Aaron Franklin, the genius behind Franklin Barbecue at 900 East 11th Street in Austin, bestrides the brisket world like a Colossus. He’s the man who revolutionized Texas brisket by perfecting the cooking and handling off that noble hunk of meat. Not only that, but Franklin generously revealed the Eleusinian mysteries and sent disciples forth. As a result, Texas has, as the magisterial Daniel Vaughan reports, reached “peak brisket.” It just can’t get any better. Even better from my perspective, a disciple landed in the Washington area and started 2fifty Texas, which is right up there with the best, and there are other followers in Virginia and South Carolina, with more reported in the Raleigh and Charlotte areas.
Franklin’s opened after my work and teaching time in Texas, and I’ve only been to Austin once since I started the blog. My one full day there coincided with a home football game, so the idea of facing the lines at Franklin never occurred to me. (I did get to Terry Black’s and Valentina’s on the advice of Daniel Vaughan, and was delighted with both. I also managed to eat at the Original City Market in Luling, Smitty’s in Lockhart, and Pinkerton’s in Houston, so save your tears for others.
And fear not. Others enjoy more flexibility than my Principal Deputy Nanny commitments allow, and I’m thrilled to share this report from our own intrepid Senior Idaho, Mississippi, and Texas Correspondents, Doug Herbert and Toni Gelston on Franklin. Here’s Doug outside Franklin.
And here’s his report:
After B. Cooper on Sunday and Hays Co. Bar-B-Que on Monday, we had planned to skip barbecue on Tuesday.
On our Austin trip, we had also planned to skip the most famous Austin barbecue place of all, Franklin Barbecue. Franklin was endorsed enthusiastically by Anthony Bourdain and many others and finished first in the Texas Monthly Top 50 in 2013 and 2017. It was on every list everywhere of the very best barbecue places in Texas. But we still planned to skip it for several reasons.
First, we figured any place that famous was probably coasting and likely to have slipped from its heyday. And, in fact, Franklin had dropped from #1 to #7 in the 2021 Texas Monthly Top 50.
Second, the lines at Franklin are notorious. We’d read that you routinely had to arrive at 8 am to be assured of getting in (they open at 11 am) before they ran out of meat. We’d read that Austinites love their lines and talking with their friends and neighbors in them, but lines just aren’t for us.
Third, we’d had barbecue three days in a row and it didn’t seem fair to Franklin to be third in line.
But we’d read that Tuesday’s are the best day to go to Franklin and that if you stopped by around 1 pm, the line might not be so bad, but they would likely have run out of some of their meats (probably their famous brisket). So, we swung by Franklin around 1:15 or so and the line didn’t look so long, and we jumped in it.
It turned out we were dead wrong about all our reasons to be hesitant. The line was only about 25 minutes and I really did have a great conversation with the man ahead of me in line, a career Army guy who along with his wife had fostered dozens of high risk young kids. They had run out of some meats, but they still had pulled pork, ribs, sausage, and, most important, brisket.
And we sure didn’t need to worry about Franklin having slipped or us being burned out on barbecue three days in a row. Franklin is a wonderful barbecue place, undoubtedly in my personal Top 10. Austin is a pretty amazing food town to have two barbecue places (Franklin and B. Cooper) go straight into my Top 10. And I find it extremely hard to believe that there are 6 barbecue places in Texas better than Franklin.
So much has been written about Franklin that I won’t try to add much to it.
The brisket is every bit as good as Bourdain and everybody else says, the pulled pork is outstanding – moist with great texture, the sausage is delicious, as are the beans.
If I had to pick nits, I’d say the sauces (even the vinegar sauce) are too sweet and the potato salad is just standard issue Southern potato salad (which is good). And the servers were extremely nice and friendly.
The next day we were talking to a Texas state trooper at the State Capitol and we mentioned Franklin’s. He immediately said, “We don’t call that barbecue.” He must have been talking about the hipster atmosphere, because you’d have to be crazy to say Franklin isn’t barbecue, great barbecue. And if you get a chance to go to Franklin, you’d be crazy not to take it.
There you have it. You probably shouldn’t go at 1:00 on a Tuesday, though. Now that the word is out, it’ll be jammed, just as every alternative route gets jammed as soon as your GPS suggests it. I’m more than ever determined to get back to Austin so I can try … I’m not going to tell you where all I plan to try, lest you’ll be there in line in front of me. As you’ve guessed, though, you should go to Aaron Franklin’s place. See you there.
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