The Best Barbecue in Texarkana

A bright yellow trailer parked in the front yard of a house across the road from the truck stop at the Leary exit, with styrofoam cups pushed through the chainlink fence to spell out BBQ. Nikiya Dansby runs the pit, an offset smoker burning hickory and pecan, and her husband Reginald, a truck driver, is the reason the operation aims itself at drivers who have nowhere decent to eat.

Texas Monthly's barbecue editor Daniel Vaughn wrote it up and singled out the ribs, the chicken quarter and the smoked gumbo. It also carries the highest average customer rating of any barbecue in the Texarkana metro across the major review sites, which is not a thing you can say about a trailer very often. It is number one here on the meat, and the tradeoff is the schedule.

The barbecue that actually started in Texarkana, in 1998 in a renovated Dairy Queen building on Highway 82, and bought by Matthew Palmer when he was twenty-one after learning the trade around East Texas pits from the age of sixteen. It has grown to five stores across both states, two of them on the Texas side here, plus Arkansas Boulevard, Hope and Ashdown.

Brisket is the order, and the sandwich comes with beans, onions and pickles if you eat in. It carries a Texas Monthly restaurant directory listing, the city tourism board calls it a Texarkana barbecue legend, and it finished second in the local country station's reader poll, ahead of everything else inside the city limits.

This is a New Boston restaurant, not a Texarkana one, and it is on this list because Texarkana keeps voting for it. It won the KKYR reader poll for best barbecue in Texarkana outright, ahead of Big Jake's and Naaman's, and it ranks first among New Boston's restaurants on Tripadvisor with the deepest review record of any pit in this guide.

It is also the only barbecue in Bowie County that stays open to nine at night five days a week, which matters if you finish work after seven and every counter in Texarkana has already scraped the pit. Call it a thirty minute drive from downtown.

The newest full-service barbecue room on the Texas side, built out on Walton Drive and open since the end of 2023. The Texarkana Gazette covered the announcement and Texarkana Today followed the construction, so this one has a documented arrival rather than a mystery opening date.

The house method is carving to order at the counter where you can watch it happen, which is a real difference from a steam table. Honest label, this is not a Texarkana original. It is a group founded by Greenwood, Arkansas restaurateur Mark Dean, with locations across Arkansas, and Texarkana is the Texas outpost.

The only barbecue in Texarkana that behaves like a restaurant rather than a counter, with a full bar, table service, steaks alongside the smoked meat and the latest kitchen hours of any pit on the Texas side. It is a Texarkana USA Chamber of Commerce member and it shares its building with Monjunis, an Italian kitchen from the same group.

Labelled plainly, it is not local in origin. Silver Star is a Bossier City, Louisiana group and this is a branch. It earns its place because if you want barbecue at 8.30 on a Tuesday night with a table and a waiter, there is no other answer inside the Texas city limits.

Craig Forand cooks prime brisket over pecan off a twenty-four foot rig, and the Texarkana Gazette profiled the operation in October 2023 for putting three generations of the family to work in the same kitchen. What began as a hobby turned into the catering outfit that local weddings and corporate events actually book.

It is ranked here rather than higher because there is no counter to walk up to. You either hire the trailer or you catch it at a downtown pop-up, and the schedule lives on its own events page rather than on a door.

Stated plainly, this is a chain counter inside a travel centre, one of a numbered string of Texas Best Smokehouse locations built into truck stops across the state. It is last on this list for exactly that reason and nobody should pretend otherwise.

It is on the list because it solves a problem none of the others do. Brisket, ribs, pulled pork and sausage with hot sides from nine in the morning until ten at night, seven days a week, at the Nash exit off Interstate 30. Every genuinely good pit in Bowie County is closed on Sunday. This one is not.