The steel cabinet smoker at Brian’s Bar-B-Q in Clute, about an hour south of Houston, holds a thousand pounds of meat. Brian Devine helped build it and installed it with his wife, MaryAnne, when they opened their joint in 1988. Twenty years ago, they added a rotisserie smoker, also built by Brian, to handle pork shoulders and briskets. Now those smokers pull double duty, producing all the meat for both Brian’s and the Fill Station, another joint less than five miles away, owned and operated by Devine’s sons, Kent and Kyle, along with their cousin Kevin Rosenbohm.
After finding a seat at Brian’s Bar-B-Q, I took in the menagerie of fish, fowl, and fauna hanging on the walls. A framed article announcing its opening explained the provenance of the various decorations. Brian, a South Dakota native, had gone back home to collect items for display. “I can’t live in the country anymore,” he told the Brazosport Facts newspaper, “so I brought a little of the country to the restaurant.”
The prices at Brian’s are a blast from the past. The True Texan plate gets you two sides and a pound of smoked meats, however you’d like to combine them, for just $25. The brisket is also $25 per pound, so when you order a plate with it, the sides are basically free. I opted for a scoop of mustard-tinted potato salad and classic pinto beans with the brisket and turkey on my plate. I’d go for the savory pork ribs and smoked sausage next time, but either way, it’s hard to beat the value.
That old-school barbecue environment is what the Devine boys grew up in. “Our first job for both of us was pouring cups of tea at caterings,” Kyle told me. He was a dishwasher at fourteen and cleaned the smokers on the weekends, but neither he nor Kent saw their future at the family business. Brian didn’t either. “He did everything he could to talk us out of going into the restaurant industry,” Kyle said. Kent went to San Marcos to attend Texas State University, and Kyle left town for New York a month after graduating high school. “Let me get as far away as I possibly can,” he remembered thinking at the time.
To his parents’ chagrin, Kyle started working in restaurants and bars in Brooklyn. He also enrolled at St. Francis College, and after graduating in 2010, took the LSAT. He got a scholarship to attend law school at St. Mary’s in San Antonio, but it didn’t feel right. “I walked out in the middle of orientation and went back to work in New York,” Kyle said. He took a position at Brooklyn Wine Exchange and helped build its spirits program. It was an education in whiskey that transformed him, and soon he was leading tasting classes. He loved the job but missed Texas. The photos he saw from every family event he missed weighed on him, so he decided to come back home for an extended visit.
“My motivation for moving back was to learn barbecue and bring it back to New York,” Kyle said, but leaving behind the hectic pace of New York felt good. Kent moved back too, and they assessed the family business. Brian and MaryAnne were ready to retire and had plans to sell the restaurant. The boys had ideas on how to expand and maybe give their folks the comfortable retirement they deserved. In their native Lake Jackson, right next to Clute, they found a gas station from 1947 that was being used for storage. They bought it, renovated it, and opened the Fill Station in 2017. The following year, the brothers, along with Rosenbohm, were able to buy Brian’s and allow their parents to retire.
Kyle’s spirits expertise is on full display at the Fill Station, where behind the bar, bottles line the wall from floor to ceiling. In addition to the full barbecue offerings, there’s an extensive cocktail menu that changes quarterly. “I don’t know if I prioritize one over the other,” Kyle said, but when he had to choose a category for the restaurant on Google, he chose barbecue. They started with a small smoker in the back but soon realized it made more sense to cook everything in the pits at Brian’s. The menu is by no means a carbon copy, though. “On the food side and the beverages side, it’s been an outlet for creativity,” Kyle said, which is why the Fill Station serves barbecue tacos on Tuesdays, pastrami pork ribs on Fridays, and beef ribs on Thursdays, which is when I visited.
For just $29 per bone (with two sides), the large beef short rib is a heck of a value. It’s seasoned simply with salt, pepper, cayenne, paprika, and garlic, like all the other barbecue cuts, but gets another layer of coarse black pepper before smoking. Rather than using post oak, the Devine family has always smoked with live oak wood, which brings a bolder smoke flavor to that beef rib.
The bartenders at the Fill Station can help you build a whiskey flight from any of the bottles on the shelf. When the Fill Station opened, it had three shelves behind the bar. Once those got to capacity, two more shelves were added, along with a library ladder to reach them. Kyle estimates that five hundred of the eight hundred bottles are whiskey, a selection that rivals most whiskey bars in Houston. The drinks are a heck of a lot less expensive in Lake Jackson, though. A flight of Jefferson’s Reserve, Old Forester 1924, Eagle Rare 10-Year, and Penelope Rosé Cask Bourbon (one-ounce pours of each) was just $28. On Wednesdays, whiskey flights are half off, and Kyle chooses one whiskey each week for half-price pours.
Kyle wanted to emphasize that he puts as much effort into selecting the other bottles in the bar as the whiskey. “I’m a geek for calvados,” he said of the French apple brandy, and the Fill Station has a good selection of vermouth as well. Kyle said he knows this might reinforce “the uppity Lake Jackson stereotype” he’s heard his whole life. The town was founded in the forties by petroleum executives to escape the pollution their industry created in Freeport, eight miles away on the Gulf of Mexico. In his defense, Kyle said, he lives in Clute.
The Fill Station’s popularity isn’t going to change how the elder barbecue joint in the family does business. “Brian’s has served the community for thirty years, and the community loves it, and I don’t want to change it,” Kyle said. He is happy with how his return home has changed his life for the better. While I was at the Fill Station, he came by to say hello with his young son in his arms, whom he’d picked up from day care. He came back to southern Brazoria County to keep the family business alive and to grow a family of his own. “This pace is enjoyable,” he said. “I get to enjoy life a little more.”
The Fill Station
127 Parking Way, Lake Jackson
Phone: 979-292-8280
Hours: Sunday–Monday 10–8, Tuesday–Wednesday 11–10, Thursday–Saturday 11–midnight
Pitmasters: Kyle and Kent Devine
Method: Live oak in a cabinet smoker and rotisserie smoker
Year opened: 2017
