Smokey John’s Bar-B-Que and Home Cooking turns fifty this year, and the story of how it got here is better than most restaurants could invent.
It starts with a mortgage broker. In the mid-seventies, John Reaves was juggling home loans, roofing, construction, and insurance businesses around Dallas, and every holiday season he thanked his clients with hickory-smoked turkeys and hams he cured himself. The gesture got out of hand in the best possible way. People started asking for them year-round. At one point the family had more than a hundred turkeys and hams stacked in the house waiting for pickup. A friend finally told him the obvious. You need to open a restaurant.
So in 1976, John and his wife Gloria opened Big John’s at the corner of Lemmon and Mockingbird, with his cousin Douglas “Rent” Spraglin working the pit. Not long after opening, a fire filled the place with smoke, and as the family tells it, a regular walked in and cracked that they ought to call it Smokey John’s instead of Big John’s. The name stuck. So did everything else.
Reaves became only the second Black vendor in the history of the State Fair of Texas, and the restaurant grew into a gathering spot for Dallas Cowboys players and Black professionals through the seventies and eighties, complete with a small club inside. When that corner sold, the restaurant moved down the street to its current home at 1820 W. Mockingbird in December 1999. Brent graduated from the hospitality program at North Texas that same month and came straight into the business; Juan had already left a job with Hoop It Up to help their dad reopen. By 2013 the two of them were running the whole show.
Then came September 9, 2017, and this time the fire wasn’t a punchline. A piece of wood lodged under a grease pan gutted the kitchen. Customers fled mid-meal, leaving half-eaten plates on the tables. Juan was in a van full of barbecue headed to a catering job in Sherman and couldn’t even turn around. The State Fair was two weeks away, and the brothers cooked their way through it anyway. The rebuild took sixteen months. The doors reopened on January 30, 2019, and Smokey John himself was there in his fedora, telling anyone who asked that he was proud of his boys.
He died that August at 74. The next day, Juan and Brent won the Big Tex Choice Award for best sweet with their Big Red Chicken Bread, a Big Red-glazed doughnut crowned with a chicken wing wearing tiny sunglasses. Their father, a man who prayed with his community every Tuesday inside that restaurant, would have loved the timing. Texas Monthly’s barbecue editor called the reopening a resurrection worth celebrating. The years since have proved him right.
The food explains the loyalty. The brisket comes tender with a proper smoke ring, sold by the pound or piled onto a brisket sandwich, and the ribs have converted plenty of visitors from cities that think they know barbecue better. The rib plate goes by Smoke On The Bone, four bones with two sides for $22.97, and the indecisive can order the Pound of Smoke Plate, which lands ribs, brisket, hot links, sausage, and smoked turkey on one tray for $37.25. Keep an eye out for the Texas pastrami, which rotates onto the meat counter when they have it.
This is barbecue and home cooking, though, and the second half of the name pulls its weight. The fried catfish comes as full fillets with homemade tartar sauce, or blackened. The baked mac and cheese, made with the big old-school elbow noodles, deserves a moment of silence before you pick up a fork, and the sides run deep: collard greens, cabbage, yams, baked beans, potato salad, fried okra, and black-eyed peas on Fridays only, which is exactly the kind of rule a place like this should have.
Weekday lunch specials come straight from somebody’s grandmother’s kitchen, chicken and dumplings and Salisbury steak on Thursdays, and Thursday and Saturday are the only days for the brisket queso with house-made chips. The po’boy, brisket and sausage stacked on Texas toast, is the move if you can’t decide, and Smokey’s Tater buries a large baked potato under your choice of smoked meat, butter, sour cream, cheese, bacon bits, and chives.
Save room. The peach cobbler is non-negotiable, the banana pudding has its partisans, and there is cake by the slice in strawberry, lemon, or chocolate. One thing you will not find is a beer list. John Reaves never felt right selling alcohol, and his sons have kept it that way.
The State Fair is the famous chapter, and fairly so. Come fall, the family’s booths sell turkey legs and tamales to generations of Texans who plan their day around them. But the fair runs twenty-four days, and the restaurant is the other three hundred and forty-one. This is a lunch counter near Love Field where the regulars show up two and three times a week, where a full-scale catering operation runs year-round out of the back, and where the dining room was always meant for lingering. John Reaves opened that room for Bible study and prayer every Tuesday, and the tradition outlived him. Brent and Juan will tell you their business isn’t really food, it’s people, and the food is just how they prove it.
Fifty years, one family, a fire, and a comeback. Dallas barbecue does not have many stories like this one, and none quite this good.
Smokey John’s Bar-B-Que and Home Cooking is at 1820 W. Mockingbird Lane, Suite 18, in Dallas, open Monday through Saturday from 11 a.m. to 6:45 p.m., closed Sunday. Call (214) 352-2752 or order at smokeyjohns.com.
