Barbecue
ness across the entire state, shipping their unrivaled barbecue wherever hungry mouths may be. Locals can enjoy all that and more, alongside warm potato salad, green beans, and slices of soft white bread. 2530 WW White Road, (210) 337-1041
House of Wings Quality is hard to put a price on, but the family-owned and operated House of Wings has been serving just that for years. It’s not just wings either — try the club sandwich, the fish burger, or the excellent Cobb salad for a departure from the usual spin. Good food at great prices. 19314 US Hwy 281 N, (210) 494-1760, houseofwingsonline.com
Jones Sausage & BBQ House
nook earned high marks for its sausage in our 2007 BBQ survey, and in ’09 the sliced-brisket sandwich scored 18 toothpicks out of 20: center-cut, ethereally smoky, tender, and moist. Served on white bread, the way God intended. Save room for 7UP pound cake for dessert. 2827 Martin Luther King, (210) 224-6999
Quarry Hofbraü Equal parts beer joint and Texas ranch house, the Hofbrau is a great place to meet people and enjoy draft beers all day and night long. Live music, barbecue, and 24 beers on tap served at the old Cement Factory—come out and see what you’ve been missing. 7310 Jones Maltsberger, (210) 290-8066, quarryhofbrau. com
This rustic little Eastside
Rudy’s Country Store and Bar-B-Q This wildly popular, Leon Springs-born chain wasn’t part of the Current’s 2007 survey, but our readers voted it in themselves, naming Rudy’s Best Barbecue in 2008. Multiple locations, rudys.com
Two Bros. BBQ Market Chef Jason Dady and sibling Jake try their hands at the Texas triple lutz and pretty much land it with oak-fired smoke pits, a great dry rub, and a genius take on chicken thighs. The blueberry cobbler gets a standing ovation. Kid-friendly, with outdoor seating. 12656 West Ave, (210) 496-0222, twobrosbbqmarket.com Two Bros.’ Jason Dady
Digging for old man barbacoa Barbacoa is the grandfather of barbecue. Both have origins in the Caribbean, and like BBQ, barbacoa is made differently wherever you find it. In Mexico, sheep is slow-cooked in a hole dug in the earth. The meat is set over coals and covered in maguey leaves. Here on Texas beef ranches, the tradition has been to use a cow head. Melissa Guerra, author of Dishes from the Wild Horse Desert, and proprietor of the Mexican cookware shop that bears her name at the Pearl, told us how she does it at home, old-school Texas style. — Scott Andrews “The classic is beef-head cooked in a hole, and brought out the next day. Now it is baked or boiled cheek meats, full of collagen, and is chopped. Lacking that meat, you can get any type of meat and chop it. But that doesn’t make it real barbacoa — that’s a beef head wrapped in a gunnysack, and cooked in a pit, end of story, traditionally with cheek meats, brains, tongue, and eyes. Because of mad cow disease, you don’t get brains anymore. What you get in restaurants today is a very abbreviated version, because no one is going to dig a hole — though we have one at the house. It’s reinforced with metal, so the earth doesn’t collapse in. You build a fire and bake it over night. We’ve done that. The result is sort of hilarious, because when you put it on the table, all the fat starts to drag out of it. On one winter night it looked like stalactites as it cooled. The kids thought it was fascinating. ‘This is cool,’ they said, ‘Better than Jiffy Pop!” You scrape the pieces off and eat it with tacos. But you need a lot of people to eat it. What happens today is that people are really nostalgic for life on the ranch, that little taste of time. It’s not so much the flavor of the barbacoa, which is great, but that sense of time past.”
210-921-2745
OPEN 7 DAYS A WEEK
DINE IN TAKE OUT DRIVE THRU 2627 PLEASANTON RD. SAN ANTONIO, TX
WHO WANTS RIBS? BBSMOKEHOUSE.COM 34
FLAVOR 2011-12 /// sacurrent.com
ERIK GUSTAFSON
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