Two of Texas Barbecue's Most Decorated Young Pitmasters Just Opened One Restaurant Together in Brooklyn

This week, a small storefront on McGuinness Boulevard in Brooklyn starts smoking brisket that would not be out of place in Lockhart or Fort Worth. The restaurant is called Kirbee's, and it is the first joint venture between two of the most decorated young names in Texas barbecue. Its arrival gives New Yorkers something they have never quite had: two distinct Texas smokehouses, with two very different philosophies, sharing a single counter.

The names behind it carry real weight. Kirbee's is a collaboration between Chuck Charnichart of Barbs B Q in Lockhart and Jonny White of Goldee's Bar-B-Q near Fort Worth, two restaurants that sit near the top of nearly every Texas barbecue ranking that matters. To understand why a Greenpoint opening is drawing attention from Austin to the Brooklyn Eagle, you have to know who these two are and how they ended up cooking together fifteen hundred miles from home.

Two friends who met behind the counter at Franklin

The partnership goes back nearly a decade, to the most famous barbecue counter in the state. Charnichart and White met while working at Franklin Barbecue in Austin in 2016, the Aaron Franklin institution that turned a trailer into a James Beard Award and hours-long lines. From there their paths braided together in a way that reads like a mentorship story.

White helped Charnichart learn to cook barbecue, hired her into the kitchen at Goldee's, and then pushed her to open her own place, which became Barbs B Q in 2023. Now the roles have flattened into a genuine partnership. "Chuck is one of my best friends and an amazing chef," White told CultureMap. "I'm super excited for us to be working together again, and we are excited to be in New York." Kirbee's is what that friendship looks like when it builds something from scratch.

Chuck Charnichart and the Barbs B Q vanguard

Charnichart is one of the most celebrated new pitmasters in the country, and the accolades arrived fast. She opened Barbs B Q in Lockhart in May 2023, and within roughly a year the restaurant had earned a James Beard Award nomination and a spot on Eater's list of the best new restaurants in America. In 2024 Bon Appetit named her its Chef of the Moment, and in 2025 the Michelin Guide handed her its Texas Young Chef Award.

What sets Barbs apart is a point of view. Charnichart cooks a modern Texas barbecue threaded with the flavors of the Rio Grande Valley, where she grew up, and the menu she brings to Brooklyn shows it. Expect pork ribs brightened with lime zest, a Mexican-spiced brisket, and the dish that became her calling card, a "green spaghett" built on poblanos and cilantro. It is barbecue that treats the smoker as a starting point rather than a finish line.

That point of view landed in a town that takes barbecue as seriously as anywhere on earth. Lockhart is the officially designated Barbecue Capital of Texas, home to old-guard institutions like Kreuz Market, Black's, and Smitty's, some of them more than a century old. For a young cook to open a modern, women-led smokehouse in that company and immediately draw national honors was its own kind of statement. "High expectations" is how Charnichart has described the weight of cooking there, and Barbs met them, which is exactly the pedigree she now carries to Brooklyn.

Jonny White and the Goldee's purist streak

If Charnichart represents the vanguard, White carries the tradition. Goldee's Bar-B-Q, the Fort Worth-area restaurant he helped run, sits at No. 3 on Texas Monthly's 2025 list of the fifty best barbecue joints in the state, a ranking that functions as scripture in Texas. White sold his shares in the business and moved to New York to build Kirbee's, arriving several months before opening to secure a space and convert it.

His half of the Kirbee's menu is built for purists: smoked turkey, brisket, and the classic sides that define central Texas barbecue. The plan, White told CultureMap, is to organize the menu into plates and trays so a guest can order from one restaurant or the other, tasting Barbs' inventive Rio Grande Valley cooking side by side with Goldee's straight-down-the-middle tradition. Two schools of Texas barbecue, one tray.

Making Texas barbecue work in a Brooklyn footprint

Bringing that cooking to Greenpoint meant a few concessions to the realities of a New York kitchen. The biggest is the smoker itself. Instead of the traditional offset smokers, the big steel barrels that sit behind every Texas barbecue joint, Kirbee's will use smoker ovens to save space. White frames the constraint as a possible upgrade, hopeful the more consistent cooking process will hold its own against the Texas norm. "I think it will be interesting for people to compare," he said.

The other question is the one every Texas transplant faces in New York: the lines. White is not worried. "I think they're used to long lines and being served to order because of Katz," he told CultureMap, pointing to Katz's Delicatessen, the Lower East Side landmark that has drawn crowds for its pastrami since 1888. He is even bringing a piece of Texas soda culture along, promising to introduce New Yorkers to Waco's own Big Red.

Kirbee's lands in a Greenpoint that has been waiting for it, having tracked the opening for months. It takes over a compact storefront at 55 McGuinness Boulevard South, a former neighborhood kitchen, and turns it into a Texas outpost run by two cooks with the resumes to back the ambition. For a neighborhood that has watched the space sit empty, the smoke finally starting is its own kind of announcement.

Why a Brooklyn opening matters to Texas barbecue

Texas barbecue has been quietly colonizing New York, one acclaimed pitmaster at a time, and Kirbee's is the most credentialed arrival yet. What makes it different is that it is not a single chef exporting a single style. It is two friends, a modern innovator and a classic traditionalist, deliberately putting their two philosophies on the same menu and inviting a new city to pick a side, or to love both.

That is a confident bet, and the resumes suggest it is a fair one. A Michelin Young Chef and a partner from a top-three Texas joint do not open a restaurant to prove barbecue travels; they open it because they already know it does. The only real unknown is how Brooklyn answers, and starting this week, the line outside 55 McGuinness will begin to tell them. Eater New York, which first reported the project, called it one of the most anticipated openings of the season.

Sources

Eater New York, Kirbee's coverage. CultureMap Austin, "Texas pitmasters behind Barbs and Goldee's open new eatery in New York" by Brianna Caleri. Chron, "Legendary Texas pitmasters to open restaurant in New York City". Brooklyn Eagle, "Two of Texas' top Bar-B-Q joints combining forces in Greenpoint". Michelin Guide, Chuck Charnichart, Texas Young Chef Award and Barbs B Q, Lockhart. Texas Monthly Top 50 Barbecue 2025. Greenpointers. Images: courtesy Barbs B Q, Goldee's Bar-B-Q, and Kirbee's.