8 Texas Barbecue Joints Worth a Two-Hour Drive

In 2021, Texas Monthly sent a team of editors to 411 barbecue joints across the state over eight weeks before ranking the fifty best.

Distance never factored into the score.

These are the Texas barbecue joints worth a two-hour drive.

1. Snow’s BBQ

Snow’s BBQ in Lexington opens for one shift a week, and the line outside its screen door often forms before the smoke does.

Pitmaster Tootsie Tomanetz rolls in at two in the morning on Saturdays.

She has run barbecue pits since the 1960s.

The brisket runs out first.

Texas Monthly named Snow’s the No. 1 barbecue joint in Texas in 2008, then again in 2017.

It fell out of the Top 10 for the first time in the magazine’s 2025 rankings, landing in what Texas Monthly calls the second 40.

Lexington sits about 50 miles northeast of Austin, close to an hour of open road that only pays off if the smoke is worth it.

Show up after the meat runs out, and you’ll find the door already locked for the week.

2. Louie Mueller Barbecue

Taylor sits about 30 miles northeast of Austin, and Louie Mueller Barbecue opened there in 1949.

The restaurant moved into its current building, a former basketball court, ten years later in 1959.

Three generations of the Mueller family have run the pits since.

The James Beard Foundation came calling in 2006.

It gave Louie Mueller an America’s Classic award, a national honor reserved for restaurants whose food and character define their community.

The recipe never changed.

You’ll still find nothing on the brisket but salt, pepper, and oak smoke, the same combination third-generation pitmaster Wayne Mueller learned from his grandfather.

3. Black’s Barbecue

Black’s Barbecue has belonged to the same family since 1932, in a Lockhart building about 30 miles southeast of Austin.

Black’s says no other barbecue operation in Texas can claim a longer continuous run under one family.

Kent Black runs it today.

He’s the third generation, working alongside his sons now.

Lockhart calls itself the “Barbecue Capital of Texas,” and Black’s is one of three storied meat markets clustered within a few blocks of the courthouse square.

Order there today, and you’ll still get nothing on the brisket but salt, pepper, and post oak smoke, the same three ingredients the first generation used.

4. Southside Market & Barbeque

William Moon opened Southside Market in downtown Elgin, about 25 miles east of Austin, in 1886.

He’d sold beef off a horse-drawn wagon around the area since 1882, four years before he opened Southside Market.

Texas Monthly’s barbecue editor calls it a plausible, if unprovable, claim to being the oldest barbecue business in Texas.

The records burned long ago.

Butcher Bud Frazier gets credit for the hot-gut sausage recipe that built Southside Market’s reputation, developed decades after Moon’s time behind the counter.

You can still taste why it stuck: The Texas Legislature named Elgin the official Sausage Capital of Texas in 1995, and the town has worn the title ever since.

5. Cooper’s Old Time Pit Bar-B-Que

Llano sits about 75 miles northwest of Austin, and Cooper’s Old Time Pit Bar-B-Que has cooked over open mesquite pits there since 1962.

The same style of outdoor cookers still lets the whole block smell what’s coming from a distance.

The chop settles it.

Cooper’s smokes a two-inch-thick pork chop known as the Big Chop, thick enough that many people cannot finish it in one sitting.

Former President George W. Bush named Cooper’s his favorite barbecue, and he reportedly had it cater at his Crawford ranch soon after he was declared president-elect in December 2000.

6. Burnt Bean Co

Burnt Bean Co. opened in Seguin in 2020, about 35 miles northeast of San Antonio.

Texas Monthly visited during the same 2021 review that sent editors to 411 barbecue joints in eight weeks.

Burnt Bean ranked No. 4 that year, less than two years after it opened.

Texas Monthly named Burnt Bean Co. the single best barbecue joint in the entire state in 2025.

That jump, from No. 4 to No. 1, took four years.

The James Beard Foundation has nominated pitmasters David Kirkland and Ernest Servantes for Outstanding Chef three years running.

The recognition kept coming.

Michelin gave it a Bib Gourmand award in 2024, and by then you’d find lines outside Burnt Bean before its doors even opened.

7. Stanley’s Famous Pit Bar-B-Q

Stanley’s Famous Pit Bar-B-Q has landed on Texas Monthly’s Top 50 list five separate times.

The sandwich earned a title.

Texas Monthly named Stanley’s Mother Clucker, a smoked chicken thigh sandwich topped with a fried egg, the best barbecue sandwich in the state.

Stanley’s sits well outside the Central Texas towns that usually dominate Texas barbecue conversations, proof the state’s best smoking isn’t confined to one corner of it.

8. Baker Boys BBQ

Baker Boys BBQ runs out of a farm-town smokehouse in Gonzales, and Texas Monthly has recognized it three separate times over the past decade, most recently in 2025.

The family never left.

Wayne Baker runs the pits today, ten years after he and his father, Phil, first opened Baker Boys together in 2015.

Phil Baker died in 2023, and Wayne has kept the smokehouse running since.

Gonzales sits an hour past San Antonio’s edge.

That’s far enough that you’ll find the Saturday morning crowd at Baker Boys there for the food, not for anything else in town.

The Meat Markets Behind Central Texas Barbecue

Several of the Texas barbecue joints on this list started as 19th-century butcher shops, not restaurants.

German and Czech immigrants who settled the Hill Country ran meat markets that sold fresh cuts all week.

Waste wasn’t an option.

Before refrigeration existed, beef that didn’t sell by Saturday night was a loss, so butchers started smoking the leftover cuts to save them.