How Goldee’s made Fort Worth the No. 1 city for barbecue, and how Heim started it all
Texas is full of great barbecue, and now so is Fort Worth.
So it took more than great barbecue to put six restaurants from the Fort Worth-Arlington area on Texas Monthly magazine’s top 50 list.
Calling Fort Worth “the most exciting city for barbecue in all of Texas,” barbecue editor Daniel Vaughn said tasters visited the best restaurants multiple times to sort and rank Texas’ best.
“Our focus is on consistent quality — consistently great food every time, every meal,” Vaughn said in a recent Star-Telegram Eats Beat podcast.
Goldee’s Barbecue, 4645 Dick Price Road south of Kennedale, ranked No. 1 because “every time we went it was spot-on perfect — there was never anything dried-out or that tasted like it had been there a while.”
Goldee’s led a local Top 50 barbecue parade that also includes Panther City BBQ in South Main Village near downtown Fort Worth (No. 10), Hurtado Barbecue in downtown Arlington; Dayne’s Craft Barbecue in the West 7th neighborhood; Smoke-A-Holics BBQ in Morningside Heights; and Zavala’s Barbecue in downtown Grand Prairie.
A list of Nos. 50-100 included 407 BBQ in Argyle, 225° BBQ in downtown Arlington, Bare Barbecue in Cleburne, BBQ on the Brazos in Cresson, and both Derek Allan’s and Heim Barbecue in the Near Southside.
The list in the November issue of Texas Monthly sparked instant crowds for barbecue across Fort Worth and Arlington, but nowhere more than Goldee’s, which opens only for lunch Fridays through Sundays.
Photos on social media showed parked cars piled up alongside both sides of the two-lane county road, along with lines stretching down the road’s shoulder.
Vaughn said he went to Goldee’s when it opened in 2020 three weeks before the pandemic shutdown, and then continued to visit as Goldee’s shifted to serving takeout from a makeshift table in the parking lot.
It’s amazing now to think that for months in 2020, anyone could walk up to Goldee’s with no line, and there were a few weeks when the tiny backroad restaurant founded by Lane Milne, Jonny White and childhood friends from Arlington seemed in danger of not making it.
“Once they opened the dining room up, started cooking more and got their crew back together, it just got better and better,” Vaughn said.
The restaurant is in unincorporated southeast Tarrant County, but the owners list it as “Fort Worth” to promote the city barbecue scene.
Angelo’s in Fort Worth, a landmark since 1958, has always drawn waiting lines. Over the years, Fort Worth folks have argued about whether Angelo’s was better than Sammie’s, Cousin’s or Railhead.
But the city’s barbecue “scene” began in 2010, when Vaughn named Off the Bone BBQ, 5144 Mansfield Highway, in Forest Hill No. 1 in the entire Dallas-Fort Worth region.
It escalated in 2014, when Emma and Travis Heim opened a barbecue trailer where Panther City is now. That grew into an empire of three restaurants serving lunch and dinner daily.
“They were the ones who started it all,” Vaughn said. “They asked, ‘Can we make barbecue in Fort Worth better?’ It built a foundation for this huge movement “
Texas Monthly’s barbecue Top 50 always revolved around the state’s Big Three — Cooper’s in Llano, Kreuz Market in Lockhart and Louie Mueller’s in Taylor — with the later emergence of newcomers such as Snow’s in Lexington and Franklin Barbecue in Austin.
The old-time traditions are represented on the new list by Terry Black’s Barbecue in Dallas, a spinoff from that family’s Lockhart legacy, and Lockhart Smokehouse in Plano, founded by a Kreuz relative.
The list has drawn complaints from readers who love those old-timers and don’t like the focus on newer restaurants and creative menu items.
And then there are the readers who simply have their own Top 50.
“A lot of people are happy for their friends, and a lot of people are sad for those who didn’t make it,” Vaughn said. “There wouldn’t be much point in doing a list if everyone agreed.”
If you have a different Top 50, Vaughn said, just tell him. Don’t criticize other restaurants.
“Just tell me I’m an idiot,” he said.
This story was originally published November 9, 2021 at 5:45 AM.
