Smithsonian Magazine - 11.2019

(Joyce) #1
56 SMITHSONIAN.COM | November 2019

WISH I COULD TELL YOU that the “blood” in
Blood Bros BBQ was literal. That sometime in the
mid-1980s, three Asian-American friends in subur-
ban Houston met under the bleachers of their high
school football stadium and performed some kind of
ritual with a drawn blade in which they swore eternal
fealty in smoke and fl esh. Sadly, no knife, no blood.
This is a diff erent kind of tale: a great American
story about the great American food. The brother
part is real, anyway. Terry Wong and his young-
er-by-18-months sibling, Robin, make up two-thirds of the
Blood Bros, whose year-old restaurant has made waves in
the world of Texas barbecue. The third, honorary Bro is Quy
Hoang, who has the distinction of being the fi rst Vietnam-
ese-American to work as a pit master in Houston, a city with
no shortage of either.
Blood Bros BBQ is located in a strip mall in the Houston
suburb of Bellaire. The location should come as no surprise:
After years of the so-called Great Inversion—in which affl uent
professionals fl ocked back to city centers, leaving the suburbs
to recently arrived immigrants—we should all be accustomed
to fi nding the most exciting developments in food happening
amid pawnshops and nail salons and urgent care centers.
Blood Bros occupies a storefront that
was most recently a Smoothie King. The
Bros spent $400,000, mostly borrowed
from family and friends, and trans-
formed it into a shining example of the
modern barbecue aesthetic: No grinning
pigs eating each other or themselves. No faux-Southern sig-
nage. No groan-inducing puns. Just a cool rectangular space
with smooth wooden banquettes (built by the Wongs’ stepfa-
ther) and warmly glowing orange walls.

I


SOON A WATER TOWER PAINTED WITH THE
NAME “ALIEF” COMES INTO VIEW. “ALL THIS
WAS STILL FIELDS WHEN WE WERE KIDS.”
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