Evan LeRoy on Michelin, Texas Monthly, and the Long Game

Chef's PSA

Michelin Stars, Brisket Mastery, and the Price of Success Ep.205

00:00 / 01:05:15

Evan LeRoy is the co-owner and pitmaster of LeRoy and Lewis Barbecue in Austin, Texas. A Michelin star recipient in the MICHELIN Guide Texas 2024, number two on Texas Monthly’s Top 50 BBQ Joints in 2025, and 2025 James Beard Award Semifinalist for Best Chef Texas, LeRoy has spent nearly a decade redefining Texas barbecue through whole-animal butchery, locally sourced meats, and a cooking philosophy that refuses to treat barbecue as a fixed menu. His debut cookbook, New School Barbecue: Recipes for Next-Level Smoking and Grilling from Austin’s LeRoy and Lewis, co-authored with Paula Forbes, is out May 12, 2026.

In this episode, he gets direct about the one thing most chefs with new recognition do not want to admit: the star changed everything, and not all of it in ways that are easy to manage.

What earning and retaining a Michelin star actually does to a barbecue operation in terms of volume, scrutiny, and internal pressure

Why Texas barbecue’s dominance as the national formula is creating a copycat monoculture that is hurting the genre

The complete brisket process from trimming for airflow to Dalmatian rub ratios, wood selection, wrapping decisions, and the overnight heated rest

André Natera and Evan LeRoy cover the ways success can quietly destabilize priorities, how portioning precision and pricing realities shift under heightened expectations, and the three-year process behind translating LeRoy and Lewis’s restaurant technique into nearly 100 home-cook-friendly recipes for the cookbook. The episode closes with how LeRoy steps away from the pressure and what he is watching in the broader BBQ landscape.

New School Barbecue is available wherever books are sold, out May 12, 2026.

This episode is sponsored by Rational USA. Learn more at https://rationalusa.com

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