The best barbecue in Texas right now is at Goldee's outside Fort Worth. What you should actually drive to depends on the day you have free:
Top pick
Goldee's Barbecue, Fort Worth — the brisket, three years running.
Worth a Saturday
Snow's BBQ, Lexington — open one day a week, from 8 a.m.
Best sides
Interstellar BBQ, Austin — the scalloped potatoes are not a joke.
Oldest room
Louie Mueller Barbecue, Taylor — smoke-blackened since 1949.
There is a version of this list that just reprints the same six Central Texas names every
publication has printed since 2011. We tried to avoid writing it. Over fourteen months we
drove to 140 pits, ordered blind, paid cash, and threw out anything that arrived off a
gas-assisted rotisserie.
What survived is below. The top of the list did move this year, and it moved away from
Austin, which is either a sign of a healthy barbecue economy or a sign that Fort Worth
has been underrated for a decade. Probably both.
At a Glance
The top of the ranking, side by side. Scroll sideways on a phone for price and rating.
The best barbecue joints in Texas, ranked, with town, signature order, brisket price and rating out of five.
Between January 2025 and April 2026 we ordered the same four things at 140 pits: lean brisket, fatty brisket, pork ribs, and whatever sausage the house makes. Four things decided the order:
1The brisket. Bark you can hear, fat rendered until it stops behaving like fat, and salt and pepper doing most of the work.
2The wood. Post oak, mesquite or pecan, burned down to coals and fed by hand. Gas-assisted rotisseries were noted and marked down.
3The sausage. Ground and stuffed on site, coarse enough to see the grind, with a casing that snaps instead of splitting.
4The wait. What the line costs you, and whether the joint tells the truth about when it expects to sell out.
Every pit was visited at least twice, unannounced, and paid for out of pocket. Prices were re-confirmed by phone in the week before publication. No joint can buy, sponsor or influence a ranking here, and none has ever tried twice.
The 6 Best BBQ Joints, Ranked
1
No. 1: Goldee's Barbecue
Fort Worth★4.9(1,180 reviews)★$32/lb avg.
Four cooks who learned on other people's pits opened this one in 2020, and the brisket has not been beaten since.
Counter service, communal tables, and a queue that forms before the doors open. Jackilometresan / Wikimedia Commons (CC0)
Four cooks who met working other people’s pits opened Goldee’s on a two-lane road
southeast of Fort Worth in 2020, which was not an obvious year to open a restaurant.
They cooked anyway. The brisket that comes off those offsets has the best bark in
Texas: dark, cracked, more pepper than salt, and fat underneath it rendered to the
point where it stops behaving like fat at all.
The sides are cooked with the same seriousness, which is rare enough in barbecue to be
worth flagging. Collards go into the pot with smoked pork and stay there most of the
morning. The potato salad is mustard-forward and cold.
Best for:
a Saturday you have already written off to driving and eating.
One day a week, starting at eight in the morning, in a town of 1,200 people an hour east of Austin. Still worth the alarm.
The Saturday line at Snow's BBQ, Lexington
Doors at eight, sellout before noon, and the pork steak in between.
Snow’s opens at eight on Saturday mornings and closes when the meat runs out, which in
practice means somewhere between ten and noon. Tootsie Tomanetz has been working these
pits since the place opened in 2003, and she was working pits in Giddings for nearly
thirty years before that. She still turns briskets by hand with a shovel-length fork.
Get to Lexington by seven. The line is friendly, the pit yard is open to walk through,
and the pork steak — a cut nobody outside this county seems to bother with — is the
thing to order alongside the brisket.
Heads up:
everything sells out. On a holiday weekend the last brisket has gone by 9:30 a.m.
The joint that made the line a national story. Sixteen years on, the brisket still justifies the folding chair.
Folding chairs out by 8 a.m. on a Saturday. It has been like this since 2011. Larry D. Moore / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)
Aaron Franklin’s brisket is not the best in Texas anymore. It is still the most reliable
brisket in Texas, which over sixteen years and several thousand cooking days may be the
more impressive claim. Nothing here is off. The bark is even, the point is rendered,
and the turkey — genuinely the sleeper order — is moist in a way that embarrasses most
of the state.
The cost is time. Two hours is a normal Saturday, and it has run to four. The online
pre-order for whole cuts is the workaround most locals now use, and there is no shame
in it.
Skip the line:
the online pre-order. Whole cuts only, but you walk past a two-hour line at eleven sharp.
A 1949 gymnasium with walls the color of a chimney flue, and a beef rib that has outlived every trend in Texas cooking.
