Before there was a Sonny Bryan’s, there was a Thunderbird. A 1955 Ford with a continental kit on the back. There was also a house, and a collection of antique Colt firearms that had taken years to build. In 1957, William Jennings Bryan Jr. — everybody called him Sonny — sold all of it. He and his wife Joanne, who had won the Miss Dallas pageant a decade earlier, raised $6,500 and hired an old carpenter named Don Hoenstein to build a smokehouse at the corner of Inwood Road and Harry Hines Boulevard.
They opened on February 13, 1958. The electricity wasn’t hooked up yet. It didn’t matter. Smoking meat doesn’t need electricity.
The story goes back further than most people know. Sonny’s grandfather, Elias Bryan, moved his family to Dallas from Cincinnati in 1910 and opened the first Bryan’s Barbecue on Centre Street. He cooked untrimmed meat lean-side down, letting the fat render over the fire and baste everything as it dripped. His son Red opened The Tin Shack on Jefferson Street in Oak Cliff in 1930, selling brisket sandwiches for a dime. Sonny grew up sweeping sawdust off the floor on Saturday mornings. There was always loose change in the spent sawdust — enough for movie money.
He had other plans. He wanted to go to SMU and become a stockbroker. Life disagreed.
What Sonny built on Inwood Road was deliberately small. He watched his father expand The Tin Shack and lose the personal touch in the process. Sonny told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram years later that he looked back on his father’s life and saw how happy Red had been with the smaller place. So Sonny kept it tight. A few school desks for tables. A walk-up counter. 800 pounds of meat a day, cooked low and slow, and when it ran out the restaurant closed. On a busy Friday that could happen before 1 p.m. After that, Sonny got on his bicycle and rode around Dallas for the rest of the afternoon.
The place drew everyone. During the civil rights demonstrations at the Piccadilly Cafeteria, protesters would come into Sonny Bryan’s after marches and eat shoulder to shoulder with the lunch crowd. Blue-collar workers were regulars. When the economy dipped, the white-collar crowd showed up too, trading the shrimp bowl at the top of the bank building for a brisket sandwich on a school desk. Sonny said he could read the state of the Dallas economy by who walked through his door on any given day.
Richard Nixon ate there. Julia Child ate there. So did Emeril Lagasse, Rachael Ray, ZZ Top, Eric Clapton, and at some point seemingly everyone who passed through Dallas with a serious interest in food. Texas Monthly wrote about Sonny Bryan’s in 1973, one of the magazine’s first issues, and the story put the smokehouse on the statewide map. The James Beard Foundation eventually gave the place an America’s Classic award.
Sonny never franchised. He was asked often enough. “If I ever did anything smart,” he said, “it was not going into the franchise business.” He ran the single location for three decades, then sold his name and recipe to a group of investors in 1989 when his health began to fail. He died of cancer a few months after the sale.
The original Inwood location still has the school desks. The hickory smoke still works its way into everything within a block. In 2016 it became the only 24-hour barbecue restaurant in the state of Texas, which suits a place that has always fed whoever showed up, whenever they showed up.
Get the brisket. Get the onion rings. Go on a weekday if you can.
Sonny Bryan’s Smokehouse is at 2202 Inwood Road in Dallas. Open 24 hours.
