Smokin Joe's Pit BBQ

Joe Martinez’s wife calls him a serial hobbyist. He went through a phase with bowling, then one with drones; gun collecting and hunting were next, and then he bought a Camaro for drag racing. The mechanical problems that go along with racing cars got expensive quickly. “You blow a tranny and that’s four or five grand,” Martinez said of the car he has since sold. Through it all, there was barbecue.

He smoked his first brisket 28 years ago on a Weber Smokey Mountain. It wasn’t pretty. “The flat [was] way dry like a leather belt,” he admitted, but practice eventually brought good barbecue. It’s the one hobby Martinez hasn’t abandoned. In fact, he turned it into Smokin’ Joe’s Pit BBQ, a truck he opened in El Paso last year.

Martinez spent years laying the foundation for this venture. He started the Smokin’ Joe’s YouTube channel over 4 years ago to hopefully build a following. Millions of views later, that part of the plan was working. But it was a family tragedy that pushed him closer to his goal. “I lost my mom at the height of the pandemic, in December of 2020,” he said. The loss gave him a new perspective on life. “I’m going to do what I’m most passionate about,” Martinez says he told himself. He was the regional sales manager for O’Reilly Auto Parts, a company he’d been with for 24 years. He gave O’Reilly 2 years’ notice and made plans to retire at 50 to pursue his barbecue dream.

The food truck park was nearly empty when I visited at noon. Martinez said I missed the early rush (he opens at 11 a.m.), but he also mentioned that barbecue isn’t as popular in his native city as it is elsewhere in Texas. The crowds were massive during the first few weeks. Martinez said he’d regularly sell out in three hours, but then the winter lull came. Customers evaporated, and worry set in. “I got scared,” he said, and he looked for ways to lower his food costs, like switching from Prime- to Choice-grade briskets. Business has picked up this year, and he’s looking forward to a prosperous summer. “I’m going to do everything possible to make El Paso a barbecue destination,” Martinez said. The quality of his barbecue is the best evidence he’s keeping his word.

It was just a few slices of fatty, but Smokin’ Joe’s served me the best brisket I’ve had in El Paso. The stout bark and juicy cross section glistened in the sun, and the slices pulled apart easily. The oak smoke’s aroma lingered, and the seasoning level was spot-on. It was truly impressive. Just as good were the spareribs. They came off the bone with just a tug, but they weren’t mushy. The heavy black pepper in the rub stood up to the sweet glaze brushed on just before serving.

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Everyone has their own techniques for dealing with the heat, which, over the course of a long shift, becomes as much a mental battle as a physical one. Some pitmasters change clothes multiple times. Others take occasional refuge in cool meat lockers until their core temperature drops. Jordan Jackson, who works the pit room at Franklin Barbecue in Austin, prefers to do mental aerobics. “It’s gonna suck and you’ve just gotta let your mind accept that fact,” said Jackson. During shifts, he uses soothing music to distract himself from the heat. “At the same time, don’t push yourself too hard out of pride, and take lots of mini breaks—five to eight minutes at a time.”

At other locations, it’s hard to imagine soothing music—or any other techniques, for that matter—successfully distracting from the conditions inside. For the past month or so, Joe Martinez, the owner of Smokin’ Joe’s Pit BBQ, a food truck in El Paso, has been sweating his way through forty consecutive days of triple-digit temperatures (an El Paso record) in a air-conditioned twenty-foot trailer that still regularly reaches 130 degrees inside. Martinez spent several decades working in a comfy corporate office before opening his food truck last year. He knew his first summer was going to be an adjustment, but this, he says, is “something different.” “You’re almost twice as tired as you’d be on a normal day because of the heat,” he said, noting that he’s still getting slammed by customers who are adjusting their eating schedule to avoid the hottest parts of the day. “Barbecue is normally a sixteen-hour shift, but these days it feels like you’ve worked a thirty-two-hour shift.”

Martinez and his brother, Martin, with whom he shares pitmaster duties, have placed extra fans in their truck, wear cold packs on their necks, and add Liquid I.V., an electrolyte powder, to their water bottles. Even so, when it’s 110 degrees outside and 130 degrees inside, there’s only so much they can do. “I told my brother that if it gets to 115 degrees outside then it’ll be between 135 and 140 degrees inside the trailer and we’re going to have to shut things down,” Martinez said. “That’s unbearable, and it would be dangerous too.”

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