OT-Heading to Franklin BBQ, what's the parking like?

The Cen-Tex Smoker

nolaegghead said:

The Cen-Tex Smoker said:

The Cen-Tex Smoker said:

lousubcap said:

@The Cen-Tex Smoker -  when you gonna cook that hunk of beauty?  Great looking brisket right there.  

I'm actually giving it to my neighbor for Christmas. He was going to order one online for like $11 per lb and i told him that our store has them all the time. Was in there yesterday and they have 5-6 of them. I still have 2 SRF in the freezer so I am already hoarding meat. I figured it was the neighborly thing to do. 

Just dropped it off. He was happy. 

Cooked?

Uncooked. 

The Cen-Tex Smoker

gonepostal said:

@The Cen-Tex Smoker this may be THE year that i make my first pilgrimage to Austin. I'm thinking about staying downtown near the music scene and focusing on brisket at a few different locations. I'm driving and have 2 weeks off so won't be in a rush to get back home. I'm assuming that "the line" at Franklin's is a must right? Looks like Valentina's will be on the list for sure too.

Any tips will be greatly appreciated. This will probably be a one-time only trip from Bama.

Hit me up when you are ready. ill
make sure you see all the spots and have all the fun. 

lousubcap

@gonepostal -  no Central Texas resident but I recently made  a road-trip to Austin (visited some friends north of Houston on the way and Dallas on the return) as I wanted to sample the famous brisket.  I rolled into Austin and Valentina's around 12:30 PM on a Tuesday and had some great brisket.  Staying at a hotel close to Franklin's. I went by there (around 1:30 PM ) and the line was quite short.  Checked-in and walked to Franklin's (nothing ventured, nothing gained).  Spent about an hour total til served (brisket meat coma over-load brewing) and enjoyed both.  Thought the bark and flavor of Valentina's was less salty which I liked better.  (I do not use anywhere close to Franklin's suggest S&P ratio for my brisket seasoning).
Next day back to Franklin's around 8 AM- was around # 30 in line. (The wait is a show unto itself as noted above.)  Eating at about 11:30 AM.  This time I expanded to one sausage and a pork rib in addition to brisket.  Great but still salty brisket.
Later that day I visited Micklewaite for more brisket.  Thurs AM I did get to talk with Aaron Franklin before he opened but then went to La BBQ (no line) and great brisket before heading to Dallas.
John Mueller's meats in Lockhart is another supposed no-miss stop and I am sure @The Cen-Tex Smoker can hook you up with more.
I will have to do it again.  I know now the target for great brisket-all I have to do is dial it in.  Would that it were easy.  FWIW-

gonepostal

Thanks @lousubcap - i'm planning my trip late May if all goes well around here. Glad to hear you got to make the journey! Every time i read a post like this one...i get motivated.

I may have to find your hotel. Sounds like a plan...

The Cen-Tex Smoker

All very well said cap but I don't think any of the Mueller's are or have ever been in Lockhart. john was in Austin at last check but was shut down for unpaid taxes. The Mueller BBQ family is from Taylor which is NE of Austin, John's sister LeAnn owns LaBBQ (LeAnn barbecue). Lockhart is SE of Austin and IMO not worthy of a visit for BBQ. Austin is where it's at now. Louie Mueller BBQ in Taylor is still in the conversation as one of the kings. Maybe that's the one you were thinking of?

Louie Mueller's produced Franklin, John and LeAnn Mueller (LaBBq and John Mueller Meat co) And the guy from Styles Switch, which is also considered good but I've never been. 

The Cen-Tex Smoker

Lockhart is Kreutz (rhymes with Kites). Smittys and Blacks. All the places in Austin are way better

gonepostal

The Cen-Tex Smoker said:

Lockhart is Kreutz (rhymes with Kites). Smittys and Blacks. All the places in Austin are way better

Well...i just booked 3 nights in downtown Austin in late May. I'll probably just keep it simple and stick to Austin. Sounds like plenty of options...

The Cen-Tex Smoker

gonepostal said:

The Cen-Tex Smoker said:

Lockhart is Kreutz (rhymes with Kites). Smittys and Blacks. All the places in Austin are way better

Well...i just booked 3 nights in downtown Austin in late May. I'll probably just keep it simple and stick to Austin. Sounds like plenty of options...

That's what I would do. I should be around. Give me 2-3- weeks notice and I'll put a list together for you. Would love to meet you for a drink in a weird dive bar or bbq in a vape shop parking lot. 

EggHead_Bubba

Tettletime said:

All in all, I'm glad I made the trek down here. I will say I thought the sausage was underwhelming, and I think my pulled pork is better. But the brisket is legit. It's saltier than I thought it would be, not as much a black pepper flavor as other central Texas standouts. I don't think I'll ever wait in line for 5 hours again, but like I said, I'm glad I can cross it off the list. 

