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Indolfo Martinez came to Texas with luggage full of dreams. The native of the Mexican state of Michoacán was 17 when he arrived in Dallas on April 15, 2000. The next day he got a job at a Saltgrass Steak House and he stayed with the company for 22 years, rising through positions from bus boy to regional manager of eleven restaurants across Colorado, Las Vegas, and West Texas.In 2011 Landry’s, Saltgrass Steak House’s parent company, relocated the Martinez family to Amarillo. In 2022, after a pandemic-related pay cut and general instability in the job, Indolfo quit to open a food truck. It was better than the status quo. “I felt like a sponge full of water, where they squish you and squish you until…

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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.

Q:  I was blessed with a mother from Central Texas whose speech was enriched with phantom diphthongs (“Let’s go out to the raynch”), stony rhotics (“and rahde harrsses”), and funny sayings. Recently, while shopping with a girlfriend, a Yankee from New Jersey, I lamented that my bank account was down to “chips and whetstones.” My friend had never heard the expression and asked if it was a Texas saying. I had to think about it for a while, to no avail. Is it?Molly Dare, San Marcos, CaliforniaA: The Texanist, as a native speaker of Texan, is quite familiar with the crazy colloquialisms, disparate dialects, idiotic idioms, and funny phraseologies used across the Lone Star State. Indeed, he’s heard them all. Or so he thought. The Texanist…

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Erik Maund had always lived the high life, as you might expect of a man whose surname had been blasted on TV ads for decades. By the time he was in his forties, he was an executive at Maund Automotive Group, a car sales business whose first dealership was opened by his grandfather Charles Maund. “If you say the Maund name in Austin in a 7-Eleven, two people say, ‘I bought a car from him,’ ” said Wallace Lundgren, a retired Chevrolet dealer. Austinites could probably recognize the major names in the car business better than they could identify any local politician. And members of the city’s old power circles would recognize Erik—a six-foot-three white guy with short brown hair, a boxy head, and heavy-lidded eyes…

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As kids, Jake Allyn and his brother Conor ran around their Preston Hollow neighborhood in Dallas, shooting movies with their father’s camcorder. Conor, who is older by four years, usually directed his sibling in what must have been action-packed thrillers. “I always say I started in stunts,” Jake says. “I was usually getting blown up or knifed or shot or thrown out of a tree or something very dangerous that you would only have your little brother do.”The Allyn brothers have turned their childhood antics into Hollywood ambitions with Margate House Films, a production company they run with their dad, Rob, that’s named after the street where they grew up.The younger Allyn, now 33, is still willing to put his body on the line for…

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Sometimes even big-time lawyers have trouble getting paid. Consider Jonathan Mitchell, who says his regular hourly rate is $1,200. The baby-faced Austin-based savant graduated from the University of Chicago Law School with high honors in 2001 and clerked for right-wing U.S. Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia. Mitchell has since earned a reputation as the canniest champion of the movement against abortion rights. He’s the architect of Texas Senate Bill 8, the law that allows anyone to sue, and collect civil damages from, anyone who has “aided or abetted” an abortion after about six weeks of gestation. He’s also crafted a host of other ingenious attempts to eradicate abortion rights in Texas. But though Mitchell was the winning lawyer last year in a defamation case that…

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