Texan brisket is not a utility food; it’s an art form.
The pitmaster will spend up to 18 hours — after waking at comically early hours — to slow cook a piece of meat in an industrial-sized smoker. People who make brisket are the intersection between cooks and blacksmiths, choosing the temperature needed to hold the brisket at, the wood it will be smoked upon and the length of time to smoke the meat with a level of care and attention to detail that I have only seen in chemistry labs. It's a game of patience, sleepless nights, careful planning and a devotion to a craft.
When my dad was going through one of his many obsessions, he made brisket. I remember living in Arizona and how he complained about waking up at 5 or 6 a.m. to cook a brisket for 13 hours, just for it to be ready for when guests came in the evening. His brisket was kosher, of course.
I came from a religiously observant Jewish family. The intense type, too: waiting an hour-and-a-half to eat dairy after meat, separate cupboards for meat dishes and dairy dishes, and all meat had to be certified kosher by a Rabbinic organization. So everything we ate was kosher.
The only difference between a kosher brisket and an unkosher one is that no barbecue place on earth has kosher brisket. So I ate brisket at home, in awe of the time, care and passion that went into it.
When we moved to Texas, the smoked meat beckoned me like wanderlust singing to a secluded monk. We would drive by places known worldwide as holy sites where barbecue savants made their sauce-stained pilgrimages. But I was stuck in the car, going to eat kosher meat at home.
When I turned 18, I took my first step toward gastronomic independence. I had my first unkosher meal at the Rainforest Cafe, and that set me down a path of trying what I had been steered away from in my youth.
I got more daring. I went to barbecue places with friends and finally tried the food my father had emulated for the religious palate. Standing in those lines for food felt like a corrupt act.
But the brisket was good. Better than good. Now it outlines my memories of watching movies with friends. The smoky flavour was under my tongue as I experienced the first bits of independence from familial expectations. Brisket was a form of rebellion.
I’ve felt homesickness for the food that moulded me since I’ve moved to Vancouver — a yearning that sounded like cicadas and felt like the humidity of the South. I didn’t know if it was a longing for the feeling of home or the food. But I set out to find Texas in Vancouver: a brisket in the great white north that I could go to when I missed people with accents like dripping molasses.
To me, all barbecue places are trying to be the primordial brisket joint. The best brisket on earth is probably 15 hours away from civilization in a converted air hangar. There’s a line out the door, and they start selling brisket at 11 a.m. to patrons who have been waiting since dawn. It's set up like a middle school lunch line: sliding metal trays and food you order by the pound. You sit down at wooden tables and taste the food the pitmaster has been making for 30 years. You’re there not for the purposeful aesthetic or cultivated liquor collection, but to eat meat that has been cooked for longer than a cubicle workday.
The closer any barbecue place is to this primeval ideal, the better I thought it would be. When I set out on this journey, I wanted to find something at least trying to be the ideal. No gimmicks, no homage to the States: just good food. People in my life told me not to be optimistic, and I was inclined to believe them. With my expectations for restaurants in the dirt, Zoe (the photographer for this piece) and I set out on what I told my friends was Brisket Week 2025.
We first went to Burnaby Heights, taking the 14 to its terminal stop, to go to Butchers Block BBQ. The restaurant had plain wooden tables, one grill station in the back, with music-themed statues and licence plates lining the walls. They were cute to see, honestly — plates from a couple of southern states, one from the Midwest and Alberta sticking out like a maple syrup-covered sore thumb.
First, the sides. The cornbread was really dense and somehow chewy-crumbly at the same time. Zoe, who is a baker, seemed to be holding back insults in front of the people who just made our food. The coleslaw was nothing: vegetables with sauce on it. The beans were slightly cold when we got them, but I ended up picking at them for our time there.
The brisket was good in some parts, lacking in others. The bark, the tougher and darker “skin” of the brisket that forms due to the Maillard reaction, was fantastic. There were parts of the brisket where the sauce and the fat coalesced into a harmony, where I found exactly what I was looking for. The barbecue sauce was interestingly acidic, like it was made with berries. Hope for home filled my heart as beef did my stomach.
But the longer I chewed, the tougher it got. It became dry, immobile. A brisket should not stand on its juiciest parts, and a great brisket doesn’t even need sauce. This brisket needed it like a fish needs water. It was gasping for sauce, suffocating without it.
Though I may hyperbolize, Butcher’s Block was fine. Nothing special in my mind — a fine reference to American cooking. But it wasn’t the real thing. In Texas, it would flounder as much as their brisket did without sauce. I tried not to nitpick each and every part of the food: I am not an expert in brisket and thus I am able to enjoy things. But when I was eating it, I didn’t feel good. I didn’t hear the rhythmic rattle of the highway or the susurration of bugs on a hot evening. I started to worry that I would never find home while living in the Lower Mainland.
These fears grew downtown at Memphis Blues BBQ three days later. The quality of the food should be put into context with its location: sandwiched between a Body Energy Club and a Dairy Queen. Anything stuck in that sort of brand purgatory in Vancouver is going to have its soul extracted like how a vampire bat takes blood from a goat.
The restaurant was small — one corridor of tables surrounded by photos of some of the most classic blues and rock musicians from the south. Black and white images of John Lee Hooker, Lead Belly, James Brown, Big Ella and B.B. King looked down like saints looking upon a Catholic mass. Someone did their research.
