Aaron Franklin

Aaron Franklin was born in 1977 in Bryan, Texas, grew up around his parents’ barbecue place (Ben’s BBQ, closed when he was twelve), and spent his twenties in Austin playing in touring rock bands. He started smoking briskets in his backyard on a $99 offset smoker, kept missing, kept iterating, and in 2009 opened a barbecue trailer with his wife Stacy beside Interstate 35 in Austin. The brick-and-mortar Franklin Barbecue on East 11th Street followed in 2011.

By 2013, Texas Monthly had named it the #1 BBQ joint in Texas — the call that helped name the modern Central Texas BBQ renaissance. In 2015, Franklin became the first BBQ pitmaster ever to win a James Beard “Best Chef” regional award (Southwest), the same year he published Franklin Barbecue: A Meat-Smoking Manifesto with Jordan Mackay and launched the PBS series BBQ with Franklin. He was inducted into the American Royal Barbecue Hall of Fame in 2020.

The Franklin operation is still a single Austin location that sells out daily. He has refused franchising and mail-order on the franklinbbq.com site — the business is the brisket, every day, in person. Alongside the restaurant he now runs Franklin Barbecue Pits, a custom offset-smoker manufacturing shop, and has published two more books with Jordan Mackay: Franklin Steak (2019) and Franklin Smoke (2023).

Texas brisket, end to end. Franklin owns the modern Central Texas brisket canon — the trim, the salt-and-pepper rub, the all-day cook over post oak, the wrap in unwaxed butcher paper once bark has set, and the rest before slicing. His MasterClass demo of the brisket trim is the single highest-leverage visual in backyard BBQ instruction.

The offset smoker, run by feel. Franklin treats the offset smoker as the only serious instrument for Texas brisket and now builds his own through Franklin Barbecue Pits. He teaches fire management, clean smoke, and reading meat by hand — not by recipe, not by app, not by the clock.

Live fire beyond brisket. His later books extend the same posture to steak (Franklin Steak) and the seam between grilling and smoking (Franklin Smoke) — beef selection, dry aging, live-fire technique, and how the grill and the smoker borrow moves from each other.

Franklin is the modern Central Texas brisket standard — disciplined, traditional, refusal-driven. He proved you don’t need a marketing engine, a franchise, or a national supply chain: you need a perfect brisket, every day, and people will wait four hours in line for it. The restaurant has never expanded, never shipped nationally from its own site, never gimmicked the rub.

His central insight is that brisket is a feel craft, not a recipe. The fire, the trim, the wrap, and reading the meat by hand are the whole game. The rub is salt and pepper. The wood is post oak. The smoker is an offset. Where other voices give you a thermometer target and a foil schedule, Franklin gives you a method for noticing what the brisket is doing and reacting to it.

He is also the rare pitmaster who made the craft watchable at scale. Through PBS, MasterClass, and the book, an entire generation of backyard cooks and professional pitmasters learned brisket from him by proxy. The current wave of Texas-style BBQ joints opening across the country — salt-and-pepper rub, post oak, butcher paper, sold-by-the-pound — is largely the Franklin lineage in operation.

• Franklin Barbecuefranklinbbq.comVisit →
• Instagram@franklinbbqVisit →
• PBSBBQ with FranklinVisit →
• MasterClassAaron Franklin Teaches Texas-Style BBQVisit →
• BookFranklin Barbecue: A Meat-Smoking Manifesto (2015)Buy →
• BookFranklin Steak (2019)Buy →
• BookFranklin Smoke (2023)Buy →