Houston Named a Day After the 98-Year-Old Who Opened Its Michelin Barbecue Joint at 93
John Toomey opened his first full-time barbecue joint at 93. Five years later J-Bar-M carries a Michelin recommendation and a 254-seat patio, and Houston just declared a day in his honor as he turned 98.
On Friday afternoon the staff at J-Bar-M Barbecue in Houston pulled off a surprise. Family, friends who go back decades, and a handful of city leaders crowded into the East Downtown smokehouse to celebrate the man whose initials sit inside the name. By the time the candles came out, the honor had turned official. John J. Toomey turned 98 this weekend, and the City of Houston declared July 26, 2026 “John J. Toomey Day.”
A proclamation would be a nice touch for any restaurateur. It lands differently here, because Toomey did not build this place in his prime. He opened J-Bar-M at the age of 93, a first-time full-time restaurant owner starting from scratch at an age when most people have long since handed off the tongs. Five years on, the joint carries a Michelin recommendation, a sprawling patio, and a roomful of regulars who treat one 98-year-old’s dream as their own.
A dream held for fifty years
Toomey is a born-and-raised Houstonian, and the fire started young. As a boy of 12 he borrowed bricks from the neighbors to stack a makeshift pit in the yard and smoke whatever meat he could get his hands on. The pull of it never faded, even as the rest of his life filled in around it.
He went to the University of Houston and graduated in 1950, then earned a law degree from the University of Houston Law Center the year after that. What followed was more than seven decades in law and business, a run the city’s proclamation credits with blending leadership, philanthropy, and entrepreneurship. Barbecue stayed a side fire the entire time.
Around town he became a fixture, the kind of Houstonian whose name opens doors quietly. His University of Houston ties ran deep enough that the school still claims him as one of its own, and his work in law and business made him a familiar figure in the city’s civic life long before a smoker sat under his name. None of that scratched the itch that started with borrowed bricks.
About fifty years ago he finally acted on it and opened a barbecue joint downtown. It closed five years later. That could have been the whole story, a young lawyer’s detour filed under things that did not pan out. Instead Toomey spent the decades that followed turning the idea over, waiting for a second chance most people would have quietly decided had already passed them by. He was, by the time he acted, a retiree with a barbecue habit and an unfinished ambition, which is a description that fits a lot of people who never do anything about it.
The joint he built at 93
The second chance arrived in 2021. Toomey opened J-Bar-M Barbecue at 2201 Leeland Street, in the pocket of East Downtown that Houstonians call EaDo, and he built it to stand. The name reads like a Texas branding iron, which is the point, and the “M” is a tribute to his late wife, Michelene.
The building makes the ambition plain. A cathedral-like glass wall opens the dining room, orbs of light hang over an interplay of wood and metal, and out back the lawn runs to a 254-seat patio with a stage for live music and a wide view of the downtown skyline. An indoor-outdoor bar, a working fireplace, and a private dining room round it out. This is not a trailer that grew up. It is a barbecue hall someone designed on purpose, at a stage of life when purpose is the easy thing to lose.
The cooking backed the room. At opening, pitmaster Willow Villarreal ran six smokers, four offset barrels and two direct-heat pits, enough steel to turn out prime brisket, pork ribs, sausage, and turkey for a crowd. Villarreal had built a name with the Willow’s Texas BBQ food truck before it shuttered, and J-Bar-M handed that talent a permanent address.
The menu has only widened since. Alongside the classic Texas plates and meats by the pound sit Tex-Mex specials like brisket tacos and quesadillas, plus all-day comfort food that runs to brisket lasagna and loaded baked potatoes. The sides read like a family reunion table, mac and cheese, charro beans, creamed corn, and the desserts finish it, banana pudding and honey peach cobbler and a chocolate ganache pie.
The location was a bet in its own right. EaDo is the old warehouse district on downtown’s eastern edge, a neighborhood that spent the last decade turning rail yards and garages into bars, breweries, and rooms exactly like this one. Dropping a full-scale barbecue hall there, rather than a bare-bones trailer, signaled that Toomey meant to plant something permanent. The beer garden and the live-music stage were not accessories. They were the argument that a smokehouse could anchor a block.
How the guide found him
Then Michelin came to Texas. When the inspectors assembled their 2025 Texas selection, they named J-Bar-M among their recommended Houston restaurants, putting a nonagenarian’s second-chance smokehouse on the same list as the city’s most-watched kitchens. A recommendation is not a star. It is the guide telling readers a place is worth going out of the way for, and it does not ask how old the owner is.
Local television had already caught on. Houston stations profiled him as the 97-year-old who owns one of the city’s best barbecue restaurants, the kind of coverage that turns a neighborhood favorite into a destination. The Michelin nod sealed it, and the two together did something a marketing budget cannot buy. They made the backstory the draw. People came for a recommended brisket and left telling the tale of the man who waited seventy years to serve it.
The timing says as much about Houston as it does about Toomey. The city’s barbecue scene has spent this decade pulling national attention its way, and a room like J-Bar-M, equal parts refined and traditional, fit the moment cleanly. Toomey did not chase a trend. He built the restaurant he had wanted his whole life, and the trend walked up to his door.
Why a city stops to name a day
That is the part worth sitting with. A proclamation is a small thing on paper and a large thing in a room. When Mayor John Whitmire signed July 26 over to Toomey, he was not honoring a quarterly number. He was marking a life that refused to treat 93 as a finish line, and a neighborhood that decided to show up for it.
The party looked the part. The University of Houston, the school that shaped him, sent coaches, staff, and student-athletes, and someone draped a custom Cougar Red sport coat over his shoulders for the occasion. Friends who have known him for decades stood next to staff who have known him a few years, and the room did not treat the gap as meaningful.
There is a tenderness underneath the whole enterprise that is easy to miss between the brisket and the beer garden. The restaurant is named partly for Michelene, the wife he lost, so every plate that leaves the pass carries her initial. A man could have marked that memory with a bench or a plaque. Toomey marked it with a working smokehouse that feeds hundreds of strangers a week, which is a louder and warmer kind of monument than most people ever build.
Barbecue rewards patience more than almost anything else on a plate. A brisket asks for twelve hours and punishes anyone in a rush. Toomey waited far longer than that. He carried one boyhood idea across seventy years of law, marriage, and loss, then lit the pit when he was ready rather than when he was young. Houston named a day after the result. The smoke, for now, does not stop.
Sources
Beloved Houston barbecue legend celebrates 98th birthday, KHOU 11.
Meet John Toomey: the 97-year-old who owns one of Houston’s best BBQ restaurants, KHOU 11.
Sizzling new BBQ joint and beer garden has opened in Houston, Secret Houston, 2021.
Featured image: John Toomey at J-Bar-M Barbecue, courtesy ABC13.