Soulman's Bar-B-Que: A Family-Owned Texas BBQ Tradition

Soulman’s Bar-B-Que is family-owned Texas barbecue — Don Hallett opened the first location in Pleasant Grove on October 19, 1974, with little more than wood and a handful of his mother’s recipes for the sides. He set out to cook barbecue worth driving for and treat the people who showed up like they mattered, and somewhere along the way that turned into 22 locations across the Dallas–Fort Worth metro and the surrounding North and East Texas communities.

Don’s daughters, Amber and Austin, grew up around the pits and now help lead the company their father started. The people who run the counter and greet regulars by name have mostly been doing it a long time. Some remember when there were only a handful of stores. The recipes traveled from store to store, carried by the people who’d learned to cook them right.

A small sign hangs on the wall of every Soulman’s location:

Great Bar-B-Que. Great Service. Great God.

CEO Brett Randle put those words up around 2007, but he was naming something that had already been true of the Hallett family a lot longer than that. It’s how the company decides what to do when something needs deciding — plain and simple, and it’s been that way a long time. The food has to earn the trust people put in it, and the service has to match it.

The faith part is real, and it’s not just a line on the wall. It shows up in the neighborhoods Soulman’s calls home and in the people who keep coming back, some of them for decades.

We still load the pits and get the smoke rolling the night before, so the seasoned hickory has time to do its work before the doors open.

We still hand-slice and hand-bread as much of the menu as we can, cutting the ribs to order every day, and we still make the sides from scratch the way Memer, Don’s mother, wrote them down decades ago. We’re not stingy with our meat. We serve it by the plate, not by the scale, because that’s what treating people like family looks like on a Tuesday lunch rush.

More than twenty stores now, with more on the way, and the same standards at every one of them. The recipes and the wood haven’t changed. Neither has the way the person behind the counter says “welcome back” to somebody who was just in on Tuesday.

A couple of mentions we were glad to get, at the time we got them:

Neither mention changed how we cook. The standards were already there, and we’ve kept at them the same way since. We also stay active in the neighborhoods our stores serve: booster clubs and blood drives among them.

• Read Our Story → How Soulman’s started, and how it became what it is today.
• Find a Soulman’s near you → Locations across North and East Texas.
• See the menu → The same recipes we’ve been cooking since 1974.