Texas Smokehouse

Rating: 4.25
Opened: 2008
Pitmaster: Dirk Miller, age 48, and Robert Reid, age 40
Process: Post and live oak; indirect-heat gap
Pro tip: Take home some sausage through the butcher situation.

If Miller’s were in Austin, it might have begun in a meals vehicle. Rather, Dirk Miller began preparing in the front room of their meat-processing and taxidermy company, which exposed in 2006. Very first emerged sausage wraps and pulled chicken in 2008; he began “throwing briskets” regarding the cigarette smoker a-year later on. Great move, as their brisket happens to be one of the best when you look at the condition, with great taste, great bark, and juicy, melty, beautifully rendered fatty pieces. Last year Miller took the dive and converted the building into a full-time restaurant (the meat-processing operation was relocated to another building). He built completely a roadhouse-style dining area within the to augment the cramped front room with yellowish booths (obtained from an old Subway) and began cooking. The end result? Miller’s delivers around five-hundred pounds of their very own pork-and-beef sausage each week: regular, jalapeño-cheese, and a pre-smoked hot website link (they also have dried out “snack sticks” and a brisket summer time sausage). All of them are exceptional: a crumbly however fast well-seasoned filling in a strong, well smoked casing. No sauce is needed for brisket, obviously, but it’s the most wonderful tangy-sweet accompaniment toward hot link on a piece of white bread. Potato salad is created somewhere else, nevertheless the beans are prepared in-house and deliciously peppery and simple, with no included flavoring or hunks of animal meat.

The very first couple of years, Miller’s maintained a casual, “until we come to an end” kind of air. But now that business features picked up, Miller along with his right-hand guy smoke in shifts (with one beginning at three each day plus one at eight), meaning you are able to show up here for dinner and be sure you’re getting meat who hasn’t been sitting for extended. Pork ribs just have a turn on Friday and Saturday, which can be additionally when the cornbread makes an appearance. Dirk’s partner, Lisa, tends to make both that and pies, including coconut-pecan, which offers out every single day, and County Fair, with chocolate and peanut butter potato chips and walnuts. Miller’s does not have a billboard on Interstate 35, nonetheless it’s extremely close to the highway, making it an ideal spot to stop on a Dallas-Austin jaunt.