Since 1959, San Antonio-area barbecue joint Davila’s BBQ has served loyal fans a distinctive, Latino variety of the Lone Star State’s favorite food, honoring the Mexican heritage of both barbecue and cattle farming—lending a deeper layer of tradition to those two icons of Texas culture.
For instance, Adrian Davila, who has succeeded his father Edward and grandfather Raul as pitmaster, adds cayenne chile to the usual salt-and-pepper rub used by pitmasters elsewhere in Texas.
“Gives it a spicy kick to go with the smoky foundation,” he said.
That smoky foundation derives from mesquite, but unlike most Texas pitmasters, Davila cooks his meat next to the fire, not separated from it.
The salsa that customers receive with their meals is made with fire-roasted tomatoes.
“That’s how the vaqueros would have done it on their campfire more than 200 years ago,” Davila said, harking back to the dawn of cattle raising in Texas.
Mexican cowboys—vaqueros—herded Spanish longhorns through the grasslands and scrub of south Texas, and their heritage isn’t only the cows, but also the cowboying—including the cow-camp food.
Popularizing that heritage is why Davila published a cookbook in 2018: “Cowboy Barbecue: Fire and Smoke From the Original Texas Vaqueros.” Based on three generations of cookery at the family restaurant, the book illustrates both Latino barbecue and the centuries-old history of Latino culture in south-central Texas. It reclaims the true history of the beef industry in Texas, which began long before Charles Goodnight.
Davila’s book digs deep into his personal heritage, which stretches from his family’s south Texas ranch back many generations to an aristocratic forebear in Ávila, Spain (that’s why morcilla, Spanish blood sausage, is in his cookbook). Add to these culinary influences the indigenous flavors of Mexico, the hardcore carnivore focus of Texas barbecue—practically a religion in the Lone Star state—and the region’s unique cultural confluence today, and the resulting cuisine is as complex as a rainbow.
Witness Davila’s Frito pie, with his family’s famous spicy beef sausage and brisket. Texas sausage derives from the 19th-century wave of German immigration, and Fritos were born and bred in San Antonio by a Kansas-born confectioner of Irish background.
The lamb ribs are another Davila family specialty, and unusual in Texas. Lengua—tongue—is foreign to most U.S. menus, but found in Davila’s cookbook, along with pork stomach and beef tripe. On occasion, he prepares traditional barbacoa, slow-cooking a cow head or an entire lamb in an underground pit, wrapped in maguey leaves, just as his family did on their ranch and the vaqueros did centuries ago.
“We use the whole animal, vaquero-style, from head to tail,” Davila said. “Cowboys on the range didn’t have the luxury to waste anything.”
