DANIEL: I don't think there's other magazines out there that really go to the lengths to come up with a list like this.

One two, three, brisket.

CJ: It is like the bible of barbecue Texas.

CHEF: Everyone that cooks Texas barbecue, this is what you strive for.

ERNEST: This is the end all, be all of barbecue.

CHEF: The state of the union.

CHEF: There's a lot of buzz with the new list coming out.

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(rousing music) PRESENTER: Welcome back.

It's barbecue season in Texas.

The same year that we inaugurate a president, we anoint the top 50 barbecue restaurants in Texas, and it's always the day that everybody waits for OWNER: The culmination of many, many months and years of work.

OWNER: Everyone that cooks Texas Barbecue, this is what you strive for.

I am Daniel Vaughn.

I'm the Barbecue Editor of Texas Monthly, and this is The List.

The list is the 50 best barbecue joints in Texas.

The list is, it's the (beep), you know what I mean?

Excuse my lang-- The list is the list.

One two, three, brisket.

CJ: It is like the bible of barbecue Texas, right?

CHEF: The culmination of like four years of research.

CHEF: This is the end all be all of barbecue.

CHEF: The state of the union of barbecue.

All of our barbecue issues that we've produced, going back to the third ever issue of Texas Monthly, which was April, 1973.

ERNEST: You know, growing up reading that magazine, and to be a part of that elite fraternity and you want to have a legacy Being on the top 10, or on the top 50 in general, it would save us.

CHEF: There's a lot of buzz with the new list coming out.

CJ: We pray we make the list.

I think it's a huge deal to be in the top 50.

If they're the best in Texas, then they're the best anywhere.

We have barbecue from two different places here.

Takes some barbecue from each one.

Get a piece of fatty and a piece of lean.

If you need me to point out which is which, you're off the team.

(team laughing) We start off with a big team, and that big team comes together here in the office, and I think this time, we had 25 different tasters plus me, and we really talk about the finer points of barbecue and what we're looking for in a great barbecue bite.

Using this as an opportunity to talk to everyone to make sure that we're using more or less the same rubrics, the same standards.

When you bite into the rib, like especially against the bone, so you can see, this meat is not falling off the bone.

He's narrowed it down to 300 plus barbecue joints.

All of those tasters get a different territory to go search through all over the state, and I get one of those, or usually a couple of those territories as well.

What sets us apart is really the big team that we send out to begin with, and to be able to have someone who gets a different sort of experience than I might get at a restaurant.

Yeah.

So send me your travel plans.

Try to aim for two, three max per day, in part so that you can try to hit that peak window for all of those joints.

If we can find that unicorn, if we can find that place that nobody else knows about, that would be incredible.

(tasters applauding) They've got about four months to complete their 12 or 15 spots.

(scoffs) Real tough.

I'm going out there trying as much as I can outside of my own territory as well, so that I have a more recent opinion about all these places.

No place makes the top 50 without me visiting in that six month period.

The tasters all have a barbecue score sheet for each place.

So the only things that are really ranked by number, on a scale of one to five, are the meats, brisket, pork ribs, sausage, and poultry.

The meats is really what it comes down to primarily for any sort of scoring.

We often get asked too, like is brisket the most important?

And brisket is certainly important, but it's not the most important.

We would be silly to think that these barbecue joints don't recognize me, and seeing how that score compares to my experience is really beneficial and really important.

They're gonna get the average meal that that place can put out most likely, and we compile them at the end of December.

Then I can look at all those and see which ones are surprisingly high, surprisingly low.

And also, those ones that are contenders that I just haven't been to in a long time.

Bracing myself to open the latest expense report from Daniel Vaughn.

We'll see how it goes.

The tab for a barbecue meal these days, if you wanna get a variety, has really shot up.

And so, Texas monthly pays the mileage, and for all the meals for all of these tasters, and I don't think there's other magazines out there, or really any other publications that really go to the lengths that we do, on a scale that we do, to come up with a list like this.

I love barbecue, I love eating barbecue.

But then when it all comes down to it, I get to talk to all these people about what motivates them, why they're in this business, that's really hard, and get their personal stories.

Ernest really started out in competition barbecue, and he got the name Burnt Bean, and that was the name of his competition barbecue.

"Hey, do you have a name?

You're gonna probably burn the beans so you should call yourself the burnt bean, or burnt beans.

We never burned our beans, but everybody thought we would.

My question, when he announced that he was gonna open this place is, how is he gonna translate his competition barbecue success into restaurant barbecue?

'Cause they're two very different things.

But what I did take away from competition was, I love the art of of competing against other people, as well as to be number one.

You get that taste of, and I call it the shark and the blood in the water.

DANIEL: Ernest is a huge personality, a really talented chef.

