Smoked Brisket 
Of Meat and Men
John Mueller was the heir apparent to a legendary barbecue dynasty. Aaron Franklin was an unknown kid with a smoke-filled dream. This is the story of two pitmasters, their devoted fans, and some of the best brisket you’ll ever eat.
(Page 5 of 5)
BACK IN AMARILLO, John Mueller was officially depressed. Beyond his co-workers at Montana Mike’s, his only acquaintances were the patrons of the Cactus Bar. His mood hadn’t lightened even five hundred miles from home. Once, when a district manager criticized him, John snapped, “You’d better shut up, or I’m gonna walk across that street and open up a barbecue and whip your butt every day in sales.” But if his past sometimes emboldened him, it was also the source of pain. “Aren’t you John Mueller?” the occasional customer would ask, recognizing him. “Yeah, that’s me,” he’d reply. He dreaded the inevitable follow-up question. What are you doing here?
John missed his boys, who were then nine, ten, and fourteen. And he wasn’t cut out to run a steakhouse, where the profit margins were totally different from those of a barbecue business. (When a steakhouse customer orders a prime rib, he receives the whole slice of meat; in barbecue, where meat is sold by weight and much of the fat gets lost in cooking and trimming, there is more waste and less profit.) By the end of 2006 he’d moved back to Taylor, but he soon found that living in his hometown again wasn’t easy either. Though people smiled to his face, he knew what they said behind his back: “That’s John, Bobby’s son who quit Louie Mueller’s and moved away.” With no job, he was so broke he couldn’t afford an apartment, and he was too embarrassed to beg his family for more favors. “I lived on the street for a little while, I slept on friends’ couches,” he remembers. “It was horrible.” Even when he was able to scrounge up the occasional catering job, he couldn’t save enough to get ahead. He didn’t think his luck could get any worse.
On September 6, 2008, he got a phone call from his mother. “Daddy’s dead,” she told him. John was so surprised he hung up on her. He called back, infuriated. “Why would you call me and tell me that?” he demanded. “You’re cruel.”
“I needed to tell you,” she said. John fell to his knees.
Robert Louis Mueller died in his sleep at age 69. His wife found him in bed. He had not been sick. The Austin American-Statesman obituary said that he had worked roughly 160,000 hours at the restaurant. That is what it took to be a legend, and the community and fans mourned his loss. Bobby had won the James Beard Foundation America’s Classics Award in 2006; everyone made sure to mention that. “He loved what he did,” John says, “and he was tenacious with it and took great pride in it.” John’s brother, Wayne, was quoted in the obituary saying, “In my estimation, he was the strongest man I ever knew.”
At the funeral, John was a mess. He was barely able to pull himself together to get to the funeral home chapel. His beard was only half-shaved, and he got drunk before the memorial service. “I was disgusted with myself,” he says, looking back. Probably to the annoyance of those around him, he could not quit laughing. The emotions were too overwhelming.
Now how would he ever show his dad that he was good enough? He was wearing an ankle monitor from two drunk-driving arrests he’d racked up. He was basically homeless. He’d had some bizarre desire to prove to himself that he was a failure, and here he was, bearing his ruin like a scar to anyone who cared to look in his direction. John thought often about his dad’s disappointment. “I think my dad and I have the same work ethic,” he says, “but my dad had great integrity. He would have never put himself in my situation.”
A few weeks after the service, John quit drinking whiskey. He also started working in earnest. He moved in with his old high school friend Debbie (now his wife), a straight-and-narrow hairdresser who saw his potential, and with her encouragement, he picked up more and more catering work. He began calling himself Shoeless Joe Jackson, a reference to the early-twentieth-century baseball player who was accused—some say wrongly—of throwing the 1919 World Series. John told a blogger that, like Jackson, he had been forced out of the game at the height of his powers. To cook the meat for the jobs he landed, he used a little pit that Debbie had in her backyard. “Every once in a while, people would call, and I couldn’t tell them I wasn’t in business,” he says. “If I had a spare forty bucks in my pocket, I’d buy a brisket and do the job, because I knew it would help me one day.”
