Fire is the lifeblood of Texas barbecue, but recently it nearly took one of its best-known joints with it.
When flames tore through Miller’s Smokehouse in Belton earlier this year, the damage was swift: dining room, kitchen, storage — all gone.
But not everything, actually. The pit room, the heart of the operation, survived. And in a sense, that’s where this story really begins.
Daniel Vaughn, BBQ editor at Texas Monthly, joined the Standard to discuss. Listen to the interview in the player above or read the transcript below.
This transcript has been edited lightly for clarity:
Texas Standard: What happened at Miller’s Smokehouse earlier this year?
Daniel Vaughn: Yeah, last day of February, Dusty Miller got a call about his barbecue joint being on fire.
The cause of it is incredibly strange. He says it’s a spontaneous combustion of rags. And that’s based on his review of the security cameras that were in the kitchen at the time.
But also weird, I think, is that the pit room survived. Everything else didn’t. How strange is that?
Well, and that’s the irony is they built a big two-hour firewall all around that pit room so that when the inevitable fire raged in the pit room from those smokers fueled by wood, that it wouldn’t affect the rest of the restaurant.
What ended up happening is the big fire in the kitchen, because of that firewall, didn’t interrupt any of the smokers and their operation. So the pitroom is perfectly usable, perfectly operational.
Yeah, well you got the pit room but then what do you do with it? Because you got the rest of the restaurant in sticks. How did the Millers pivot?
Yeah, well, within just a few weeks, they had already went and purchased a food truck and had it parked right outside of their pit room, right outside their old restaurant while it’s getting renovated. And so you can still show up and order barbecue straight from their food truck.
You know, I guess in a sense you could think of this as a chance to reset, just rethink the whole place. And yet, we know barbecue is so tradition-bound in Texas.
How likely is it — how rare is it — that you’re just going to sort of start over from scratch, and what’s your sense of where they go?
Well, I think really the sad thing for them is that they had no interest in retooling or reshaping, right? They had just opened Muscovy Coffee Roasters that they also own and operate right across the street in Belton.
And for six days, Dusty Miller said that it was the best six days of his life. They actually had both of these restaurants running simultaneously, you know, using each other’s products. It was just this great symbiotic relationship right there in downtown Belton until that fire happened.
And now they have the food truck now and the coffee shop. But they now have no choice but to go retool and reshape and, you know, see if there were any inefficiencies.
I guess they have a choice, don’t they? I mean, they could decide not to rebuild.
Well, I mean, this is the heart of their operation, right? They do roast their own coffee and they have these two different coffee shops, one down in Salado and one in Belton.
But barbecue is the heart of the operation and that’s where the family began. And without Miller’s Smokehouse, Belton just wouldn’t be the same.
Boy, now that’s saying something. Without Miller’s Smokehouse, Belton wouldn’t be the same.
So what does it take to keep cooking when the place itself is essentially gone? I mean, are they still working the same pit that survived?
Yeah, they still have a couple of smokers back there that survived. Well, all the smokers survived. So they’ve got a couple of them chugging back there.
And you know, the menu itself is limited, because they can only put out so much from that food truck. But what they really need is just for customers to continue to show up to that food truck and keep things going for them while they rebuild.
Are they doing it? Are they showing up?
They are showing up. And hopefully that is something that is sustained because I think it’s gonna be months before they’re able to get all the renovations done on that space.
You know what this makes me think of, Daniel, is how we define “barbecue joint” because you talk about all the, you know, ancillary coffee houses and everything and then you have the joint itself actually going up in smoke.
And I wonder, does it make you think about what it means to do barbecue in Texas these days? Is it the building, the pit, the people, something else?
Well, so much of my work, I focus just on the food, right? The food being the most important part.
But when I went down to Belton to check out this new food truck, I was certainly happy to get that food, but I really missed sitting in that restaurant. It made me realize how great of a space that they created and there was such great hospitality and food and everything else.
And without it, it isn’t the same, but it will come back.
They’re going to rebuild.
That’s right.