He's got an incredible palate, and he has this grand level of hospitality.

He's probably gonna be the one who's right there working the line when you show up.

Do you mind if I get a picture with you?

Yeah, come on.

David, he's a behind the scenes guy.

He runs the pits.

So if the barbecue is great, it's because David's back there watching the pits, making sure that everything that comes off of them is at its prime.

He just retired too.

I'm like, Yeah.

Hey, so listen, I know you just retired and you wanna live the good life, but do you wanna be crazy and open a restaurant during COVID, and I don't know if we're gonna succeed, but if we do, it'd be really legendary and he was like, "All right."

Burnt Bean was number four on our last barbecue list in 2021.

When we put 'em on the list last time, they were a year old, that like, it's just so good, we can't leave this place out of our top 10.

When you get number four, that changed our game plan.

Dave looked at me and Dave's like, oh (beep), because he knew what I was gonna go after.

We got top five.

Let's shoot for one.

DANIEL: Sunday is the big barbecue event of all, it's the barbecue brunch.

This is their weekly specialty, is doing this breakfast spread, and they do it every week.

So they've got brisket huevos rancheros.

They have the Blue October, a croissant with a big slab of brisket and then the fried egg.

And then one of the signature items is the barbacoa.

Like, just stop already.

And then they do other specials that day too that don't have anything to do with breakfast, like lamb ribs, Korean beef ribs.

Well, let's talk about that brisket, because the fat was like the, I don't know, almost like the gushing flavor of roast beef.

I mean, the texture was just freaking perfect.

They do such a variety of things so well, that often the thing that gets lost in the mix is just how great their straight up barbecue is.

And they weren't searching around for the right brisket.

VICTORIA: They didn't cut into five like before?

No, they did not cut into five briskets looking for it.

Victoria, don't eat me.

He didn't get a Michelin star.

He deserved a Michelin star.

Maybe they'll see that next time around.

Good god, Michelin, what were you thinking?

There were a few of these new names, kind of small operations that not a whole lot of people knew about it.

SABRINA: We started as a food truck.

Our food trailer was purple.

CJ: And we thought about what name we could use.

SABRINA: And he was like, "Well, my grandpa named Yearby."

I'm like, oh, that's a nice name.

It's real unique.

Yearby's Barbecue, from from the first time I ate there, I knew that it was gonna be special.

So once I scrub stuff down in the morning and kinda like get everything loaded up, before we open up, me and Sabrina will get together and just say, like, God, send your people, just hoping that we get a crowd.

Because being out here, you don't know, especially the fact that we chose to come to Pilot Point, Texas, and being Black Muslims, we're probably like the only Muslims here, possibly.

DANIEL: CJ and Sabrina Henley, they are the couple who run Yearby's Barbecue.

Cooking is my passion.

Something that I love to do.

Did I think it was gonna be a halal barbecue restaurant in the state of Texas?

No, no.

Well, the biggest thing that makes Yearby's unique is that it's an all halal barbecue menu.

CJ: So halal is, it's blessing to meat, raising it humanely.

The thing about a halal menu is, you're missing pork.

But this is the beef state.

So if you're serving beef ribs, and beef brisket, and a beef sausage, and smoked meatloaf, smoked chicken, there's a lot of people who are probably gonna forget that you might be missing pork ribs.

I like to always find something and put it as a chip on my shoulder, and I think that being in the halal barbecue space, we're trying to make it good for anybody that comes through the door.

Beef sausage is central to Texas barbecue, right?

But most of that beef sausage is in a pork casing, so that would not be halal.

So, they developed their own link in a lamb casing.

A really great flavor, and really good snap as well.

Smoked brisket at Yearby's is really good.

It is certainly one of their strong suits.

They certainly have their big expensive beef ribs on the weekends, and those are the things that I love, but they also have really inexpensive chicken, they have a smoked meatloaf sandwich, which that meatloaf is using their beef trimmings to make it.

You've only got so many people to draw from in Pilot Point to be your regular customers.

DFW is maybe an hour away if you're trying to get into Dallas.

And so, they've gotta be quite the draw with their barbecue.

So this top 50, for a lot of these new spots and a lot of these small town spots, this can be their sort of grand introduction to the Texas barbecue community.

I go to these barbecue joints a lot, all of them that are in the top 50, not in the top 50.

I have a bank of memories from each one of these barbecue joints, but that's the part that I have to eliminate when we're talking about searching for the most recent top 50, and that was the case with LaVaca Barbecue.

My dad did barbecue competitions when I was little, so we've always kind of done the barbecue thing.

We never owned a restaurant before.

So, the owning a restaurant part, and day to day was a learning curve.

The first time I visited LaVaca Barbecue, it was February 7th, 2020, and they were in our top 50 last time.

