The Best Barbecue in Waco, Texas

Phillip and Yvette Helberg lost their kitchen, their trailer and most of their building to a fire on the night of 26 November 2023. They raised about $80,000 from the community, cooked out of a food trailer parked off Texas Highway 6 while they rebuilt, and opened the new room in March 2025. Two months later Texas Monthly put them at No. 8 in the state, their second straight appearance on a list the magazine only publishes every four years.

The pork steak is the dish the magazine singled out, marinated overnight in citrus and spice. The pesto stuffed turkey and the banana pudding get named nearly as often. Read the address before you drive, because this is Woodway and not Waco proper, roughly eight miles southwest of the downtown square.

This is the fourth Terry Black's, opened 19 April 2024 in a purpose built downtown room with six smokers that were craned into place the previous October. Brothers Michael and Mark Black run the company, and their great grandfather Edgar Black Sr. opened Black's Barbecue in Lockhart in 1932, which is about as deep as Texas barbecue lineage goes.

You walk a tray down a counter and point. The beef rib is the signature and the reason people photograph the tray, but the brisket and the sausage are the consistent part. It is the most expensive barbecue on this list and the easiest to get into on a Saturday night, which are related facts.

Kim and Gerald Hicks opened Papa Jack's in 2020, about two months before the pandemic shut dining rooms, and spent the next six or seven months working out of parking lots. In 2023 Yelp ranked it the No. 2 place to eat in the entire state of Texas, ahead of every restaurant in Austin, Houston and Dallas on that list.

The two of them are the only cooks, which Kim has said plainly is why the food does not wobble from one visit to the next. A world map on the wall is pinned with where customers came from, and it reaches a lot further than McLennan County.

The DiMaria family came from Poggioreale, Sicily, landed in New Orleans in 1888 and reached Waco in 1902. Tony was serving hot barbecue out of a brick pit behind his Elm Avenue grocery by 1936. Tony Jr. came home from the Second World War in 1946, opened his own market, and in the 1950s fed the crews building Interstate 35 through town.

The current building went up at Elm and Rose in 1995, a short walk from where the family started, and a fourth generation DeMaria runs it now. It is a counter, not a destination restaurant, and it is the cheapest good brisket in the city.

Jasper DiMaria started with a pushcart fruit stand and opened this place in 1919. It has never moved, which makes it the longest running barbecue address in the city by a wide margin. Waco History, the public history project run out of Baylor, keeps a file on it for a reason.

The draw is not innovation. It is a plate of chopped beef, sausage and white bread served across a counter in a room where East Waco families have been eating for a century, often several generations at the same table. The four hour midday window is the whole day, so treat it as a lunch plan rather than a stop you fit in.

Vitek's dates to 1915 and the family is on its fourth generation. The Speight Avenue building went up in 1958 and has been a Baylor fixture ever since. The barbecue is solid rather than spectacular, and that is not why anyone drives here.

The Gut Pak is why. Bill Vitek built it in 1983 by putting chopped brisket on a Frito pie and adding sausage, beans, cheese, pickles, onions and sauce. It has been the best selling thing on the menu for four decades and it is the single most Waco item of food in the city.

Dan Henderson started Uncle Dan's in 1978 on Wooded Acres Drive with two partners, bought them out in 1988 with his wife Clara, added the Hewitt store in 1990, then bought the old Kelly's Night Club building on Lake Air Drive in 1996 and moved into it in May 1998. Very little about the operation has changed since.

Ribs and smoked turkey breast are the strong suits, and the Texas Tater, a loaded baked potato built on the smoked meats, was invented here and copied all over Central Texas. There is a drive through, which no other joint on this list can say.

Anthony Walton cooked and catered around Waco for years before opening Broken G's first permanent restaurant on North Lacy Drive at the end of 2025. He is a Wacoan of 44 years, self taught, and the brick and mortar was a long time coming, funded partly by people who had been eating his food off a trailer.

It is the youngest operation here and it is ranked last for that reason rather than on the food. If you want to see where the Waco barbecue scene is going instead of where it has been, this is the stop.