This 26-Year-Old Pitmaster Is Reshaping Texas Barbecue
Barbs B Q is one of the 20 Best New Restaurants of 2024. Pitmaster Chuck Charnichart is this year’s Chef of the Moment, in honor of her work reshaping Texas barbecue and fostering a new generation of talent.
Photographs by Mary Kang.
The entrance to Barbs B Q is marked by a pink wood sign decorated with little hearts. Inside, white walls are peppered with menus in that same bubblegum hue, several illustrations of Sonic the Hedgehog, and plenty of kitschy tapestries with life-affirming expressions. The decor recently expanded to include the lime green cover of Brat, the 2024 album that elevated Charli XCX to pop treasure. This is the energetic world of Chuck Charnichart, the 26-year-old pitmaster upending Texas barbecue.
From the start, Charnichart’s approach has been irreverent and cheeky, unmistakably that of someone who grew up on the internet. She didn’t name her first restaurant after herself in the vein of the state’s most prolific pitmasters—Franklin Barbecue, Louie Mueller Barbecue, Terry Black’s BBQ, and so on. Barbs B Q nods instead to Nicki Minaj, whose army of fans are known as the Barbz. From top to bottom, Charnichart has styled her restaurant with an aesthetic shared by the sorts of queer and female pop icons who smash barriers and reshape American culture in their image. This young pitmaster is reshaping barbecue in hers.
Charnichart’s mastery of traditional cuts is apparent in her dark and wobbly brisket and juicy turkey breast. But her spirited approach is clearest in dishes like her Molotov pork ribs. A salute to fond childhood memories of Flamin’ Hot Cheetos, they’re lacquered in a fiery-sweet sauce superpowered with serrano, guajillo, and árbol chiles. Each order is brightened by a flurry of lime zest. Diners eat these hulking ribs alongside spaghetti in cilantro-packed green sauce and generous scoops of sweet, sticky pineapple upside-down cobbler. “I want it to be fun and silly and not so serious,” Charnichart says of the menu.
Charnichart often incorporates the flavors of South Texas into her cooking. Her parents emigrated from the central Mexico state of San Luis Potosí to the Texas border town of Brownsville in 1997. At her first pop-up event in 2021, she served a duo of Heaven or Las Vegas ribs in honor of an album by the Scottish indie rock band Cocteau Twins. The Heaven ribs were glazed in a bright and sweet cherry sauce, while the Las Vegas were smoky and dark. “I was thinking about the flavors of the [Rio Grande] Valley—spicy, citrusy, savory—and also a little bit of pop culture,” she says.
Charnichart’s father was a cook at a seafood restaurant on a nearby barrier island, and her mother made nearly every meal from scratch. In high school Charnichart won an iPad in a school raffle and spent her time listening to her favorite pop stars and debating their merits online. “I wanted to be able to start my own music festival one day. Music was a huge part of my life,” she says. “I wanted to be an actor; I wanted to be a lawyer. I’ve always wanted to be a lot of things, but I knew that chef was one of them.”
Charnichart landed in the food world while attending the University of Texas at Austin. She worked the register and doled out sides at Austin’s legendary Franklin Barbecue before taking a job in the kitchen at Goldee’s BBQ in Fort Worth. In 2021, shortly after she started at Goldee’s, it secured the top spot on Texas Monthly’s star-making list of “The 50 Best BBQ Joints.”
Goldee’s co-owner and pitmaster Jonny White had an approach that would inspire Charnichart’s restaurant: a young crew of cooks and a penchant for pushing boundaries while remaining grounded in tradition. “I was able to be a full-on student there and take on all the knowledge and practice and learn my own techniques,” Charnichart says. “I was young, and no one really took me seriously. Jonny saw my passion and saw how I work and put in the time to teach me and support me.” If a slab of brisket was not up to par, it never reached the dining room. Charnichart caught on, earning the trust to prepare the brisket and jockey the smoker herself. “She got what I was talking about,” White says. “I really do think she’s the best brisket cook in Texas.”
Joanne Irizarry, Barbs B Q investor and baker
After departing Goldee’s and test-driving the Barbs B Q pop-up, in 2023 she found a fitting home for her own restaurant in Lockhart, a town of about 15,000 people an hour from Austin. Lockhart is the official barbecue capital of Texas, named so for its density of legendary barbecue restaurants. On research trips, Charnichart began to envision what she could add to this storied landscape. “Aside from feeling very welcomed, it was also the idea of doing something so different in a place that has so much history with barbecue,” she says.
Because of the restaurant’s untraditional menu and its woman-led pit, Charnichart says Barbs B Q hasn’t always gotten a fair shake from barbecue conformists and what she describes as the “typical barbecue guy.” But as lines have gotten longer and attention has focused on the unimpeachable quality and originality of Charnichart’s food, the restaurant has acquired loyal fans and staff who believe in her vision.
“She’s fearless, committed, and passionate about what she does,” says Joanne Irizarry, an investor in Barbs B Q who helps develop the restaurant’s desserts and works the counter. “There’s a lot of very talented young ladies in barbecue now, and I believe Chuck is a role model for what success looks like.”
Barbecue businesses are often handed down like precious heirlooms, and top pitmasters tend to guard their seasoning and smoking methods. Charnichart takes a different approach. Though still in her 20s, she spends a lot of time thinking about what the next wave of pitmasters will look like. Her approach—building up a young team and giving them the tools to set off on their own—is a defining characteristic of next-generation barbecue leaders like herself and White. They champion the notion that there can be more than one top barbecue cook.
“Our team is relatively young, and when I was that age, most people in charge sort of brushed that age group aside,” Charnichart says. “That’s what I care about the most—making them see how valuable they are and how much more they can do.”
The Barbs B Q crew is small—five full-time employees—but Charnichart recently hired Logan Key, a 19-year-old cook who’d worked at a nearby restaurant. After tasting Charnichart’s barbecue and experiencing the warmth of her team, he’d begun checking each week to see if the restaurant had space for one more member—until they did.
Though it’s Key’s first barbecue job, Charnichart entrusted him to trim brisket, start the fire, and help out at the pits. Recently, she coached him through making a rack of ribs for the team to try. “They were so good,” she says. “I saw my young self in him.” The pitmasters from Key’s childhood in Lockhart had decades of experience under their belts. He couldn’t imagine reaching their position until Charnichart rolled into town, a few years older than himself and brimming with ideas about the future of barbecue. It’s a future Key wants to be a part of, he says. “I’d love to do this for the rest of my life.”
Originally Appeared on Bon Appétit
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