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SOUTH TEXAS HINZE’S BAR-B-QUE
Wharton
Address: 8229 U.S. Highway 59, Wharton
Phone: (979) 532-2710
Established: 1970
Owner: Michael Hinze
Best
Bites: beef brisket, pork spareribs, smoked sausage, chicken, fried
catfish, chicken-fried steak, chicken tenders, bacon-onion potatoes,
meringue pies
Payment: credit cards
Mike Hinze is the
undisputed pit boss, with all memories of side dishes and meringue pies
fading inside the tumultuous swirls of smoke.
Mike uses two
rotisseries fired with pecan wood, a Southern Pride for his brisket and
an Ole Hickory for his pork spareribs, chicken and just about
everything else. Cooking is done in these overnight, with finished
meats moving into a couple of 20-foot homemade barrel smokers blessed
with the least expected of features—double drawers that allow Mike and
his guys to reach meat without sticking their faces deep into the
smoke.
Mike’s 16-hour brisket is king on Hinze’s menu, dry-rubbed
at the start and basted with a mop sauce near the end. Ribs and sausage
come in next, followed by chicken, pork roast, ham, and turkey. Not
content with standard-issue potato salad, coleslaw and beans, Hinze’s
offers no fewer than 20 sides. The trinity is among them, of course,
but so are bacon-onion potatoes and pinto beans, plus fried okra,
several other fried favorites and something called “okra gumbo”—more
like Creole okra and tomatoes.
For dessert, Mike and his sisters
have become such masters of meringue that they’re the only workers
allowed to go near Hinze’s coconut, lemon or chocolate pies. The
fillings are amazingly light and flavorful, especially the coconut, and
the meringues are lighter still.
AUNT JO’S BBQ
Victoria
Address: 5303 U.S. Highway 77 South, Victoria
Phone: (361) 578-5900
Established: 2007
Owners: The Joshua family
Best Bites: beef brisket, pork spareribs, potato salad, pumpkin bread, mini pecan pies
Payment: credit cards
Aunt
Jo’s mesquite smoke tastes especially good on the thick slices of
fall-apart brisket that’s cooked 12 to 14 hours, but it also delivers a
knockout punch to the place’s tender pork spareribs. There are separate
dry rubs for seasoning the beef, pork, or poultry before it goes into
the smoker, plus a wonderful, distinctive sauce for the eating
afterward. It’s sweet and tangy when you first taste it, but it leaves
a warm trail of black pepper on your tongue that’s equally pleasurable
with beef and pork.
Side dishes travel no farther than traditional
potato salad, coleslaw and beans, even though the onions provide a
happy jolt. Instead of simply and typically raw, they are lightly
pickled. Dessert choices include mini pecan pies baked by Monroe’s
sister and pumpkin bread baked by his mother. “We’re keeping it very
simple,” he says.
THE BAR-B-Q MAN
Corpus Christi
Address: 4931 Interstate 37 South, Corpus Christi
Phone: (361) 888-4248
Established: 1977
Owner: Malcolm DeShields
Best Bites: beef brisket, pork spareribs, smoked turkey, potato salad, waffle cones with ice cream and praline sauce
Payment: credit cards
Malcolm
DeShields took over The Barbecue Man operation years before buying the
restaurant from his father. The place seats up to 800 at a time and
often does, though Malcolm stresses he likes things better with a
little more breathing room. Meats are smoked in Southern Pride
rotisseries, what Malcolm refers to as “wood-burning convection ovens,”
essentially basting themselves as they turn in a sealed chamber.
Most
popular meats here are the brisket and sausage, though the cafeteria
line at The Bar-B-Q Man also entices with smoked chicken on the bone
and smoked turkey breast off of it, along with tender and savory pork
spareribs.
Following his father’s lead, Malcolm offers only four
side dishes: the trinity of M.O.’s recipes for potato salad, coleslaw
and pinto beans, plus green beans. Favorite desserts include a waffle
cone bearing vanilla ice cream and a topping of gooey-good praline
sauce made up the road in Sinton.
