Hit the blinker as soon as you spot the trio of BBQ flags waving outside Kirby’s BBQ. The speed limit is 50 miles per hour on Loop 494, and there’s just a wide strip of gravel between the low-slung, metal-roofed shack and the two-lane road. Kirby’s may have the look of a long-standing establishment, but it opened in May, the newest barbecue joint in New Caney, just northeast of Houston.
After the cloud of dust settled from my sudden stop in the makeshift parking lot, I walked up the steps to the screened-in porch, where employee Svea Bailey greeted me and took my order. The building only houses the kitchen, so the dining area is limited to the picnic tables lining the porch. I found a seat to wait for my order, and soon after owners Shawn and Alondra Jones delivered a couple of barbecue trays and desserts. Shawn sat down to chat for a bit until another customer arrived.
“I didn’t have anything better to do, so I figured I would make some barbecue,” Shawn told me, explaining why he impulse-purchased a smoker from an Academy store last July. “I was out of work and trying to figure out what my next move was going to be,” he said. He had spent most of his adult life working in restaurants but never at a barbecue joint. But his late grandfather and the restaurant’s namesake, Kirby Busby, competed in barbecue competitions and, a decade before, had shown Shawn how to smoke meat.
Shawn smoked a few briskets on his new backyard pit last summer and gained some confidence. He was humbled during a trip to Austin for last year’s Longhorns season opener. Before the game, Shawn and Alondra waited in line at Franklin Barbecue and couldn’t help but compare. “My brisket does not taste like that,” Jones said. He now had a new target.
Five weeks later, they held their first pop-up for Kirby’s BBQ in nearby Porter. From then on, every weekend, Shawn and Alondra set up a canopy and a table there, serving brisket, pork ribs, and smoked turkey. “Maybe I want to give this a shot full-time,” he remembers telling Alondra. When Shawn saw the For Lease sign on the roadside shack in New Caney, something told him the rent wouldn’t be too high. He was right.On the day of my visit, I could see the promise in their food and the effort they put in. “It was not my best cook day,” Shawn told me later. Kirby’s BBQ is only open Friday through Sunday, but the staff prepares the homemade sauces, sides, and desserts during the week. Thursday is for making the sausages. One gets some heat from jalapeños but no cheese to keep it dairy-free. The other has large chunks of melty pepperjack cheese mixed in with the coarsely ground beef. I thoroughly enjoyed them both.
Shawn fetched meats out of the smokehouse while I ate, and the smell of oak smoke filled the porch. The brisket bark held onto plenty of the clean smoke flavor. The lean side was a bit undercooked, but the thick fatty slices were tender and juicy. The pork ribs were better. They were coated in a mixture too thick to be called a glaze, but the sticky, sweet, and spicy layer wasn’t barbecue sauce either. “A billionaire’s bacon glaze” is how Shawn explained the mix of brown sugar, maple syrup, cayenne, and black pepper.
Meats and sides at Kirby’s BBQ.Photograph by Daniel Vaughn
Sweet baked beans were generously topped with a few ounces of chopped brisket and seasoned with chili powder, cumin, and garlic—an unusual blend for sweet baked beans, but I liked the contrast. A classic mayo dressing coated the potato salad, which was garnished with green onions and paprika. Toasted panko provided the crunchy topping for the creamy shells and cheese.
One of Shawn’s previous restaurant jobs was at the Grub Burger Bar chain. The Happy Pie Co., a spin-off of Grub, sold a chocolate-pecan pie he loved. Shawn tracked down the recipe—which calls for pouring pecan filling over the chocolate before baking, then topping it with the crushed nuts—and now serves the dessert at Kirby’s. My serving was huge—an entire quarter of a pie. It was a great change of pace from the usual barbecue-joint dessert options, though I have plenty of love for Kirby’s banana pudding as well. The team scoops it to order, and tops it with freshly sliced bananas and Nilla wafers straight from the bag. “Nobody likes soggy wafers,” Shawn said confidently, though I think some banana pudding fans may disagree.
As a self-described military brat, Shawn moved around a lot as a kid. When he first sat down with me, he confessed he was born in Wichita, Kansas, but quickly added: “We like Texas barbecue a little better than Kansas City barbecue.” That’s obvious in the menu they’re serving at Kirby’s, where you won’t find burnt ends. What you will find is a bare-bones barbecue joint that’s a great starting point, a place where an admitted barbecue novice can put his growth on display. This roadside spot is serving solid smoked meats to a community on the outskirts of the Houston-barbecue boom, and given that Shawn smoked his first solo brisket a little over a year ago, his development is certainly ahead of schedule.
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