How much did that plate of BBQ set you back?

YEMTrey

I'm gonna guess $75-80

lousubcap

You can visit his web-site and the prices are listed.  It's worth it and the prices across the four places I visited in Austin are the same.  FWIW-

cazzy

EggHead_Bubba said:

Tettletime said:

All in all, I'm glad I made the trek down here. I will say I thought the sausage was underwhelming, and I think my pulled pork is better. But the brisket is legit. It's saltier than I thought it would be, not as much a black pepper flavor as other central Texas standouts. I don't think I'll ever wait in line for 5 hours again, but like I said, I'm glad I can cross it off the list. 

How much did that plate of BBQ set you back?

My guess is $73, unless he got drinks.

DoubleEgger

If I ever wait in that line, I'll have my food saver with me. Those leftovers will be on the plane...

Tettletime

@EggHead_Bubba that was about $150. It was 5lbs of brisket @ $20/lb and 2 lbs sausage @ $17/lb. The pulled pork was a freebie, it was literally the last of it they had.

EggHead_Bubba

Tettletime said:

@EggHead_Bubba that was about $150. It was 5lbs of brisket @ $20/lb and 2 lbs sausage @ $17/lb. The pulled pork was a freebie, it was literally the last of it they had.

Thanks... you certainly didn't walk away hungry. ;-)

FearlessTheEggNoob

The Cen-Tex Smoker said:

If it only had better marbling. 

NICE!

Where in town did you find that?!!

The Cen-Tex Smoker

FearlessTheEggNoob said:

The Cen-Tex Smoker said:

If it only had better marbling. 

NICE!

Where in town did you find that?!!

Lakeway HEB. They had 4-5 left yesterday but this was the best one.

FearlessTheEggNoob

Thanks!

Tony_T

NYT Review: A MacGyver of Slow-Cooked Meats at Franklin Barbecue

AUSTIN, Tex. — “How much brisket are you having?”

That’s the first question the man with the knife behind the counter will ask when you reach the front of the line at Franklin Barbecue. He won’t stab you if you don’t have an answer ready, but I might.

By that point, you or another person who is either being paid by you or who just likes you very much will have been waiting outside for two hours or more — sometimes a lot more. The line starts earlier and grows faster on weekends and during South by Southwest, the festival of music, film and technology that metastasizes here each March and runs, this year, through Sunday.

Nobody reaches the front of the line accidentally. If you haven’t managed to work out how much brisket to buy when you get there, you are beyond my help.

I won’t blame you, though, if you double your order after the man with the knife cuts off a little block of meat and hands it to you. Look at it, the way it shades from nut-brown at the inside to cherry-jam around the border to black at the crust, stained by carbon and stubbled with coarse pepper. Smell it while the steam is still carrying the smell of burning post oak. Taste it, the way it combines the fat-bathed richness of fresh beef with the tight focus of meat cured by salt and smoke. Still want just half a pound?

Other considerations come into play, like the elasticity of your stomach and your taste for pork, smoked sausage and turkey. But brisket is the foundation on which Franklin Barbecue was built, brisket as it is seasoned and barbecued by Aaron Franklin, the chief pitmaster and an owner.

Mr. Franklin is a gearhead and a MacGyver with obsessive tendencies. Men like him were building hot rods in the 1960s and six-chambered bongs in the ‘70s. In the 2000s, Mr. Franklin was designing and welding offset smokers and firing them up for loosely organized backyard cookouts. He writes in his book, “Franklin Barbecue: A Meat-Smoking Manifesto,” that his first brisket was “flavorless — tough and dry.”

He got better. By 2009, when he began selling meat from a white-and-aqua-blue 1971 Aristocrat Lo-Liner trailer he’d bought for $300, he had moved far upscale from the cheap supermarket brisket of his first experiments. And when he moved to an actual structure, painted to look like an overgrown version of that trailer, his brisket was already famous.

He had studied the physics of chimney draw and the maddeningly long time during which barbecue appears to have stopped cooking long before it’s done, known in the trade as “the stall.” He has to be the first pitmaster in Texas history whose cookbook has a list of recommended books that is devoted entirely to the food-science writers Harold McGee and Nathan Myhrvold.

What Mr. Franklin had stumbled across in his backyard was a craft in which, for both the maker and the consumer, the financial barrier to entry was low and the opportunity for connoisseurship was ample. These are the two chief prerequisites of any successful hipster food business, and Franklin Barbecue set off a new-traditionalist barbecue movement across the country.

One of Mr. Franklin’s apostasies from old-school central Texas barbecue technique is wrapping meat midway through smoking to keep it from drying out. All his products are noticeably juicy; the turkey is helped by a quick dip in a pan of butter and juices. He swaddles brisket in butcher paper, which lets some steam out. Other meats are sealed inside aluminum foil. I wondered if this was the reason the marbling inside the brisket was more appetizing than the fat on the pork ribs and pulled pork, which could be a little wet and squishy.

