow headscarf sat forever unmoving on a rustic log table.  She was about to smile, it seemed, as she contemplated a pear she held gracefully in her right hand. Near her were three less distinct figures, seated or standing around baskets and piles of fruit. The deep shade, broken by swaths of sunlight, was protective and…

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