Terry Black's Opens Its Ninth Smokehouse in Houston on August 18, Extending a Barbecue Dynasty Born in 1932

On Tuesday, August 18, a former car dealership at 1329 North Shepherd in the Houston Heights becomes a smokehouse. Terry Black's Barbecue, the operation Texas Monthly calls the most impressive barbecue chain in Texas, opens there for lunch and dinner, seven days a week. It is the ninth Terry Black's, and the first inside Houston city limits. A city that has spent years watching Austin and the Hill Country collect the barbecue headlines finally gets one of the names those headlines are about.

The building is big on purpose. Six 1,000-gallon smokers sit behind the line, cooking enough brisket, beef ribs, pork ribs, turkey, and house-made sausage that a mid-afternoon sell-out is rare. Multiple cutting blocks keep the queue moving, which is the whole trick in Central Texas barbecue: cook a mountain of meat, slice it to order, and try not to run out before the dinner crowd arrives.

The method underneath is old and unhurried. Central Texas barbecue means beef, post oak, and time measured in shifts rather than hours, with brisket held over low smoke until the fat renders and the bark turns black. Cooking that much meat to that standard, every day, in a brand-new kitchen is the hard part of any opening. The six smokers are sized so the restaurant almost never has to tell a customer the brisket is gone.

The location says something too. The Heights has become one of Houston's busiest dining corridors, and North Shepherd is one of its main arteries. Turning a car dealership into a smokehouse fits a pattern the neighborhood has repeated for a decade, converting big utilitarian lots into destinations. A restaurant that needs room for six thousand-gallon smokers, a full dining room, outdoor seating, and eventually a hotel needed exactly the kind of oversized footprint a dealership leaves behind.

A family that has been cooking since the Depression

To understand why one restaurant opening draws this much attention, start in Lockhart, the small town south of Austin that the state legislature named the Barbecue Capital of Texas. In 1932, an impoverished farmer named Edgar Black Sr. went in on a meat market with a friend, and Black's Barbecue was born. It still operates today as the oldest barbecue joint in Texas owned by the same family, a piece of living history a few blocks off the courthouse square.

Terry Black grew up inside that world. Born and raised in Lockhart, he graduated from the University of Texas in 1977 as an accountant, married Patti a year later, and raised three children on the family trade. Their daughter Christina arrived in 1985. Then came twin sons, Mike and Mark, who spent childhood summers chopping post oak in hundred-degree heat in the lot behind their grandparents' restaurant. The wood they split fed the fires that made the family name.

When the twins opened their own place in Austin in 2014, they made a choice that has since become part of the legend. Rather than put the family surname on the sign, they named the restaurant after their father: Terry Black's Barbecue. A Dallas location followed in 2019. In 2022 they brought the name home, opening in Lockhart itself, a short walk from where Edgar Black started nine decades earlier. Christina runs the business side alongside her brothers, so all three of Terry and Patti's children now steer the company their grandparents' shop made possible.

A famous feud, and a fast expansion

Opening in Lockhart also put two barbecue businesses with the same last name on the same small map. Terry Black's and the original Black's Barbecue are run by different branches of the family, and the rivalry between them has become one of Texas barbecue's most public sagas, chronicled by Texas Monthly and by a KXAN documentary titled Family Beef. The short version is that the smoke never cooled. Two generations of cousins now compete for the same hometown crown.

That backstory gives the Houston opening its weight. This is not a new brand testing a concept in a strip mall. It is a fourth generation of a barbecue family scaling a proven one. The chain has grown to nine stores and earned an honorable mention on Texas Monthly's list of the 50 best barbecue joints in the state.

It also has a national stamp. The Michelin Guide gave Terry Black's a Recommended designation when the tire company published its first-ever guide to Texas, extending a validator most Americans associate with fine dining to a counter-service barbecue joint. For a family business built on butcher paper and post oak, a Michelin nod is the kind of credential that travels well beyond the state line.

Houston is only the next stop on a crowded schedule. Terry Black's is set to open in New Braunfels on September 23 and in San Antonio on December 16, just before Christmas. The company is also building its first location outside Texas, in the Germantown neighborhood of Nashville. Leaving the state is its own kind of test. Barbecue brands are notoriously hard to export, because the wood, the pace, and the local palate rarely travel intact, and Nashville will be the first proof of whether this one can.

More than a place to eat

The Houston restaurant carries a few things the others do not. Diners will find indoor and outdoor seating and a semi-private elevated loft for private events. Black Family Hospitality, the company that owns Terry Black's, also plans to operate a boutique hotel on the property, with details promised later. A barbecue joint that doubles as a hotel is a statement about how far this family intends to take the brand.

The food stays close to the Central Texas template. The counter starts with smoked meats and moves to sides made fresh daily: macaroni and cheese, creamed corn, pinto beans, potato salad, coleslaw, Mexican rice, and cornbread muffins. Dessert runs to mini pecan pie, peach cobbler, and banana pudding. There is Texas craft beer, wine, and a frozen black margarita for the people who decide to linger past their meal.

Houston's barbecue moment

Terry Black's lands in the middle of a Houston barbecue boom. Eastbound Barbecue opened in the East End in June. Willow's Smokehouse and Tavern is expected to open in the same part of town in August. The Station at Smokey Oaks is running weekend pop-ups in Garden Oaks before it opens full time. Houston already has a scene worth defending, with names like Truth, Killen's, and Gatlin's, so Terry Black's is joining a conversation the city is having, not starting one.

The expansion also settles an old Texas argument. Barbecue purists tend to hold that greatness lives in a single pit run by a single family, and that scale is the enemy of a good brisket. Terry Black's is the counterexample the purists have to reckon with: a nine-store operation that has held its quality well enough to earn Texas Monthly and Michelin recognition while still growing. Whether it can hold that line across a hotel, a Nashville outpost, and four new dining rooms is the real test the next year will put to it.

For the Black family, that competition is the point. A restaurant that began with two teenagers chopping wood behind their grandparents' shop is now nine stores deep, with a hotel and four more openings in the pipeline. The dealership on North Shepherd is where the next chapter starts. The line forms on August 18.

Sources

CultureMap Houston: Terry Black's Houston opening

Texas Monthly: Lockhart Has a New Barbecue Family Feud

KXAN: Family Beef documentary

Terry Black's Barbecue: Meet the Terry Black family

Wine Industry Advisor: Black Family Hospitality expansion

What Now Nashville: first location outside Texas

Michelin Guide: Terry Black's BBQ

Image credits: hero and food photos courtesy Terry Black's Barbecue, Goldbelly, and Advocate Magazine.