Much of the fat simply yields a glossy liquid that makes a delicious sauce for the lightly smoky pulled pork. The smoke works its way more thoroughly into the ribs, which become a firm and chewy pig candy, and into the sausages. Franklin Barbecue isn’t famous for its sausages, which are custom-made by a nearby butcher. They are glorious, though, loaded with pepper and garlic and enough beef fat to make the wrinkled surface of the casings sparkle. Within the next few days, they will be ground and stuffed on site.

As for the turkey, it is so mild that it will probably be of surpassing interest only to those who don’t eat beef or pork who’ve been dragged along by brisket-crazed friends. Vegetarians may find some comfort in the fine vinegared slaw of purple cabbage or the potato salad, made in the creamy style that I hope to find at every picnic. They will run from the pinto beans, which are supplemented by odds and ends of meat scraped from the butcher block.

Near the cash register are palm-size pies wrapped in plastic, with old-fashioned crusts. Lemon chess pie had a citrus tartness that the Key lime pie was missing, and I admired the way the bourbon-banana pie compressed childhood and adulthood in a single dessert.

And so, you ask: Is it worth the wait? The answer, like many things in life, depends on what else you could be doing with your time. I would note that in the hours required to line up and sit down at Franklin Barbecue, I could have driven 35 miles northeast to Louie Mueller Barbecue in Taylor, ordered the magnificent beef rib (which Franklin sells only on Saturdays), and eaten it until I couldn’t hold any more.

But I’d also note that I would not trade Franklin’s brisket for Mueller’s. I doubt I’d trade Franklin’s brisket for anybody’s, although for other meats, and certainly for turkey, I may give a slight edge to Killen’s Barbecue in Pearland.

Finally, I’d point out that the line at Mr. Franklin’s restaurant is not Mr. Franklin’s fault, except insofar as he is responsible for cooking meat that people sacrifice entire mornings for. The line is a function of popularity and the way Texas barbecue is sliced (on the spot) and sold (by weight).

Franklin Barbecue also goes out of its way to offer customers standing outside what you might call palliative care. A dozen or so folding chairs are kept in a corral under the stairs for early birds. Although the main entrance is locked until 10:59 a.m., another door is opened so the faithful can use the restrooms or buy drinks.

An employee will walk down the line several times in the morning, selling canned beer from a cooler (Franklin stocks beers from some of the city’s best breweries) and trying to estimate when the meats will run out. This is an imprecise science, involving people’s best guesses for what they’ll order when they get inside.

On my first visit, I was right in the middle of the parking lot, and was told there was a chance I’d miss out on pulled pork. That was incorrect, I’m happy to say.

Though inexact, Franklin’s estimates can fend off the kind of disappointment I felt at La Barbecue, a highly regarded local truck where I spent more than an hour one afternoon and where everything but chopped beef was gone by the time I’d inchwormed to the front of the line.

Franklin Barbecue doesn’t have to be so humane. Employees could probably stand on the roof pouring hot lard over customers’ heads without driving too many people away. Once you start thinking about how much brisket you want, it’s hard to leave.

Franklin Barbecue

Atmosphere A ragtag and old-timey homage to roadside Americana. Servers are proactively helpful, whether slicing meat, patrolling the dining room or selling beer and giving realistic wait times to people in line.

Sound Moderate; most customers have their mouths too full to talk over the country music.

Recommended Dishes Brisket; pork ribs; pulled pork; sausage; Tipsy Texan sandwich; beans; coleslaw; potato salad. Meats, $12 to $20 a pound; sandwiches, $6 to $10.

Drinks and Wine A couple of wines and far more beers, mostly local, in cans or on draft.

Price $$ (moderate)

Open Tuesday to Sunday for lunch.

Reservations Not Accepted

Wheelchair Access The dining room and rest rooms are on sidewalk level.

What the Stars Mean Ratings range from zero to four stars. Zero is poor, fair or satisfactory. One star, good. Two stars, very good. Three stars, excellent. Four stars, extraordinary.

This information was last updated: March 14, 2017

lousubcap

@Tony_T - nice read. Thanks for the post.  Definitely some great groceries, but last December after a few rounds at Franklins I stopped at La Barbeque before leaving Austin.  Got there at 10:50 AM (they open at 11) and was first in line.   Had I not earlier that week had Franklins and Valentinas it would have been the winner.  
I liked the bark at Valentinas better than Franklins-higher pepper to salt ratio but dang, it is all off the charts.  If you want to know the target for nailing brisket then visit the Mecca.  At least you will leave knowing the objective, even if it remains ever elusive.  I will make that road trip again.