SMOKEY’S BAR-B-QUE
San Juan
Address: 608 W. Highway 83, San Juan
Phone: (956) 702-4127
Established: 1991
Owner: Juan Salinas
Best Bites: beef brisket, grilled fajitas,
barbecued chicken, Spanish rice, charro beans, pecan pie
Payment: credit cards
As any pit boss will tell you, barbecue is the opposite of fast food.
And,
as Juan Salinas learned long ago, the key to doing barbecue his way was
to break difficult and complex tasks requiring a master’s touch into
brief steps that virtually no one could mess up. This way, he says, he
can “duplicate” himself, whether that means consistent food cooked and
served at multiple locations or simply taking a day off. Surely the
most controversial of these moves is the way Smokey’s cooks
brisket...usually the litmus test for the “low and slow” crowd that
glares at a rotisserie with a thermostat as though it’s an instrument
of the devil.
“My brisket is 80 to 85 percent broiled in a gas
oven, then finished the last 15 to 20 percent in the smoker for
flavor,” says Juan. Each brisket spending about four hours in the oven
and up to 2 more in the smoker. For that last step, a purist in his own
fashion, Juan goes along with the local love of mesquite, using it for
smoke even when he’s knocking out 800 to 1,000 plates at a time for the
school and church fund-raisers that remain a backbone of his business.
Smokey’s
serves beef fajitas in amounts right behind brisket, and barbecued
chicken not too far behind that. Side dishes include items expected in
barbecue joints all over Texas, but built out with the Spanish rice and
charro beans demanded by customers in the Valley. “This is the Valley,”
he says, “and you just gotta have ’em.” Having been in business since
1991, Salinas has known a lot of his best customers from the days they
came in with their parents. “They started out as kids 16 years ago,
eating a chopped beef sandwich for 99 cents,” Juan says. “Now they’re
married and bringing kids of their own.”
JOE COTTEN’S
Robstown
Address: 607 Highway 77 South, Robstown
Phone: (361) 767-9973
Established: 1947
Owner: Cecil Cotten
Best Bites: beef brisket, chopped beef
sandwich, homemade sausage, potato salad
Payment: credit cards
To
hear his son tell it, Joe Cotten got into the barbecue business 60-plus
years ago only to keep his clientele drinking and gambling.
“Back
then,” Cecil Cotten explains, “gambling was just a misdemeanor, so you
paid a fine and went on about your business. My daddy always wanted to
get rich without working for a living. That’s why he got out of oil and
opened a beer joint. He started cooking cuz he noticed guys going home
to have supper with their wives. This way he could keep ’em there all
night, spending money. But then, they made gambling a federal offense,
and my daddy didn’t want to go to prison.”The gambling went. The
barbecue stayed.
These days, Joe Cotten’s does all its meats on a
series of huge, silver Southern Pride rotisseries. Brisket, sausage,
pork ribs and sliced pork are the meats, and mesquite is the wood. In a
hive of interconnected little rooms, the kitchen not only turns out its
few homemade sides but produces Joe Cotten’s own sausage each day.
Meals
are assembled in sequence between the smoker and the dining room, with
each meat order on paper set in its own shallow tray, and all trays for
a particular table stacked atop a deeper tray holding all the sides.
Waiters go forth into the dining room carrying, for the larger tables
at least, a barbecue high-rise.
One of the strangest touches—one
that, this being Texas, has become a beloved signature—is Joe Cotten’s
barbecue sauce. It almost isn’t. Instead of the smoother, sweeter,
thicker renditions that have become the norm, Joe’s sauce is, well,
chunky like Tex-Mex salsa. It’s full of rough-chopped tomatoes, onions
and jalapeños, plus mustard, Worcestershire sauce, salt and pepper.
Cecil is proud to tell you, though, that the real secret is the “base”
his father took to using, which, of course, his successors use
faithfully to this day.
“It’s drippings from the brisket,” he
reveals. “You gotta have some kinda base to put the other stuff in. My
daddy said it took him eight years to get this sauce the way he wanted
it.” Some people don’t like our sauce, but I always tell them to bring
their own if they want to. Some of our customers been comin’ here so
long—some of ’em 50 years—that they think this is their home anyway.”
See the full article in the March 2009 issue. Subscribe Order back issues |
