Peach-tea-glazed pork belly burnt ends at #6 Interstellar BBQ.
Four years ago, we accused Texas Monthly of jumping the shark when they published their Texas Monthly BBQ Guide and anointed a place serving Laotian sausage as the best in the Lone Star state ahead of Snow’s, Franklin, Kreuz, Mikelthait and other icons. The 2025 guide is out (turns out it’s every four years, so this is a big deal) and they’re at it again.
This year’s #1 is Burnt Bean Co in Seguin, a town of 30,000 an hour north of San Antonio. They have Korean beef ribs as an occasional special and “brisket-stuffed croissant sandwiches dubbed Blue Octobers” and a variety of Mexican dishes and serve all day long including breakfast specials… actually that sounds pretty good. The rest of the top 5 places (two of which repeat from the previous ranking), also rate high for traditional dishes (i.e. brisket, sausage and maybe some turkey smoked long and slow) with a few quirky outliers. It’s not until we get to blueberry-gouda sausage at #7 Dayne’s Craft Barbecue and gluten-free baked goods at #10 Evie Mae’s Pit Barbeque that we want to throw in our mopping towel. So maybe it’s us, not them.
Pork ribs at #3 Goldees, which was #1 in the previous guide.
As we recognized in 2021, there’s a new generation of customers who are interested in experiences beyond standing in line for hours at grubby shacks and seek out foods for their inventiveness and Instagrammability as much as for flavor. Our Burnt My Fingers Texas barbecue rating system doesn’t mean much to these folks and they are entirely willing to accept a variety of foods that are grilled or otherwise cooked without smoke as “barbecue”. But it rankles us to see Snow’s and Franklin and Mueller as also-rans (the runner-up list is organized by city, not rating, which I guess is meant to be kind), and Kreuz’ gone entirely. And Mikelthwait has never made the list… we still don’t understand that omission. Also the guide opines* that “brisket might be an afterthought when the 2029 or 2033 list rolls around”. No. Just no.
The 2025 Texas Monthly BBQ Guide is here, and the 2021 guide is still available here. Both require you to register with your email at some point after you start reading, but it’s free.
*This might not be BBQ Editor Daniel Vaughn talking but one of his many chirpy associate tasters. Though in 2025, vs 2021, Vaugh avers that he personally visited each of the top 50 establishments.
