The Best Barbecue in Lufkin, Texas

Jeremy Staggs opened Boxcar in 2023 and it is the joint that pulled statewide attention back to Angelina County. The meat runs through an offset smoker fueled by post oak, and the board covers brisket, pork spareribs, turkey breast, pulled pork and locally made sausage. Texas Monthly's barbecue desk profiled it and singled out the once-a-week pork steak and pork belly burnt ends.

It did not make Texas Monthly's Top 50 for 2025, and we are not going to pretend it did. What it has instead is a crowd that sells the trailer out on a three-day week, and a filing with the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation dated February 20, 2026 for a 3,725 square foot, roughly 360,000 dollar remodel at 212 E Burke Ave. That address is meant to become a sit-down room seating around 100 with a 1,000 gallon smoker behind it.

Wade Barbe, pronounced bar-bee, is the owner, the pitmaster, the server and the cleaning crew. Texas Monthly ran him under exactly that headline. The menu is brisket, ribs and sausage, with a mashed potato salad and pinto beans seasoned with salt and black pepper. No specials, no dessert, no elaborate rub.

He started out parked at Lufkin Mall in March 2020, weeks before the mall closed for the pandemic, and later got a five hundred gallon smoker built from a reclaimed propane tank by his welder friend Randy Golden. The reason this sits at number two rather than lower is that the ribs and the brisket hold up against anything in the county, and the operation is one person deciding when it is right.

Eugene Gann opened this as LBBQ in 1950 in a twelve by twenty foot building. In 1952 Queen Esther Stringer took a job here after overspending on her children's Christmas presents, and bought the place six weeks later. It has stayed in the family since. Buck and Queenie Stringer sold the business and the land to their son and daughter-in-law Paul and Brenda in 1983, who sold to Paul and Robin Stringer in 2014.

They still fire hickory in the same brick pits Queen Esther used, they smoke their own meat rather than buying it in, and the Texas Historical Commission has recognised the business with a Texas Treasure Business Award. Locally it is called Lufkin BBQ or LBBQ as often as Stringer's, and the two are the same address.

Jeremy and Christine Teague opened TnT in December 2021 and it is listed with the Lufkin/Angelina County Chamber of Commerce under food trucks rather than restaurants, which is the honest description. The Lufkin Daily News has written it up twice, once on the barbecue and once on the ingredient sourcing behind it.

The regular stops include the Hijinx lot in Hudson and the Shade Tree, and directories carry at least two different Lufkin street addresses for it because a truck does not really have one. Judged on the brisket sandwich alone it belongs this high. Judged on how hard it is to find on a given Tuesday, it belongs behind the three above.

Brothers Charles and Archie Chapman run this one, and the Lufkin Daily News put them at 23 years in town. They opened at 521 S Timberland Dr, later added the Frank Avenue building, and closed the Timberland location after about five years. Frank Avenue is the surviving address and the Timberland one is shut, which trips up visitors working from an old listing.

The board runs beef, ham, turkey and chicken, and Chapman has said the addition of Mexican dishes brought in customers the barbecue alone was not reaching. This is the Lufkin answer when it is a Monday, or it is 6 p.m., or you want to sit down inside with a table rather than eat off a trailer window.

This is the one entry on the list that is not in Lufkin, and we are labeling it rather than quietly counting it as local. Huntington sits ten miles east on U.S. 69, which puts Papa's inside a normal Lufkin lunch run.

Kelvin Jones, who goes by Papa, worked at the Lufkin paper mill until it closed and then spent years in the oilfield, including six and a half in West Texas, before opening this. It is a family operation with his wife Lesia, his son Justin and daughter-in-law Casey, and his daughter Chelsea and son-in-law Garrett working it, and the family had been cooking barbecue for fundraisers for more than 25 years first. The Lufkin Daily News covered it four weeks after it opened under the headline that it was already drawing a crowd.

The Lufkin Daily News has reviewed this twice and liked it both times. It occupies the old Ruben's Chicken and Fish building on North Raguet, and the menu goes well past barbecue into oxtails, links, boudin, fried chicken, chicken dressing, collard greens, cabbage and banana pudding.

One warning worth more than any review. The business trades as both Willie P's and Willie G's depending on the sign, the listing and the delivery app, and aggregators also carry a Pollok address and a Locke Street address for it. It is placed last here because it is a soul food kitchen that does barbecue rather than a barbecue joint, not because the food ranks last.