Every year, right before the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo kicks off, hundreds of teams spend months preparing for the World's Championship Bar-B-Que Contest, a wildly popular three-day pageant of pork, poultry and beef.
It is, officially, a competition, judged like the RodeoHouston Super Series fixtures that took over NRG Stadium starting last night. The barbecue (and philanthropy) is supposed to be the point, the stated reason for all the smoke, the sponsors and the sea of cowboy hats that flooded into NRG Park this past weekend.
But after spending some time at the cook-off myself, it became clear what draws hundreds of thousands of people back year after year: the party, essentially the pregame for three weeks of concerts and carnival.
Or, more accurately, parties, since there were hundreds of them popping off at once in an eyepopping and ear-drum-bursting eruption of neon, live bands, DJs, wristbands, saloon doors, velvet ropes, spilled beer and corporate logos all tied together with the aromatic bow of rich, almost nauseating brisket smoke.
Some tents required sponsorships to get in, others were buyer-appreciation functions and some were strictly for friends of friends. Together, they formed a cluster of the most exclusive events in town, private fundraisers that bankroll scholarships and other philanthropic efforts (and, yes, make donors look very good), hosted in the middle of a parking lot by the Astrodome.
And with the help of a well-connected rodeo escort, I got to take a look inside last Friday.
From Memorial Park to NRG Park
I'd started the afternoon in Memorial Park with the trail riders, who were celebrating their Houston homecoming after a week on horseback with roasted pig and heavy-duty coolers packed with Modelo and Michelob Ultra. As horses nipped at bags of hay, families ate and the children danced to live music.
So when I got to NRG Park that evening, it felt like we were commemorating a completely different event in a completely different world.
Instead of wagons lining park paths, the cook-off stretched across a planned grid of roughly 250 tents arranged along fake streets like Chuckwagon Way and Rodeo Drive. It was sprawling, crowded and slightly disorienting, not unlike Houston itself.
Chris Daniel, a lifetime Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo member and cook-off committeeman (I guess I should mention he's also a former Harris County district clerk and a current candidate for the office), agreed to guide me through the grid after I struck out at every tent I visited the night before.
We stepped onto Astrodome Way and into the churn of people, some waiting in line for port-a-potties, others sitting on concrete curbs and taking off boots that clearly weren't meant for this many steps.
"You can tell who made a poor choice in shoes," I remember Daniel saying.
He then steered me down Garden Avenue toward one of the largest venues on the map.
Where the donors dance
The Lamb and Goat Auction Committee's Ram's Club was a tent so big that it took up the space of four allocated spots, and it was so elaborately decorated, with rustic chandeliers and disco balls hanging from the ceiling, that it took a week to build.
When Daniel convinced a mustachioed committeeman to let me in through the cook's entrance, the band inside was covering "Fireball," and the tent was packed shoulder to shoulder with donors, committee members and sponsors in various states of Western wear.
Megan Hollis, a 14-year committee member, summed up the formula quickly.
"Everybody comes out, has a great time for three nights," she said. "Private party, brisket, ribs, chicken, all of the foods, the drinks are great. But we mainly just support the kids and raise a lot of money for them."
They served about 1,500 on Thursday and expected to serve 3,000 each on Friday and Saturday, a portion of each plate supporting scholarships and grants for RodeoHouston's annual lamb and goat auctions.
Here, you could see how the whole thing works, how the party fuels the fundraising.
Choose your chaos
We left Ram's Club and took in the range of offerings from the cook-off tents.
Zydeco spilled out of Da' Creole Krewe's tent on Los Vaqueros Trail. On Chuckwagon Way, Q'Ston BBQ had cumbia turned up so high that people without wristbands to get in were dancing in pairs on the asphalt outside of the tent. There were plenty of country-themed saloons, but there were also hyper-pop-playing nightclubs and much smaller setups with candle-lit tables that offered an intimacy much quieter than the packed dancefloors.
We passed Sharks R Us, marked by a large inflatable shark at its entrance and rumored to be a favorite among judges and lawyers, then continued to Fire in the Hole Cookers, where the rodeo's fake street grid had been overridden by a sign declaring the intersection of Fire in the Hole Lane and Best Damn Party Street.
"We turn our tent into basically a club," said Oscar Guevara, who helps build the tent every year. "Three DJs on rotation."
Then we arrived at my favorite stop of the night: PBR Saloon, operated by PBR Cookers, short for perfect butts and racks, as in the cuts of meat.
Its wooden facade was built by students at MacArthur High School, owner Joyce Vaughan said, and its neon lights were easily the brightest at the cook-off. Vaughan eagerly invited me onto the dance floor, where I was met by a man in an LED-lit robot suit on stilts beeping and bopping through the crowd as "Pepas," the ultimate party song, played.
Outside, a man who said he runs the bar (and who had clearly sampled the inventory) was holding a margarita glass so comically large that I cannot, in good conscience, include his commentary.
What a night it was turning out to be.
A reprieve along the way
Not every tent was trying to outdo the next one.
Daniel and I walked to the More or Less Cookers tent, where the team was celebrating its 40th year at the cook-off. There were families inside, longtime members catching up and photos of late teammates pinned up alongside old aprons.
"The big thing with us, we're a small team, and everybody knows everybody," said Jim Follett, chief cook since 2000. "We're very close together."
For the last stop of the night, I asked to see another one of the massive tents: Bottomless Pit.
Outside is where I met Danny Rivera, a young woman who had flown in from Mexico City for the start of the rodeo and had made the rounds with impressive efficiency. She'd already managed to get into Moonlight Cookers, Those Texans and Pony Xpress Puro Tejano.
"We're having a blast," she said. "I'm already lit."
Inside was a spectacle of epic proportions, somehow outdoing even the LED not-robot from earlier.
The band onstage was Bag of Donuts, a New Orleans-based cover group dressed in a mashup of Mardi Gras costumes and KISS-style face paint. They powered through their way through Queen covers with the enthusiasm only middle-aged men covering classic rock can conjure, under hot stage lights and to a packed crowd that sang every word back to them (myself included).
"How did we go from a barbecue contest to this?" I wondered, as somewhere offstage, sweaty cooks were still doing the work that was technically the reason we were all here in the first place.
Overstimulated beyond belief by the bass-thumping showcase of bravado and generosity washed in neon, I stepped back onto Chuckwagon Way and decided I'd seen enough for one night.
But I left grateful that I live in Houston, where livestock and LED robots, scholarship money and stage lights, and pitmasters and partygoers, can take over the same stretch of parking lot next to an aging Astrodome and somehow make sense.
