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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.

big tacoSomething stops Clay Dover cold as he strolls behind the restaurant’s counter. The CEO of Velvet Taco has been all smiles and high fives since he entered the chain’s location in the Grandscape shopping center, amid the suburban sprawl north of Dallas. But now, staring at a few chicken strips in a bin under a heat lamp, he cuts off his friendly patter midsentence and pulls out one of the little brown hunks. He turns it over in his hand, tears it apart, takes a bite, and throws the rest in the trash with a faint trace of a pucker on his face. He’s not going to call anyone out on the spot, but he’s clearly not pleased.Dover happens to be one of the world’s…

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Curry Lime wings and more from Feges BBQ.I’ve thought about Feges BBQ’s curry lime sauce every day since I first ate it on a smoked and fried chicken wing at the joint’s Houston location six days ago. And I’ve used the sauce in four meals since co-owner Erin Smith texted me the recipe. It’s great on smoked chicken, grilled chicken, noodles, and even cucumbers, so when the Feges crew said we could share it, I was elated.Marco Coleman, the director of operations at the Spring Branch location, developed the recipe. In 2022, ten months after the location’s opening, the cost of chicken wings finally dipped low enough for the restaurant to be able to serve them regularly. It already had three sauces in the lineup—Alabama white, hot red, and PB&J—but it asked…

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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.

Last year, Texas Monthly‘s very own award-winning in-house agency, Texas Monthly Studio, was tapped to produce the official companion podcast—alongside Max—for Love & Death. This month, it was announced that the show has been nominated for a Webby Award for Best Partnership or Collaboration in the Podcast category. This is the second year in a row that the TM Studio has been nominated for a Webby in this category. “The Official Love & Death Podcast,” hosted by Nancy Miller, takes an episode-by-episode dive into Max’s limited series. The show itself, written by David E. Kelley, is based on parts one and two of the 1984 Texas Monthly article “Love and Death in Silicon Prairie,” as well as the book Evidence of Love: A True Story of Passion and Death 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.

Did Chip Gaines’s Social Media Crusade Keep Scott Drew at Baylor?The Baylor men’s basketball program hasn’t exactly enjoyed a storied history. While the program has made it to three Final Fours, two of them came before the invention of the Barbie doll. The third, though, led to a 2021 national championship, and it was the product of an almost two-decade run of success for the program under head coach Scott Drew. Drew came to Baylor in 2003, after a shocking murder scandal caused its previous coach to resign. He weathered NCAA sanctions in his first years, then led the Bears to respectability by 2010, with the team making twelve NCAA tournament appearances in seventeen seasons—six of which saw the team advance to the Sweet Sixteen or better, including that 2021 title. In the past four seasons,…

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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.

I last saw Carlos Alvarez in January.  He was his usual self—welcoming, unhurried, and insatiably curious about the year ahead for the Texas Business Hall of Fame, into which he was inducted in 2010 and for which I serve as executive director. Carlos had just purchased a piece of technology to send to an entrepreneur whose start-up he had helped our organization fund. That innovator was developing a technology similar to the one Carlos had bought, and Carlos smiled as he predicted how passionately the young man would explain how what he was working on was far more transformative. That was the beauty of Carlos. He delighted in the successes of others and rarely talked about his own. Carlos was the first Mexican-born Texan to be inducted into…

The post The Rich Legacy of a Bighearted Beer Guy appeared first on Texas Monthly.

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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.

Jeff Hiller short profileJeff Hiller knows why people come to see his one-man show, Middle Aged Ingenue. “People like you more when you’re on TV,” the San Antonio native told the audience at New York City’s Public Theater the first time he performed it in August 2023, referring to his two seasons as the unexpected leading man opposite Bridget Everett on HBO’s Somebody Somewhere. “It’s literally the only reason you’re here tonight, so thank you.”When the show makes its Texas debut on April 13 at Austin’s State Theater as part of the Moontower Comedy Festival, Hiller—whose newfound fame also stems from a stint playing a serial killer on American Horror Story—may not say it quite the same.“I’ve tried to pull that back a little bit because my husband…

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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.

Mary Allen Seminary in Crockett, date unknown.In the nineties, when I was growing up in the small East Texas town of Crockett, about a two-hour drive north of Houston, I could see nothing impressive about Mary Allen College. In fact, I could barely see its last remaining building, a decrepit, four-story brick structure, at all, because it was obscured by tall grass and debris. Vines had crept over much of it, and broken windows gave it a foreboding air. Sometimes kids joked that the college was haunted, but mostly, we ignored it. Today, with the grass mowed and the debris cleared, you can see the building from the street. A newcomer might wonder exactly what it is they are looking at. A historical marker out front explains that this place was…

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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.

El Paso FlautaArturo Reyes and his best friend, Mark Rubio, were leaving a Naughty by Nature concert in Las Vegas in late 2018, when Rubio’s nephew called at 2 a.m., from Texas. The young man was speaking in a hurried, excited manner. It was difficult to hear him, but one question came through: “Hey, Tío, does Art still make that delicious queso?” Rubio switched the call to speaker and heard his nephew tell the two men that their families were confident enough in Reyes’s recipe to sign up for the Quesoff in Austin. The day of the contest, Reyes arrived with his family’s decades-old chile con queso recipe: a mixture of restaurant-quality white American easy-melt cheese, roasted Anaheim chiles, poblanos, onions, tomatoes, jalapeños, cilantro, and a blend…

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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.

Khruangbin new albumThere are infinite ways to decorate a room. Cover the walls with photos of your loved ones. Stack your precious literature into columns. Litter the shelves with mementos you’ve collected while traveling. Make it kitschy, dress it cute, or keep it formal; it’s yours to do with how you please. It takes confidence to ensure your room remains just yours, a haven despite a world beyond its walls. Which is why it feels vulnerable to open your door and let others inside. Khruangbin, Houston’s psychedelic soul-rock trio, unhinges the doors to their room entirely. With their fourth studio album, A La Sala, the band welcomes the world “to the room,” as the title translates from Spanish. It’s a space adorned with decorations as globally inspired…

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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.

Mout’s Barbeque ReviewEric and Jessica Mouton didn’t jump into the barbecue business hastily. The process to launch Mout’s Barbeque (pronounced like “moots”), in Winnie, started three years before its opening in August. The couple purchased an empty building just south of Interstate 10, between Houston and Beaumont, that had been a doctor’s office. Then Eric used the welding skills he developed in the marine salvage business to build a steel offset smoker. All the while they traveled the state with their four kids, researching the best barbecue joints in Houston, Austin, and Lockhart. Eric’s confidence in his own barbecue grew, but he had to be sure, and asked Jessica if she thought people would buy it. “I think it’s the best, but I might be biased,” she…

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