The Texas BBQ Demographic
What's worth getting out for
While I was in Dallas, I went out of my way to visit the Texas BBQ restaurant that I have been visiting since childhood. When I was asked where I wanted to eat as a young child, I knew the answer “Sonny Bryan’s” had a good chance of being agreeable. People always seemed willing to get in the car and drive there, risking the parking and seating hassles at various times of the day. I loved the food, the free dinner rolls, the BBQ sauce in re-purposed beer bottles, and the seats with individual desks that resembled those in high school classrooms. This was 1967.
Sonny Bryan’s was already a Dallas institution back then. I’m certain Jack Ruby darkened it’s doors. JR Ewing wouldn’t have been caught dead eating BBQ anywhere else. Now there are a number of locations, all equally good, but this piece refers to my recent visit to the original location on Inwood. That’s where the pit is. With Texas BBQ, it is the pit that counts.
On this visit I noticed something rather startling. At 65, I was one of the youngest people having lunch, and I was particularly the youngest if one didn’t count the companion caregivers with about half of the elder patrons. There were a number of people my age taking their parents out to lunch. Their parents are at least in their late 80s. Almost every table had a walker or a wheelchair perched unused at the end of a smoothed-with-age wooden booth bench.
I had to wait on my sandwich, so I pondered this fact while I sat there and had a realization. These people around me don’t really like to get out of the house much. It is painful, it is a hassle, and they need someone else’s help to do it. So, they only do things that are really worth the struggle.
That’s a chopped beef brisket sandwich with raw white onions and pickled cucumbers. Note that the beef has not been minced up with a knife, it has been chopped enough so that it falls apart the rest of the way on it’s own, owing to the low and long smoking method the pitmaster here pioneered.
Brisket prepared this way is practically spreadable with a knife, and it is impossible to get this texture using pork, though properly prepared Carolina-style pulled pork comes close, as does unagi (Japanese smoked eel).
I fully expect in two decades, if I am still able and in Dallas, I will persuading some younger ally to let me buy them lunch here too.
This is worth getting out of the house for.