Smoked brisket and ribs weren’t featured at family barbecues when Sebastien Quintanilla was growing up in Corpus Christi. Family members would grill fajitas and chicken quarters while Quintanilla’s grandmother Rosa made beans, rice, salsas, and tortillas by hand. She cooked every day, not just for family gatherings, and a young Quintanilla was there to help. “She passed before I could get a lot of her recipes,” he said. But he watched; now he tries to make those dishes from memory while cooking for his BBQ Fiends food truck, just outside Hutto, about thirty minutes northeast of Austin. Since April, he’s been serving four days a week in front of Rockabilly Brewing.
The barbecue business has matured along with Rockabilly over the past few years. Quintanilla began serving his smoked meats at pop-ups in 2021. Rockabilly hosted several before closing for renovations in late 2023. When the brewery reopened this April, the main bar had moved from a shipping container on a concrete slab to the large covered porch of a renovated house on the property. That’s when the BBQ Fiends food truck became a permanent resident.
Thursday afternoons feature a limited menu of smoked burgers and rotating items such as chopped brisket sandwiches and smoked wings. The full barbecue menu is available Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays. I arrived on a Friday in the early evening and found a spot to park along the winding gravel path. I’ve walked up less rustic paths on wilderness trails than the makeshift stairs leading from the barbecue truck to the brewery’s porch, but the elevation offered sweeping views above the tree line. I enjoyed a pint of the brewery’s 8-Second Amber and a taste of the refreshing Tangerine King cream ale while waiting on the delivery of my barbecue tray. Several other Texas craft beers were on draft, and Rockabilly is working to get more of its own brews on offer.
Everything on my barbecue tray was house-made. Quintanilla rolls all the flour tortillas by hand. “I’m not as good as my grandmother,” he joked, but who is? He’s getting a tortilla press soon. It took twenty batches of pickles before Quintanilla settled on a version he was comfortable serving, and the final product has great crunch and flavor. “I refused to put them on until they were either the same as Best Maid or better,” he said. His pickled red onions were quite good as well. As for the barbecue sauce, I don’t remember it. I was enraptured by the smoky essence of the salsa verde. The tomatillos, onions, and chiles are charred in the firebox of the smoker before Quintanilla blends them into a perfect accompaniment to smoked meats.
Quintanilla knows his way around a smoker, but after committing to a regular schedule at Rockabilly, he hired Marc Franco, formerly at Terry Black’s BBQ in Austin, as the lead pitmaster. They collaborate to produce tender spareribs with a peppery bark and a candy-sweet finish, thanks to a squirt of simple syrup as a final step. “Our menu is super rich. There’s a lot of salt, and a sweet balance helps round out the tray,” Quintanilla explained. At the other end of that sweet–salty spectrum, you’ll find the highly seasoned brisket. It was on the verge of being too salty, but it was plenty juicy, with a meltingly tender fat cap.
Melted butter and honey bathe the smoked turkey breast, wrapped in foil, as it’s finished on the smoker. The moist slices tasted best when paired with the sultry salsa verde. The choriqueso sausage was a flavor bomb of its own that needed no adornment. It was heavy on the cumin that Quintanilla’s grandmother used in her cooking, with big chunks of melting cheese mixed in.
Thankfully, I got a scoop of Spanish rice with my pinto beans. (Quintanilla will combine the two into one side if you prefer.) The beans had a good dose of heat and a heavy jalapeño flavor, but there were no jalapeños in sight. Quintanilla cuts the tops off the chiles and simmers them in the stock he uses for the beans, then removes them before adding the beans and diced sausage.
The esquites served at barbecue joints are often soggy, thanks to canned corn. At BBQ Fiends, Quintanilla uses frozen kernels mixed with crema and mayo and topped generously with cotija, fresh cilantro, lime juice, and hot sauce. I loved every bite. After a visit to Heim Barbecue in Fort Worth, Quintanilla now makes a potato salad that’s like a chilled version of a loaded baked potato. It’s got the zing of sour cream, along with green onions, bacon, and cheddar, and is definitely not what Grandma used to make.
Quintanilla changes up the Sunday special, so be on the lookout for big beef short ribs, or maybe smoked beef cheek barbacoa—inspired by the dishes he ate growing up. “Instead of a Crock-Pot, we use a smoker now,” he said with a laugh. The desserts change up as well. I was lucky enough to try the rich churro cheesecake, which had a heavy drizzle of dulce de leche and fresh strawberries on top.
Barbecue is a second career for Quintanilla. He previously worked for a hospice provider. “I just liked helping people,” he said, but he acknowledged that working with families making end-of-life decisions for their loved ones was emotionally draining. “I was ready to just make people happy with food,” Quintanilla said, while thanking his wife, Ashley, for supporting his decision to finally quit his day job. “It was just a month ago that I took the deep dive and gave this one hundred percent of my time,” he said of the barbecue truck. The jump has been stressful for Quintanilla. Every day is a guessing game of how many people hungry for barbecue will show up at a recently renovated craft brewery outside Hutto. But just as with any impressive newcomer, the local barbecue fiends should find this one sooner rather than later.
