Tag Archives: BBQ

Off the Bone Came Before All of Them

Dwight Harvey spent 38 years in finance at PepsiCo. When he retired, he started barbecuing in his backyard. Rose, his wife, thought it was a fine hobby. Then it became something else.

In 2008 Dwight and Rose opened Off the Bone Barbeque in The Cedars, in an old service station at what is now 1734 Botham Jean Boulevard. Their son Steven came in alongside Dwight to run it. They had about 800 square feet for everything — kitchen, counter, the works. They used the old service bays as a patio. They came in and redid the whole thing themselves. It was a challenge, Dwight will tell you. It turned out pretty good.

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There’s a Name in Fort Worth Barbecue You Should Know: Jonny Butch

Most people in Dallas haven’t heard of Jonny Butch yet. That’s going to change.

Butch works the pits at Goldee’s Barbecue in Fort Worth — the operation at 4645 Dick Price Road that Texas Monthly has ranked number one in the state, that the New York Times has called out, and that Food & Wine named among the best new chef programs in America in 2024. Being part of that crew is already a credential. But Butch’s path to a Fort Worth pit room is not the standard one.

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Sonny Bryan Sold Everything He Owned to Open a BBQ Joint

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.

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The Best Summer Day Trip from Dallas Opens This Month

Forty-five minutes east of Dallas, train conductors stop their trains to get a scoop of peach ice cream. That tells you most of what you need to know about Ham Orchards.

It started with a firefighter and a hunch. Dale Ham had spent 32 years with the Richardson Fire Department when something came over him in 1979 — he wanted to grow peaches. He bought 23 acres just east of Terrell, planted 50 trees, and waited. Every tree survived. When the peaches came in, Dale and his daughter Sharien set up a card table on the side of the highway and started selling out of the back of a pickup truck. The railroad told them they were too close to the tracks. They moved above the tracks. The line of customers followed them up.

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$5 Cinco De Mayo Specials at Vaqueros BBQ in Allen

If you’re looking for a reason to get out on May 5th and don’t want to fight a generic margarita crowd, Vaqueros Texas Bar-B-Q in Allen is running $5 specials all day and actually has the food to back it up.

The deal is simple: $5 margaritas, $5 tacos, $5 palomas, and $5 beers from open to close on Monday, May 5th. The beer selection includes Victoria, Modelo, El Chingón, and house picks. Not a limited window, not just during happy hour — all day long at their Watters Creek location.

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7 Dallas Chef Authors Worth Reading

Dallas and Fort Worth have produced a shelf full of cookbooks worth owning. Not novelty books, not coffee-table objects, not celebrity tie-ins. Real cookbooks, written by real working chefs and food writers who spent decades in the kitchens and markets of this region and had something worth saying about what they found. Here is the list.

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Long Weekends for Camping at Glen Rose

Dallas does not have the mountains or the coast. What we have is a good road in a lot of directions, and a handful of small towns close enough to reach in an afternoon but far enough to feel like somewhere else. Glen Rose is one of them. Ninety minutes southwest, set in limestone hill country along the Paluxy River, it has dinosaur tracks in the riverbed, a wildlife park full of giraffes wandering loose, a historic square worth a walk, and a 60-year-old barbecue joint that is the real reason I keep going back.

Here is how to spend a weekend there with a tent.

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Crossbuck BBQ’s Tim McLaughlin Competes on Food Network’s BBQ Brawl Season 7

Tim McLaughlin

Dallas has quietly produced one of the most interesting careers in American barbecue, and now the rest of the country is about to find out. Tim McLaughlin, chef-pitmaster and founder of Crossbuck BBQ in Farmers Branch, will compete on Food Network’s BBQ Brawl when Season 7 premieres on May 11 at 9 p.m. ET/PT. Episodes stream the following day on HBO Max.

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