Not the Best Barbecue

I've lived in a few places, and every place has one of these: the thing locals cannot stop talking about. In Texas, it's barbecue, and it's not even a debate, it's a script. Ask where to get good barbecue in Austin and you get the same two lines every time. Franklin's. Terry Black's. Said with the confidence of someone reading you your rights.

So naturally, I went. Both of them. Waited in the kind of line that makes you reconsider your relationship with food entirely, ordered the brisket like I'd been told to, and waited for the moment everyone promised.

That moment never showed up. The barbecue was good. It just wasn't the second coming.

I want to be clear, I'm not knocking either place. Franklin's and Terry Black's have rightly earned their reputation. But somewhere between bite four and the walk back to my car, I remember thinking: this is fine, but if this is "the best barbecue in Texas," I might be broken.

Turns out I wasn't broken. I just hadn't found Brown's yet.

Brown's Barbecue doesn't have a sign you'd notice. It's a trailer south of downtown, no dining room, no line that starts before the sun's up, no marketing budget that I could find evidence of. I found out about it almost by accident, from someone who mentioned it the way you'd mention a secret you weren't sure you should be sharing.

Five minutes and I had a plate in my hands. Best brisket I've had in this city. Not close, honestly. And more affordable than either of the places everyone told me to go to first.

Here's what I keep coming back to. Franklin's and Terry Black's aren't famous because they're the best. They're famous because they're the most agreed upon. Somewhere along the way, enough people said the same thing enough times that it calcified into fact. "Everybody knows" is doing a lot of work in that sentence, and none of it is about your actual tongue in your actual mouth eating the actual brisket.

That's the part that got me thinking, because it's not just a barbecue problem.

Ask an AI tool what the best option is, for almost anything, and you get the Franklin's answer. The consensus answer. The one that shows up most often because it's been said the most, by the most people, in the most places that get scraped and summarized. It's not wrong, exactly. It's just not yours. It can't be, because it was built by averaging everybody else's taste, not asking about yours.

That's fine when you're picking a restaurant and you've got a free afternoon to go find out for yourself. It's a bigger problem when it's your business on the line. AI can hand you ten logo options, and every one of them will be competent. It can't tell you which one actually feels like you. It can shortlist candidates for a job you need filled, and every one of them will look qualified on paper. It can't tell you which one you'd actually trust with your customers. It can tell you what the market says something should cost. It can't tell you what price feels right coming from you.

The research, the options, the first draft, that's the repeatable half, and AI is genuinely great at it. The other half, the "does this feel like us" half, that's still entirely on you. It has to be. That's the half nobody can outsource, because it's built out of your own experience, not everybody else's.

I still think about that trailer sometimes. Small sign on the side of the trailer, no line, no ad spend, and it beat two Texas institutions without trying to. It didn't win by being the most recommended. It won because somebody trusted their own palate over everybody else's opinion, and kept making the thing they actually believed in.

That's the whole game, I think. Use the tools. Let them do the repeatable stuff so you're not starting from a blank page every time. Just don't let "everybody agrees" replace your own taste in the process. The agreement is Franklin's. Your taste is Brown's. Nobody else can tell you which one you actually like better.