AUSTIN, Jan 28 — At Franklin Barbecue, people pull up at dawn or shortly thereafter and spend their breakfast hours waiting for lunch.
Rain or shine, six days a week, hundreds of men, women and children wait three to five hours or longer to eat some of the most celebrated smoked beef brisket in America. The line has become a thing unto itself — a kind of pregame party for meat, 2,000 pounds of it daily — instead of sport, and the best visible evidence of the cult of Texas barbecue.
Texas has always obsessed over barbecue, but lately that obsession has gone global and viral. After all, you can get Texas barbecue in Paris at The Beast, in Tel Aviv at Texas BBQ and in Nha Trang, Vietnam, at Texas BarBQ & Steaks. Within Texas, barbecue’s center of gravity has moved from revered rural outposts to urban ones like Franklin or La Barbecue here, where pitmasters are celebrated like chefs at 25-course tasting-menu restaurants in New York.
One recent Thursday outside Franklin Barbecue, they came from Houston and San Antonio, but also from Kelley, Iowa, and Sydney, Australia. And it’s not just Franklin. Waiting a couple of hours for brisket has become routine around the state.
“You walk in the door at noon at your favourite barbecue joint in town and whether it’s got a huge name that has statewide recognition or not, you’re going to be standing in a line,” said Daniel Vaughn, the full-time barbecue editor at Texas Monthly magazine. “It’s not something that people notice. That’s just how you go eat barbecue.”
7:43am
Even those who show up early worry that they have arrived too late. The first two in line — a burly brewer named Corey McCart, 39, and his brother, Zachariah Hill, 35 — woke up at 5:30am in San Antonio, spent 90 minutes driving to Austin, then settled into their camping chairs.
“If you heard something was the best in the world,” McCart asked, “you’d go, right?”
Franklin Barbecue’s hours are 11am to sold out. Its fare reflects the ethos of Texas barbecue, a style more dry than wet, more fat than lean, more beef than pork and more anti-fork and anti-plate than your mother probably taught you.
The owner, Aaron Franklin, first opened the business in 2009, starting in a trailer, and he has sold out of meat every day since. Customers pay by the pound (US$20/RM84 for brisket, US$17 for ribs) and, in a larger sense, by the hour. Regardless of who you are in a state driven by power, wealth and politics, just about everyone who wants to eat Franklin meat has to wait in line like everyone else.
“Kanye West wanted to cut the line and we didn’t let him,” said Benjamin Jacob, Franklin’s general manager. “Everybody’s equal.”
There has been one exception. On a trip to Austin in 2014, President Barack Obama was apologetic as he cut to the front and stood at the counter, so much so that he bought lunch for the family who had been next in line. When Obama heard their order, which included three pounds of brisket, he joked, “Hold on — how many folks are y’all feedin’?”
8am
Raheem Chaudhry, 25, sat down with his friend Daniel Carlomany, 25, and pulled out Milton Friedman’s “Capitalism and Freedom,” required reading for his economics class at the University of Texas at Austin. “I’ve got to get things done,” he said.
People pass the time in useful, creative ways. They play cornhole. They munch on breakfast tacos, which amounts to eating while waiting to eat. They socialise to an extraordinary degree (at least two couples who met in line here have since gotten married). Someone in line once had a funk band in tow.
Down the line behind Chaudhry, Tyler Vasquez, 28, brought a football. Jake Hazzard, 30 — “like the Dukes of,” he said — kept busy with the Pocket Mortys game on his phone. Dylan Walter, 29, played the card game Pepper with his wife and his parents at a deluxe card table with built-in cup holders. And Amber Sarker, 34, had her goodie bag.
“We have apples, carrots,” she said. “I made this kale salad. We’re trying to have healthy stuff in here to make up for what’s happening later.”
8:27am
John Veracruz, 31, a recent graduate of the Energy and Earth Resources program at the University of Texas, opened a 12-pack of Pabst Blue Ribbon beer. He joined two friends at the bottom of the concrete ramp in the handicapped-parking space.
“This is what they’ll be drinking,” Veracruz said.
He motioned to the bottles of mineral water. Those were his. “I’m doing a dry January,” he said.
As Veracruz pulled out the cans, his friend Tabish Khan, 30, had a question for him. “Is it too early for beer?” Khan asked. “I mean, I don’t know, are there rules?”
Khan was informed that some young men once set up a table and spent the morning playing beer pong while waiting in line.
“Awesome,” Khan replied. “I think we’ll be all right.”
9am
Few in the line watched the clock more than Ryan Beeman, 40, of Los Angeles.
“I have a flight at 1:50, so I’m really hoping for the best,” Beeman said. He was making his third attempt to eat at Franklin, having previously showed up after the place was sold out. “This is the white whale of barbecue.”
Customers facing a time crunch used to turn to Tyson Ferguson.
Ferguson, who lived in an apartment overlooking Franklin Barbecue, regularly posted pictures of the morning line on Twitter as a kind of public service. “Long Line Alert!!” Ferguson wrote one July morning. Ferguson moved out, dealing a blow to Franklin fans.
Time is relative at Franklin. Matt Ryan, 31, a police officer in Campbell, California, had only one place to be later in the evening: his bachelor party, which he was holding in Austin in large part because of Franklin Barbecue. “It’s on my bucket list,” he said.
11:01am
McCart and Hill stood at the register, about three hours and 20 minutes after arriving in line. Their tray groaned with two pounds of brisket, two pounds of ribs, a quarter-pound of pulled pork and three sausages.
In the end, Beeman had time to catch his flight to Los Angeles. Friendships formed. Borrowed camping chairs were returned below a staircase so they could be borrowed again the next day. Chaudhry, who had passed the time with Milton Friedman, said it was worth the wait, but he felt for those in line watching him and his friend eat. (“They should have tinted windows or something like that,” he said.)
McCart and Hill introduced themselves to Franklin, who stood near the register greeting customers. They informed him of their first-in-line arrival time of 7:43am.
“Oh, that’s not too bad,” Franklin replied. “I like the slow season we’re in right now.” — The New York Times