When I went back five years later, to the day, it was February 7th, 2025, the quality of everything had just really taken, not just one step, but a few steps up.

When the LaVaca Barbecue first opened, it was the Lupe and Christine show.

There were a husband and wife team who were running it, and Lupe was running the pits and Christine was doing pretty much everything else.

I talked to Kelli quite a bit about her path.

Before COVID, I taught elementary school, first grade.

When COVID hit, we asked her, do you want to come in with us?

DANIEL: And so, she decided to jump into the family business, and quit her job teaching and jump into the pit room.

KELLI: And I just started running with it When she took over the pit, that allowed Lupe and Christine to focus really on everything else and not be distracted by having to cook the barbecue day after day, along with everything else.

So, it is truly a mom and pop place.

Mom, pop, and daughter.

We knew that barbecue was a boy field, but I did this to help my parents.

We got questioned a lot whether I was the actual pit master, and that threw us off.

We never thought people would be bothered by it, but they were for some reason.

We're here as a family.

We're not here to prove anything else.

So we put all of our heart, all of our soul, all everything that we have into it, so that way, people can enjoy it.

For Lupe, it was really important to have something on the LaVaca Barbecue menu that was unlike anything else that he had had at a barbecue joint, and was something that really went back to their heritage.

The tamale is one of those things that sets them apart because it really shows off their identity, right?

Instead of corn husks, they actually wrap the barbecue-stuffed masa in butcher paper, and then that butcher paper goes, not into a steamer, but into the smoker.

And so, the masa itself takes on the smoke flavor.

It's really unlike anything else that I've ever seen in a Texas barbecue.

This last time I went, he had this pork steak.

It's smoked, and then finished over direct heat, and then garnished really heavily.

Had that bark, great smoke flavor.

The smoked brisket, I would say, was their weak point the first time I went.

I had real skepticism when I saw the really high score from our initial round of tasting.

But as far as some of the best of the best, I didn't really have them that way in my own mind.

I saw that great score, went back again, and just like knocked it out of the park, and that was one of my last stops for the search for the 2025 top 50 list.

You know, it does highlight the way that we do this list.

It's not what you were doing in 2023, or 2021, or 1997.

It's, how is the barbecue right now compared to everybody else in the state?

Yeah, that's looking promising.

There was a sense of relief of getting the tasting over with, of getting through it all.

The following day, I had to narrow it all down to 50 and rank the top 10.

So there was a lot of work yet to be done.

I'm not a standard food critic who goes out and anonymously eats at a bunch of different restaurants.

I mean, Texas Monthly asked me to do a whole lot in the barbecue community.

Because of that, I know a lot of these people.

There is a personal aspect there, and that's the part that I just have to block out.

People come up with all kinds of reasons of why they're not in the top 50, or an honorable mention, or why they're not in the top 10, and none of the reasons in their mind ever end up being the barbecue, but that's really all that it is.

ANNA: Are you thinking like end of day?

I'm not thinking.

There is no choice.

VICTORIA: The deadline.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Okay.

I've never felt a lack of confidence about the amount of work we put into it.

We did all the visits that we could, and we gave everybody their fair shot.

Late yesterday afternoon, right before 5:00 p.m., Daniel sent us his final Top 50 Excel spreadsheet, and we're in like crunch mode for a Top 50 production.

So things are gonna move really, really quickly after this.

Now that we have the list, we're really gonna start planning out our photography plan.

We are doing 10 shoots for each of the top 10 joints.

And we're gonna be drizzling the peach glaze on top of it.

And I definitely want a bite afterwards.

EMILY: That makes two of us.

CAMERAMAN: How do you schedule these shoots without tipping them off?

They might have a suspicion, but we won't confirm or deny it.

My name is Doyin Oyeniyi, and I am a senior fact checker at Texas Monthly.

So fact checking is essentially going back over the reporting of the writers and double checking to make sure that every single detail is right.

One thing I was just gonna double check to make sure we were getting right, because this seemed outrageous to me.

You visited 100 joints just in January and February.

DANIEL: Yeah.

I was a little unhappy that you just didn't say that I had been to 194 barbecue joints in the whole search.

VICTORIA: The whole feature is macro photography.

And I love the minimal list cover line.

Options there.

How unconventional is no lines.

People go to these joints and take overhead photos of their trays nonstop.

So, we wanted to give them that experience in print.

You're handing someone the magazine, you're handing them the tray.

And it's super simple.

It's accessible.

It's so simple.

Almost every shoot we went to, people would come over and be like, when's the list come out, in a casual.

And they say the list.

So when the issue goes to press, that's definitely a weight off your shoulders, that's a big celebratory moment.

Pit masters are smart enough in this day and age, they know exactly when our issue is coming out.

So they know something's up.

They're definitely on high alert.

