Two Michelin-Starred Texas Pitmasters Took Their Smoke to a London Bank

Walk into the old Midland Bank headquarters in the City of London this month and the first thing that reaches you is not the marble. It is the smoke. Inside a cathedral-like hall ringed with green stone columns, two of the most decorated pitmasters in Texas have parked their fires and started cooking brisket the way Central Texas has done it for a hundred years.

The pitmasters are John Bates of InterStellar BBQ and Ali Clem of la Barbecue, both out of Austin, and the building is The Ned, the grand hotel carved out of a 1924 bank. The two joints opened a one-month residency there on September 4, and it runs through October 4, which gives Londoners a few short weeks to taste what people back home wait in line for.

What makes the trip more than a novelty is the badge each of these cooks carries. In 2024, Michelin came to Texas for the first time, and when it did, it put stars on barbecue. That had never happened anywhere in the world before. So this is not a food truck on holiday. It is two of the four starred barbecue joints in Texas, cooking abroad, in a room built to move money.

A Texas Residency Inside a Landmark Bank

The Ned is not a generic hotel. It occupies the former Midland Bank headquarters at 27 Poultry, a Grade I-listed building designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens and finished in 1924, steps from the Bank of England and St. Paul's Cathedral. The architect's nickname, Ned, is where the hotel got its own. When Soho House converted the long-empty landmark and opened it in 2017, it turned the vast banking hall into a bank of restaurants and tucked a bar down in the old safe-deposit vaults.

The scale of the place is part of the point. Soho House founder Nick Jones took on the disused landmark and reopened it after a roughly 200 million pound redevelopment, turning the old banking floor into a hub of restaurants under a 248-room hotel and a members' club. It is one of the most watched dining addresses in the City, and for one month its all-day American diner is a Texas barbecue joint.

The barbecue is running out of Electric Bar & Diner, and the setting is the whole joke and the whole charm at once. A cut of brisket that spends its life on a roadside pit in Austin is now being served under Lutyens columns in a room where clerks once counted cash, a few steps from the trains at Bank station. Central Texas smoke has landed in about the most formal address it could pick.

The Two Joints Texas Sent Abroad

Neither of these places is a tourist trap at home. Both sit near the top of a scene that argues constantly about who belongs there. InterStellar BBQ, in far northwest Austin, is the work of pitmaster John Bates, who cooks low and slow over post oak and draws a line down the sidewalk before the doors open. Bates built the smokehouse in 2019 out of his old sandwich shop, Noble Sandwich Co., and within two years Texas Monthly had ranked it the second-best barbecue joint in the state. His peach tea pork belly burnt ends have become the kind of dish people drive in for.

la Barbecue carries a longer story, and it runs straight through one of Texas barbecue's founding families. The trailer started on South First Street in 2012 and moved to its permanent East Austin home in 2021, and it was built by the late LeAnn Mueller, the granddaughter of Louie Mueller, who opened the legendary Louie Mueller Barbecue in Taylor in 1949. After Mueller died in 2023, her wife, pitmaster Ali Clem, took over the pit, and the Michelin star made Clem the only woman running a starred barbecue kitchen in the world. Both cooks earned that star on the same night in November 2024, part of a barbecue class that also included LeRoy and Lewis and Houston's Corkscrew BBQ, with Franklin Barbecue taking a Bib Gourmand alongside them.

Sending these two together is a deliberate pairing. Bates and Clem cook in the same tradition, honest Central Texas barbecue with a couple of signature turns each, so a London diner is not getting one style dressed up as the whole state. They are getting a fair cross-section of the barbecue the guide chose to honor with a star in the first place.

You Cannot Fly a Texas Pit Across the Atlantic

The hard part of a residency like this is the part diners never see. A Texas pitmaster's fire is half the recipe, and the steel they cook on is built and seasoned over years. None of that fits in a suitcase. So the teams are cooking on Ironbrand smokers, custom-built in the United Kingdom, learning a new set of pits on the fly in a strange kitchen an ocean from home.

That is a real test, and it is the reason a stunt like this can go wrong. Wood behaves differently, the ambient air is different, and a cook who knows his own pit down to the quarter-degree has to relearn the feel of the fire in a week. Doing it under a Michelin badge, in front of a London crowd that has read the headlines, raises the stakes on every brisket that comes off the smoker.

What Lands on the Tray

The menu reads like a greatest-hits tray built for people who have never had the real thing. Diners can order pork ribs, pulled lamb shoulder, a chopped cheese sausage, and InterStellar's peach tea pork belly burnt ends, with brisket available as an add-on and a run of Texas sides. Jack Daniel's built the drinks around it, from pickleback shots to a corn-and-honey Old Fashioned and a banana pudding finished with whiskey caramel, so the whole table leans Southern from the first pour to the last spoonful.

None of it is cheap, which fits the postcode. The sharing tray runs about 75 dollars a person, with a two-person minimum and a service charge on top, so a table for two starts north of 150. Reservations have been going fast since the residency was announced, which tells you the appetite for Texas barbecue reaches a long way past Texas.

Why a Month in London Matters

For years the story of Texas barbecue was a story about place. You had to go there, stand in the line, and eat it off butcher paper in the heat, because the thing did not travel. The Michelin stars started to chip at that idea, and this residency takes the next swing. Two of the best in the state packed up their aprons, borrowed a set of foreign pits, and set out to prove the craft holds up three thousand miles from the pit it was built on.

It is a small thing and a large one at the same time. Small, because it is one month in one hotel with one shared tray on the menu. Large, because a London banking hall is now a place you can get a plate of properly smoked Central Texas brisket, and because two pitmasters were confident enough in the tradition to cook it that far from home. The line that used to form on a Texas sidewalk is forming in the City of London now, and it runs until October 4.

Sources

• 2 of Austin's greatest BBQ joints are on holiday in London (CultureMap Austin, Sept 4 2026: residency dates, venue, menu, price, Ironbrand smokers, pitmasters)

• InterStellar BBQ at Electric Bar & Diner (The Ned, official residency listing)

• All the Stars from the MICHELIN Guide Texas 2024 (Michelin Guide: inaugural Texas selection, first barbecue stars)

• Three Austin barbecue joints earned Michelin stars; Franklin awarded Bib Gourmand (Austin American-Statesman, Nov 12 2024)

• Four Texas Barbecue Joints Now Have Michelin Stars (the four starred joints: la Barbecue, InterStellar, LeRoy and Lewis, Corkscrew)

• Midland Bank, Poultry (The Ned building history: Lutyens, 1924, Grade I-listed)

• Two Michelin-starred Texas pitmasters to host Ned residency (The Caterer: Jack Daniel's drink pairings)

• The best seat at la Barbecue (Visit Austin: la Barbecue / Mueller family history)

• Soho House converts Lutyens' Midland Bank into The Ned (Dezeen: redevelopment, restaurants, members' club)

Images courtesy The Ned London, InterStellar BBQ, and la Barbecue.