Fifty Years Ago, a Dallas Banker Smoked Turkeys in His Backyard. This Weekend, Smokey John's Throws the City a Party.

This Saturday, a parking lot on West Mockingbird Lane in Dallas turns into a block party. There will be a marching band, popcorn and cookies from neighborhood vendors, and a line of people waiting on brisket. It is the kind of scene Smokey John's Bar-B-Que has built its name on for half a century, and this weekend it doubles as a birthday. The restaurant is turning 50, and it is celebrating the only way it knows how, by feeding the city that kept it alive.

The free block party runs Saturday, Aug. 29, from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m., and it caps a week in which the first 50 people in line each day walk out with a free brisket sandwich. Fifty years, 50 sandwiches, one very old Dallas institution that started in a backyard. Brothers Brent and Juan Reaves run it now, and the story they are throwing a party for is not really about barbecue technique. It is about a family that kept showing up.

A banker who smoked turkeys on the weekend

The man everyone called Smokey did not set out to run a restaurant. John Reaves had a steady career in banking. On weekends he tended a backyard smoker, working hickory-smoked hams and turkeys that he handed out to friends and neighbors, and the word got around fast enough that in 1976 he decided to sell it. He, his wife Gloria, and his cousin Douglas "Rent" Spraglin opened the first Smokey John's at Lemmon Avenue and Mockingbird Lane. The food was an instant hit.

So instant that it pulled in some famous partners. Dallas Cowboys stars Drew Pearson and Harvey Martin became investors, and the national spotlight followed. Weeks after Super Bowl XII, Martin plugged Smokey John's as "the best barbecue in town" during an ABC Superteams broadcast, and the partners began opening new locations across Texas. For a stretch, the little backyard operation was a growing chain.

Then Smokey pulled it back. As the business expanded, the focus drifted away from the mom-and-pop barbecue joint he had started, and he decided he wanted the barbecue back at the center. Almost overnight, the expansion unwound. By 1984 the company had filed for bankruptcy protection, and only the original restaurant remained. It was a hard reset, but it left Smokey John's as what it was always best at being: one neighborhood barbecue counter, run by one family. The restaurant settled at its current West Mockingbird home in 1999.

The fire, and coming back

The hardest test came decades later. In 2018 a fire tore through the restaurant, gutting the building that generations of Dallas families had grown up eating in. For a beloved 40-something-year-old joint, a fire like that is often the end. Smokey John's treated it as an intermission. The Reaves family rebuilt, and the restaurant reopened in January 2019, its pits running again on the same corner. Smokey himself died later that year at 74, having lived to see the place he started come back from the ashes.

Running it now are his sons. Brent and Juan Reaves took over in 2013 and have spent the years since expanding what the name can do without losing what it means. They turned the brothers' easy, joking chemistry into a genuinely funny social media presence, landed the family on A and E's "Deep Fried Dynasty," and built a catering operation on top of the restaurant. The 50-year-old house rub, along with banana pudding, sauce, and spices, now sits on H-E-B shelves across Texas, with a sweet potato pie in the works.

The barbecue itself is not standing still either. The brothers recently invested in a new all-wood smoker and rebuilt their brisket program from the trim up, a project they are still fine-tuning. Retooling brisket, the single most scrutinized item on any Texas barbecue menu, is a pointed choice for a place old enough to coast on nostalgia. The message is that the 50th is a starting line as much as a milestone, and that the counter their father built is meant to be as good tomorrow as anyone remembers it being.

Fifty years at the fair, and a giving habit

One tradition has outlasted almost everything else. Smokey John's has poured turkey legs, brisket, ribs, and tamales at the State Fair of Texas since 1979, which makes it one of the longest-standing family vendors on the grounds. Each fall the operation runs six booths for the fair's 24-day stretch, feeding tens of thousands of people who may only know the name from the smell drifting across Fair Park. In about a month, the brothers will do it for a 50th straight year, hiring up a small army to cover the stands.

Over five decades the menu grew into its own small canon of Dallas comfort food. The full name is Smokey John's Bar-B-Que and Home Cooking, and the second half earns its keep. Beyond the smoked brisket, ribs, and hot links there are the sides and sweets that regulars drive across town for, plus a banana pudding good enough to end up in a grocery cooler. For a lot of families the Fair Park turkey leg is the whole relationship, an annual October ritual passed down like a season ticket. The restaurant sells the taste of a particular Dallas, the kind you grow up on and later bring your own kids back to.

Ask Brent and Juan what their father taught them, and they do not reach for pitmaster tricks or business strategy. They land on his giving spirit. Smokey was known for offering his help, his time, and his money to people who needed it, and his sons built that instinct into the way they run the place. It is why the 50th block party is free, and why they used it to invite neighboring small businesses, a bakery, a popcorn maker, a candle maker who once worked for them, to set up alongside a marching band from a local high school. A milestone that could have been a victory lap became, instead, an open invitation.

Why a 50-year-old counter still matters

Barbecue restaurants do not usually make it to 50. The hours are brutal, the margins are thin, and fire, both the kind you cook with and the kind that took the building in 2018, is always a risk. Smokey John's got here by being the opposite of a trend. It survived a boom-and-bust chain, a bankruptcy, a founder's death, and a total rebuild, and it never stopped being a family standing behind a counter in Dallas. The Reaves brothers like to point out that on any given day, someone walks through the door for the first time. This weekend, 50 years in, the whole city is invited to be that person, and the sandwich is on the house.

Sources

Dallas Observer, "How Smokey John's BBQ is celebrating 50 years: free brisket and a block party" (Aug. 24, 2026), and "After 50 years, Smokey John's revamps its brisket game". The Dallas Morning News, "After devastating fire, Dallas barbecue joint Smokey John's has finally reopened" (Jan. 2019). FOX 4 Dallas-Fort Worth, "'Smokey' John Reaves, founder of Smokey John's Bar-B-Que, dies at 74". NBC 5 Dallas-Fort Worth, State Fair of Texas vendor history. Smokey John's Bar-B-Que. Images: courtesy Smokey John's Bar-B-Que and the Reaves family.