Tex-Mex Barbecue at Vaqueros Moves Beyond the Old-School Ways

It turns out there is a good reason they tend to put barbecue restaurants in stand-alone buildings and not at the bottom of office buildings, or so Vaqueros owner Arnulfo “Trey” Sánchez and his partners at M Crowd Restaurants (the hospitality group behind Mi Cocina) learned when building out its new location.

Vaqueros’ pit room, located at Watters Creek in Allen, required installing safety measures that are over and beyond what a barbecue restaurant typically has to do. “We built a two-hour fire-rated box to contain the pit room,” Sánchez says. The heavily ventilated space sucks all the air out of the room with the smokers, filters it up through ducts, and into water-filled scrubbers that eject it as steam. The restaurant also had to replace the air in the pit rooms, and that is how Vaqueros ended up with what Sánchez believes to be the only air-conditioned pit room in existence.

What comes out of those pits is some noteworthy barbecue: fatty brisket so tender that it tears apart with the slightest of fingertip pressure, sausage loaded with a spice blend that turns it a brick red, pork belly with crispy ends and super-soft insides, barbacoa that goes into Mexico City-inspired tacos topped with a chile-infused sauce that eats like a mole, and its famous barbecue brisket birria tacos that melt in your mouth.

Right now, the windows from inside the restaurant are blocked off. However, passersby can peek through the giant glass panes out front to get a look at the pair of thousand-gallon custom backline offset smokers and an M&M rotisserie, all of which were customized by Ryan Newland of Backline Fabrication in Austin. It is quite a sight: two pits stand on legs designed to resemble a monument to Xiuhtecuhtli, the Aztec god of fire. The pits themselves look like an ode to a masterful graffiti artist working on one of the nation’s great canvases — a train car — in grey and white. The rotisserie is painted to look aged, with rust and worn spots showing through, and the barbecue joint’s name sprawled in a Chicano-inspired font.

His roots in barbecue go back to his father, Arnold Sánchez, who went from chili cook-off champ and catering master to owner of the long-closed Arnold’s Texas Bar-B-Q on Haskell Avenue. Sánchez laughs, remembering how his father made him and his catering crew dress up in outfits to recreate battles from Texas history before serving the food, saying it was all part of the act.

Vaqueros got its start in 2018 as a food truck parked by a brewery in Grapevine, where it stayed for years. Sánchez memorialized his dad and Arnold’s by hiring tattoo artist Enrique Castillo to paint a giant mural that hangs in the dining room — Castillo also designed the Vaqueros logo. “There are still more details being added,” Sánchez says of the mural, like the faces of his sons, which will be painted into the camper.

A lot has changed since Sánchez moved into the barbecue world as it becomes more diverse, some of which he is leading. His birria tacos were among the first to be recognized by both the taco and barbecue editors at Texas Monthly, kicking a birria trend into high gear all across the state. If you want to see some prime examples of Sánchez putting his stamp on things, look no further than the sides. For example, his coleslaw — Sánchez hates it soggy and hates mayonnaise even more, so he serves it as sliced cabbage and carrots in two styles. One version is topped with a thick raspberry vinaigrette and a combination of apples, Gorgonzola, and pecans. “That only goes with half the menu,” he says, adding that the tacos, in particular, make an odd pairing. He pairs those with a Tex-Mex version of the coleslaw made with garlic and crema sauce.

He takes liberties with other sides and dishes, infusing them with Tex-Mex flavors. Instead of plain old mac and cheese, he serves a green chile mac inspired by espaugeti verde. Corn is not served as loose elote, but on the cob and dressed with crema and salsa and, most notably, with the husk left on. The spicy cucumber salad is a simple assembly of cool pickled cucumber slides to offset some of the heat in these dishes. And then, to finish the meal, there’s the mysterious ice cream inspired by a trip to Guadalajara, where he came across the flavor in a little shop. “No one has guessed it yet,” Sánchez says with a smile. “Misti Norris was here this week, and she didn’t guess. AQ [chef Anastacia Quiñones-Pittman] guessed mole.” But she was wrong.

The secret flavor? It’s burnt tortilla, although no one would guess from the sweet, caramel-y flavor. Sánchez brings out a shaker of the tortilla bits used to top it, which taste like tiny bits of graham cracker. It’s just one more brilliant idea pushing the boundaries of what to expect at a barbecue joint.