I'm pretty nervous with the list coming out, because I feel like we've been putting our best foot forward.

Let's come in here and let's keep on jamming out the best product we can, because we wanna hit the list.

DAVID: Right now, we're seeing a lot of people that are guessing who's gonna be top 10, and nobody's mentioned us.

ERNEST: Some people are like, well, are you cooking to cook for yourself or are you cooking for the list?

I would be lying if you're not cooking to be number one.

But I don't sleep right now at night.

That's all I think about.

The day that it comes out, I'm gonna have a whole lot of people who are really disappointed, and there's gonna be a lot of people who are elated.

I know their stories, I know their struggles.

Even some who didn't make the list, I know how hard they tried to make the list.

It's the barbecue on the plate that's gonna speak.

And in the end, it's certainly a ranking, and it's our judgment of all these barbecue joints, but it's a celebration of barbecue, it's a celebration of how good we have it today, and every time we produce one of these lists, it's a reminder to us that how it is today is even better than it was four years before, and four years before that, and four years before that.

I wish there wasn't a top 50.

Like if I could hold the title as barbecue editor without a top 50, I think I would prefer it that way.

REPORTER: Here we go, guys.

Brand new Top 50, 2025 just released.

So happy for all these barbecue joints.

We had 23 new barbecue spots on this list, and it's spread out all across the state.

REPORTER: And there's a lot of new spots on the Top 50.

REPORTER: Yes.

Yeah, let's go through.

'Cause again, we are super.

So we knew it was gonna come out at eight, and we were together, so we were here and we were making sausage anyways, and we were just waiting and refreshing and refreshing, and then his daughter texts us and she's like, "Congratulations."

We're like, what are you talking about?

And we just, we went bonkers.

And it just makes all the hard work worthwhile, and we get the title for four years.

KELLI: That was our goal the whole time.

That was what we strived for, and after four or five years of, could we do it, we were finally validated.

Before I actually got to seeing our name, I got a text message from someone else saying, Hey, you guys made it.

Like, oh wow, this is crazy, man.

Like so much excitement.

'Cause it was like, wow, we put this work in, and then like we actually made it.

Yearby's is my grandfather's name.

The opportunities even just for African Americans are a lot different than they were back then.

And if he could see me today and see what we've done with that name, I could just see him smiling and being very proud of us.

We've always hoped to make the list because of what we do on the daily basis.

I was hoping for top 10.

When we opened, I just wanted to make top 50.

And then once I saw it, I was just in shock.

I'm fully committed to showing people what a small town barbecue spot can do.

Yeah, it feels really good, obviously.

Obviously we were going for number one.

We wanna be the best at everything.

But to still be considered in such a close race, then that means a lot.

Of course, the excitement, all that stuff like that, then that led to a conversation about like, okay, we need to go higher.

Now that we're just top 50, it is something we aspire to to land top 10.

We're just getting started, brother.

That Texas Monthly award was just to get our foot in the door.

Onto phase two, I wanna be a household name.

I wanna be one of the greatest of all time in barbecue, and that's the legacy I wanna leave.

Because at the end of the day, people will remember you as a person and not what you accomplished.

The Top 50 list is like constantly in our most viewed stories.

In a way, it feels like it never ends until you start the next one.

I get that question after the list comes out, like, oh, you get to take a break now.

It's like, are you kidding me?

I'm traveling the state, always looking for new stories to tell, and really, just always looking for barbecue joints that I can send people.

Like my whole goal is, my mission statement really, is to connect people with great barbecue.

And so, that means I've gotta go out there and find it, and then tell the story behind it and tell people where to find it.

So, it's right back out to the barbecue trail.

CHEF: This is happening in Texas, with Texas ingredients, and it can only happen here.

It's an expression of home, growing up the chef's identity.

CHEF: I lived longer outside of Mexico than I'd been in Mexico, and I'm think the food reflects that.

These memories drive (indistinct).

They're so (indistinct).

ANNOUNCER: I love it.

We're on the precipice of a great discovery.

(rousing music) ANNOUNCER: I love it.

Fasten your seatbelt.

(rousing music) As long as we're together, it's perfect.

Love is not as simple as you seem to think.

We're so close to cracking the case.

Dreams do come through, hey, lad?

ANNOUNCER: Major funding for this program was provided by.

ANNOUNCER: At H-E-B, we're proud to offer over 6,000 products grown, harvested, or made by our fellow Texans.

♪ I saw miles and miles of Texas.

♪ ANNOUNCER: It's all part of our commitment to preserving the future of Texas and supporting our Texas neighbors.

(tranquil music) ANNOUNCER: Texas Parks and Wildlife Foundation is dedicated to conserving the wild things and wild places in Texas.

Learn more at tpwf.org.