When he was not working, John became obsessed with the Internet. (In December 2009 he started tweeting under the name @ShoelessJoeJaxn.) He saw that since he’d quit the business, people had become total barbecue snobs. They wrote about terminology he’d never encountered. “I don’t say ‘pitmaster,’ I say that I ‘cook,’ ” he says, shaking his head. “There are so many terms I’ve never heard of, I swear. I read them on the Internet. I don’t know what the ‘point’ or the ‘slab’ is; I just know there’s a lean end and a moist end. I just laugh at it. I read some of these articles, and they have all these little sayings, and I’m like, ‘God dang, where do y’all come up with this stuff?’ ”
That wasn’t all he noticed. He saw that others were wearing the crown that was once meant for him. People waited in line at Snow’s BBQ beginning at eight in the morning, and the line was increasing daily at Franklin Barbecue. He often reflected on his lost opportunities and burned bridges, as well as the pit he had once prized and mistreated. “I was happy for Aaron; he’s very nice,” John says. “But it was humiliating.”
Having seen how his former employee had created a storm, John wondered about his own relevance. If those in his old line hadn’t forgotten him, he thought, he could dovetail with the barbecue craze and try to make a comeback. This was a little scary—he considered that some disgruntled former customers might be waiting to pound him with baseball bats as soon as he opened—but it would be better than waking up at three-thirty every morning and realizing he had no place to go. On a whim, in late 2009, he began telling people that he was coming back. His phone started ringing off the hook.
THREE MONTHS AFTER the opening of John’s trailer, it is difficult to say whether his and Aaron’s competing businesses truly represent a barbecue rivalry. The two remain friendly. “It’s not like Aaron and I hate each other,” John says. “We like each other. We saw each other one day and talked for about twenty minutes. I said, ‘What are you going to do when all this starts?’ He said, ‘I’m not even thinking about it,’ because we knew what was about to happen, with the comparisons. The—what do you call it?—old lion against the new lion.”
The line is adjusting. One day this winter, some thirty customers stood patiently during the lunch hour at JMueller BBQ, a trailer in a dirt lot just south of Lady Bird Lake. An Asian man waiting in front of me introduced himself and mentioned that he’d shipped a smoker from Texas to China to see if the food could be replicated for a restaurant in his home country. A woman standing near him began professing her love for barbecue and her particular affection for John. “We were all fans of the old location,” she said. “Then he left us!” When she got to the trailer window, she received the last piece of brisket. “This is it!” she shouted to those of us close by. “The very end!” The Asian restaurateur offered some of his sample to a man standing near me, resulting in an awkward tug. “Shoot,” the man whispered to me. “I tried to get the whole thing, but he wouldn’t let it go.”
Over at Franklin Barbecue a few days later, I stood in front of a man who had been to the restaurant more than one hundred times and a newbie who had flown in from Los Angeles and knew nothing about Austin except Franklin Barbecue. “It was worth the trip,” the first-timer later told me. “Standing in line alone was worth the trip.” In the months to come, there would be chatter in the line about John’s and Aaron’s history; a few patrons might take sides. The pair’s stories would likely get discussed in the same way that people might tell a newcomer about the controversy over sauce usage or where they could find a brisket with a gold-standard sugar cookie. Customers would remark on the ball-busting hard work it took to enter the canon. And the personal obstacles, well, they’d dissect those too.
But early in the mornings, the line is nowhere to be seen. Aaron begins his day at 3:15. He makes an espresso, then heads to the smoker to check on the meat that another employee has been watching overnight. By 3:30 he’s lining up the ribs and poking at the fire, the sparks popping as the embers whir inside the box. Until the restaurant opens, he does maintenance projects, like fixing sinks or constructing shelves. (He has built two smokers, bringing the total at the restaurant to three: two are cylindrical, and one is a rectangular Kreuz-style pit. Another cylindrical pit is in progress, and when it is finished, he plans to build one identical to it to replace the rectangular model.) By 11:00, when the line is snaking to the back of the lot, he has already put in almost eight hours, and the most hectic part—serving the customers—hasn’t even begun.
A few miles across town, John runs through his routine too. He gets up at 2:45, walks down his dark driveway, and hops into his pickup. He drives along the empty highways from Taylor to his trailer, where he lights the fire, unlocks the trailer door, turns on the little fluorescent interior light, and starts rubbing the refrigerated briskets down with salt and pepper. For all the rhapsodizing on Twitter, the work of a barbecue master is a bleary-eyed grind well-known to all the cooks who have come before: Aaron’s dad, Bobby Mueller, Fred Fountaine, and, before them, all the nameless pioneers of the pit. While the enthusiasts are still asleep and the cicadas sing a chorus of white noise, John and Aaron and every other pitmaster in Texas are hard at work. John is making beans and potato salad in the same type of plastic tub he used for mixing when he was a kid. He puts the ribs on at 7:00, sets the sausage in at 9:30. Then, like his father told him, he tries to remain calm, feed his fire, and quit liftin’ the lid.
My Library