That’s the problem, though — someone did their research: either googling or word of mouth. It’s corporate appreciation.
Medium shelf liquor was stacked up to the ceiling, like a great stained glass centrepiece. A lot of the decoration actually had to do with booze: signs about needing whisky, one telling women without tops that they’ll drink for free — we were even served water in an old whisky bottle. The TVs blasted an infinite tar pool of sterile ads, with some hockey breaks in the middle.
Southern licence plates were haphazardly thrown onto the walls under paintings and leaned against the wall instead of hung up. I realized then that they were borrowed authority, using a mundane part of American life to portray knowledge or respect for the food they were serving. My despondency grew.
The food itself was as corporate as the bar I was in. We ordered the brisket meal. There was no mention of the amount of brisket on the menu — we were given a couple of pieces of dry meat. The only consolation was the barbecue sauce, which tasted so standard I swear I have a bottle of it back home.
The longer I chewed, the sadder I got. I tried to distract myself with the sides, but they were all bland. The mac and cheese, though incredibly creamy, tasted like nothing while chewing it. The coleslaw this time was actually just vegetables. The cornbread was thin, a fine taste but it was like someone had put a weight on it while it cooked — Zoe grimaced. She called it “texturally challenging” and let me have the rest. The beans tasted like a beef stew with too much brandy and tomato paste. Let me tell you, that's a feat on its own.
The most seasoned thing on the plate was the fries. I actually still dream about these fries. They were the right amount of salty with addictive spices. If I had gone there to just eat fries, I would have left a happy customer.
But I didn’t. And I was not. I became disconsolate the more I thought about it. The food that I loved, the testament to the skill of the chef and the devotion they feel toward the form, was being commodified — served up on a tray to reflect a place that no one working here might have even seen. It was a game of telephone, where the word at the beginning of the line was brisket.
The taste of dry brisket and stock sauce left a bitter taste in my mouth for the week between Memphis Blues and our final stop. A chain had stereotyped an art form, which I know they are known to do. It was sad. I was sad.
That week, I thought about this piece. I thought about this piece a lot. The whole point of this was to be trying to find home in an unfamiliar place. The thesis I kept coming back to was “if you are somewhere, don’t try to recreate the feeling of home. You are where you are — try to enjoy that.” It was the authorial white flag held up at the bombardment of the French barricades.
Then I got to hear the cicadas again.
Slims BBQ, sitting on a corner in Mount Pleasant, is what I was looking for. It was exactly what I was looking for. I’ve used a lot of flowery language in this article, but I have to say this plainly: this place fucks.
I've been to this place before. Houston has dozens of places like this — halfway between dive bar and car shop. Stained glass lamps hung with Christmas lights around them, giving the whole place an almost incandescent glow. One wall was dedicated to “the shooting priest of Texas,” with photos of a senile priest toting a pistol and pinching a cigar between his teeth. A birthday balloon hung in the air, half deflated from a party that I am sure was long past celebrated. On one end of the restaurant, for some reason, there was a hyperrealistic painting of an owl. This place was lived in and had as much character as one of your dad’s old friends before he sold his pickup truck. No goddamn license plates were in sight.
They only sell brisket on Saturdays, from 5 p.m. until close, so I was beaming when their once-a-week delight was handed to us with cornbread and mac and cheese.
I should mention the sides first. The cornbread was perfect — Zoe laughed as she told me it was up to her standards before gobbling up the rest of her piece. The mac and cheese had a little kick and was seasoned. The riblets we also ordered were as smoky as the outside of a Green Auto show.
Even though the brisket had no sauce, it was so juicy it left a buttery sheen on the paper it was served on. It reminded me that I don’t eat barbecue to live longer. It was smoky, tender; it melted in my mouth like gold in a kiln. It had seasoning, no thick bark, but I didn’t even care. Zoe, who for most of her life didn’t eat meat, stared at the ceiling like she was having a divine revelation before saying, “Meat should all be like this.” We finished the food in front of us like buzzards after a famine. We left nothing.
This place didn’t do their homework, didn’t pay homage to places I loved and called home. They were home. Bits of accidental Texas surrounded me as I feasted. Metal stars lined the exterior of the kitchen, just like they did countless lawns and door frames back down south. There were bats on the walls, apparently an old Halloween decoration, that took me back to the Congress Avenue bridge in Austin, Texas, seeing hundreds of bats ascend and blot out the setting sun.
I asked our waiter if anyone was from Texas and he laughed. He told me he was from Penticton, BC. The owner lived in San Francisco for a bit, but is from Vancouver. The kitchen was half, if not all, from Latin America. He said that they were “a bunch of Vancouver kids hanging out.”
My journey last month was not trying to find the place that made me feel like home. I know I’m not going to get Texas here. What I was looking for wasn’t someplace that tried to be the South or the Wild West, but somewhere that cared. I wanted to find someplace where they loved the art of everything as much as I did. I wanted to find a place that saw a piece of animal and sixteen hours the same way a sculptor sees a slab of rock and a chisel.
Find the people that give heart to the same things you do. I see that more as a home than any name on a map.
Because this is still a Nosh Hunt, I would recommend Slims BBQ in Mount Pleasant for the best brisket I’ve had in Canada. If you’re in the area on a Saturday night, stop by — you might hear the cicadas by the end of the meal.
