The Best Barbecue in Kilgore, Texas

Country Tavern opened in 1939 during the Great East Texas oil boom and has been trading on the same dish ever since. KLTV's profile of the place reported that Toby Pilgrim's grandmother, Lois Mason, bought the tavern in 1972, that his mother waited tables and his father cooked, and that Larry Hagman, Robert Duvall, Sandy Duncan and George Bush have all eaten there. Visit Kilgore, the city's own tourism office, calls its ribs the prettiest in the region and describes a dark red sauce that gives the hickory-smoked meat a sweet East Texas edge.

Come for the ribs. The brisket is good and the smoked turkey gets steady praise, but the meaty pork ribs are what made this a destination for people who are not from Kilgore. The two real complaints in recent reviews are the wait, which can run long on a Friday or Saturday night, and the prices, which are the highest of any pit on this list. Both are survivable. Arriving before six is the fix for the first one.

This is the best brisket in Kilgore and the highest rated pit in town, sitting near 4.9 across several review platforms, though on review counts in the dozens rather than the hundreds, so read the score as a strong signal rather than a settled verdict. Reviewers describe the sliced brisket as very moist with a pronounced smoke ring, and the burnt ends, pulled pork, boudin and barbecue stuffed potatoes all come up repeatedly. The kitchen sides people name are the mac and cheese, the tater tot casserole and the baked beans, with blackberry cobbler to finish.

It started as a mobile unit working fairs and festivals and still caters, which is why the operating week is short. Four days, Wednesday through Saturday, closing at seven or whenever the brisket runs out. Visit Kilgore lists the address as 2130 Utzman Street while a few directories carry 2130 North Henderson Boulevard for the same place, so use the Utzman address the city publishes and call if you cannot find it.

Kilgore Smokehouse is the weekday lunch pit, and it is the only one on this list that publishes its hours on its own website and keeps a normal Monday to Friday week. Ten in the morning to six in the evening, closed both weekend days, which is the exact inverse of how most of this town's barbecue works. If you are in Kilgore for work rather than for a weekend, this is your default.

The menu is built around chopped beef sandwiches, meat plates with classic sides, and Pittsburg hot links, the East Texas sausage from the town of Pittsburg about seventy miles north that most pits outside this region do not carry. Customers also single out the sliced beef, the boudin, and the potato salad and baked beans. Order online for pickup through the site if you are on a lunch break.

Raisin' Smoke is the newest of the five and the smallest. It runs out of a Highway 31 East location on a Wednesday to Saturday week, smoking brisket, chicken, ribs and hot links, with Southern sides including potato salad and baked beans and Kool-Aid pickles on the counter. Listings name Stephen and Lacreshia Walker as the owners. The catering half of the business is as much of the operation as the walk-up half.

Two cautions. Review counts here are genuinely small, single digits on some platforms and under a hundred across all of them, so there is less evidence behind this pick than behind the four above it. And a handful of older directories still list the business at 2701 South Henderson Boulevard. The Highway 31 address is the one its own Facebook page, Waze and the restaurant directories all carry with the current phone number, so that is the one we use.

Bodacious is an East Texas institution, started by Roland Lindsey on Mobberly Avenue in Longview in 1968 and grown to more than a dozen stores, and the Kilgore location is listed on Visit Kilgore's own barbecue page. The company line is that the barbecue is prepared fresh daily with its own spice blend and smoked over wood-burning pits, and that is a fair description of what you get.

We have it fifth for a straightforward reason. The individual stores are run with a lot of independence and they are not equal, and this one carries the weakest review scores of any pit on this list, around 3.2. Other Bodacious stores, the Longview original and the Marshall store that Texas Monthly singled out for its spare ribs, are stronger. Here, it is a reliable fallback rather than a destination.