This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate

The Louie Mueller beef plate rib is the canonical dish of contemporary Texas barbecue.

Beef plate rib at CorkScrew BBQ in Spring

Beef rib at Harlem Road Texas BBQ in Richmond

Beef back ribs were the original beef rib stars.

Roegels Barbecue Co. offers a pastrami-style beef plate rib special on Fridays.

Tejas Chocolate & Barbecue offers a pastrami-style beef plate rib special on Thursdays.

In the beginning, there were beef back ribs.

In 2010, I was on a pilgrimage to the legendary Salt Lick BBQ near Austin and sat down at an expansive picnic table to order most of the menu. All the usual suspects were on offer: brisket, pork ribs, chicken, turkey and exemplary Hill Country-inspired, German/Czech-style sausage.

The menu also featured a relatively unknown item listed as a “beef ribs.” I ordered a batch and a thin slab of beef and bones covered in a mustard-vinegar sauce arrived. They were messy to eat and the effort-to-reward ratio was minimal — I really had to dig hard between the bones to pull out a miniscule amount of meat.

Not long after that trip I visited Lockhart, the self-proclaimed capital of Texas barbecue, and made the rounds of the historic barbecue joints there: Kreuz Market, Smitty’s Market and Black’s BBQ. On the way out of town, my companions and I stopped at Chisolm Trail BBQ, famous for being the place where locals go to avoid the tourists at the other Lockhart spots.

We ordered a big spread, including a rack of pork ribs and the “beef ribs” listed on the menu. These beef ribs were also small and thin while the pork spareribs were thick and meaty. In a comical scene, my companions and I argued about which ribs were beef and which were pork, as they so closely resembled each other that even the most experienced barbecue aficionado among the group had difficulty discerning the difference.

206 W. 2nd, Taylor, 512-352-6206

As evidenced by these pre-craft barbecue tours, the menu item known as a “beef rib” was more accurately identified as beef “back” rib.

A brief digression into the anatomy of a steer’s rib cage: At the top of the rib cage, toward the front of the cow, is the prime rib and just below that the cut known as beef “back” ribs. Further down, as the ribs start to curve under the cow is the beef “plate” rib. Closer to the head, in the primal cut known as the chuck, are beef “chuck” ribs.

Each of these three beef rib cuts — back, chuck and plate — have had their starring role in recent Texas barbecue history.

Back ribs were the original stars, as evidenced by those early barbecue trips. (In Houston, Pappas Bar-B-Q still serves them.) But a trip to Louie Mueller Barbecue in Taylor around that same time foreshadowed what was to become the defining dish of craft barbecue: the beef plate rib.

The plate rib — known as the “dinosaur,” “brontosaurus” or “Fred Flintstone” rib due to its weight and girth — had been a staple on the Louie Mueller menu before other craft barbecue johnny-come-latelies. Black’s BBQ in Lockhart is also known for this cut, though we had not ordered it on that earlier tour.

The Louie Mueller beef plate rib is still the canonical dish of contemporary Texas barbecue. Strands of flavorful, black-pepper-spiked beef intermingled with veins of silky rendered fat cling to a prehistoric-like bone that offers a payoff in both taste and sight — Instagram photos of Louie Mueller plate ribs arguably inaugurated the international obsession with Texas barbecue that started in the early-2010s.

The obsession with beef ribs peaked circa 2016 when every craft barbecue joint worth its salt (and pepper) added it to their menu — usually one day a week, on a Saturday. Beef plate ribs were essentially a loss-leader; they are expensive to acquire and cook and most pitmasters are happy to break even selling them.

During that 2016 peak-beef-rib era, some pitmasters experimented with the smaller, stubbier and less-expensive beef “chuck” rib.

Now in 2020, beef chuck ribs are virtually nowhere to be found, vanquished by the arguably more delicious and imminently more Instagrammable beef plate rib. Though most barbecue joints still only sell beef ribs on weekends, others like Killen’s Barbecue have made it an everyday menu item. Tejas Chocolate & BBQ in Tomball and Roegels Barbecue Co. in Houston make a pastrami-style beef plate rib special (Thursday for Tejas, Friday for Roegels) that takes this canonical dish of Texas barbecue to a whole new level.

A native of Beaumont, J.C. Reid graduated from the University of Southern California after studying architecture and spent his early career as an architect in New York City. He returned to Texas in 1995, retiring from architecture but creating his own Internet business in Houston. As his business became self-sustaining, he began traveling Houston and the world to pursue his passion: eating barbecue.

He began blogging about food and barbecue for the Houston Chronicle in 2010 and founded the Houston Barbecue Project in 2011 to document barbecue eateries throughout the area. Just last year, Reid and others founded the Houston Barbecue Festival to showcase mom-and-pop barbecue joints in the city. The 2014 event drew 2,000 guests to sample meats from 20 restaurants.

You can view more of J.C.'s work at jcreidtx.com.

Before the world knew Brittney Griner as the WNBA star at the center of an international scandal, Houston knew her as a local basketball phenom.