The dining hall at Louie Mueller Barbecue, Taylor
Smoke has been settling into these walls since 1949.
Louie Mueller has been in the same 1949 building in Taylor since Bobby Mueller’s father
bought the lease, and the walls have not been washed in any meaningful sense since. That
patina is the point. So is the beef rib, a single bone the size of a forearm, crusted in
pepper coarse enough to feel between your teeth.
Timing matters here. The room rarely has a wait after two on a weekday, but the beef ribs are usually gone by mid-afternoon on Saturday, and the doors stay shut Sunday and Monday. Order the rib first, around $22 for the single bone, and build the rest of the tray around it.
Order this:
one beef rib, a quarter pound of fatty brisket, and a jalapeño sausage link. Split it
between two people and you will still have leftovers.
Leonard Botello IV moved the operation from Brenham to Washington Avenue in 2018 and brought his mother's cake recipes with him.
The cake case at Truth Barbeque, Houston
Six flavors, baked in house every morning, waiting at the end of the meat line.
Truth is the rare barbecue joint that has thought about the second hour of your visit.
There is air conditioning, there are chairs with backs, and there is cake — six kinds,
baked every morning, sold by the enormous slice. Leonard Botello IV started in Brenham
in 2015 and moved the operation to Washington Avenue three years later.
The brisket holds up against anything in Houston and most things in Austin. The ribs
run a little sweeter than we prefer. Nobody at our table complained.
Order this:
a slice of the tres leches to go, before you order any meat. They sell out well ahead
of the brisket.
A strip-mall pit in far north Austin where the side dishes are cooked with the same attention as the meat, which almost never happens.
A loaded tray at Interstellar BBQ, north Austin
Nine rotating sides share the tray with post oak brisket at $30 a pound.
John Bates put Interstellar in a north Austin strip mall in 2018, and the location has
probably cost it national attention. The meat is very good. The sides are the reason it
is on this list at all: scalloped potatoes with green chile, a peach and pecan cobbler
that would carry a bakery, and nine rotating options that get changed when they stop
being interesting.
The strip mall setting works in your favor. Parking is easy, the line moves, and you can be back on the road in half an hour with pork belly worth ordering twice. The trade is a small, loud dining room twenty minutes north of central Austin.
Know before you go:
the dining room seats about forty and fills fast. Park at the far end of the lot and
walk.
Barbecue is a wood problem before it is a meat problem. Everything else is seasoning and patience.
— Cole Rutherford, Senior Editor
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the best barbecue in Texas?
Goldee's Barbecue, on a two-lane road southeast of Fort Worth, took our top spot for the third year running. Snow's in Lexington is a very close second and, because it opens one morning a week, a harder ticket.
Do I really have to wait in line for Texas barbecue?
Less than you used to. Franklin now sells whole cuts by pre-order, Truth in Houston moves a full room in under twenty minutes, and Louie Mueller in Taylor is usually walk-up after 2 p.m. Lines are worst on Saturdays between 11 a.m. and 1 p.m.
What wood is used for Texas barbecue?
Post oak, almost everywhere in Central Texas, burned down to coals in an offset pit. Mesquite is common in West and South Texas and burns hotter and harder. Pecan turns up in the Hill Country. All six joints on this list cook with wood alone.
How much does a pound of brisket cost in Texas?
Between $28 and $34 a pound at the joints we rank, and a pound feeds two people comfortably. Beef ribs are usually sold individually and run $18 to $24 each.
What should I order at a Texas barbecue joint the first time?
A half pound of fatty brisket, one pork rib, and one link of house sausage. Fatty brisket is the honest test of a pit. Order the lean only if you already know you prefer it.
Is Central Texas barbecue different from East Texas barbecue?
Yes. Central Texas is a meat market tradition: post oak, salt and pepper, sauce on the side if at all. East Texas leans sweeter and saucier and often chops the beef. South Texas barbacoa is a separate lineage again.
Sources & Methodology
This guide is original reporting. Nothing here was pulled from a press release or a paid placement.
—Field reporting: 140 barbecue joints visited between January 2025 and April 2026, receipts and tasting notes on file.
—Prices, hours and sellout patterns re-confirmed by phone the week of publication.
—890 reader nominations submitted through our Nominate a Spot form.
—Pit and wood-sourcing details confirmed with owners or pitmasters at all six joints.
Cole edits the rankings and runs the fact-check desk. He has eaten at 1,900 of the places on this site, which he describes as both a privilege and a medical event. Before Best of Texas he covered agriculture and water policy for a Panhandle daily.
