David Longoria announced it the way he ran the place, with no fuss. “HELLO, we are closing BBQ shop,” he posted last Thursday. Friday was the last day.
Longoria’s BBQ, the corrugated-metal joint at 100 Christopher Drive on the Everman edge of south Fort Worth, is closed after 31 years. In his goodbye post, David listed what the shop had earned: a dozen magazine stories, two spots on the most famous Top 50 barbecue list in Texas, and a Travel Channel episode. He wrote that he was “closing the doors and cutting the light one last time.”
The story starts with his father. Fidencio “Fred” Longoria was working at Bell Helicopter in the mid-1970s when he began making sausage at home, trying to recreate the links he grew up on in Gonzales. Around 1990 he landed on the recipe that made the family’s name, a coarse-ground brisket sausage with a spice blend nobody outside the family has seen. In 1995 he opened the restaurant around it.
Fred later handed the business to his sons, Danny and David. When Danny moved to Mexico, David took over the pits. He brought years of experience as a Kroger meat cutter and cooked on wood-fired rotisserie smokers burning post oak and pecan.
The brisket sausage was the reason people drove to Everman. It was lean and coarse, and in a region raised on snappy pork links, it was one of a kind. Plenty of North Texas pitmasters grind their own sausage now. Longoria’s was doing it when that was rare.
The family guarded that recipe hard enough to turn down Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives, because the producers wanted it as part of the deal. Regulars had other favorites too. The smoked brisket cheeseburger and the brisket chili each had their fans.
The two-room building had walls covered in old photographs and clippings from the Everman Times. One photo showed a 1971 Little League team with David, Danny, and Mark Jones, whose family ran Hickory Stick across town. If you came in alone on a slow afternoon, David might pull up a chair and talk barbecue while you ate.
The reasons for closing piled up. David has said the restaurant never fully recovered from a 45-day pandemic shutdown. After that came an unsteady economy, road closures near the shop, and his own health.
Everman once had three well-known barbecue joints. With Jerry’s Beef Barn and now Longoria’s gone, Hickory Stick Barbeque at 900 E. Enon Ave. is the last one left.
The sausage may not be finished. David has said he isn’t done with food, and he’d like to find a way to keep his father’s recipe going. For now, he says he’s hitting the barbecue trail himself to make the visits he never had time for. After 31 years at the pits, he has earned that drive.
