Gonzo’s Smokehouse Delivers a Day of Barbecue for the Rouses Team
Jason Gonzalez uses a shovel to rake the shimmering coals of his offset smoker. We are at the picnic area just outside the Rouses Corporate Headquarters in Schriever, about 12 miles from Houma. Cloudless blue skies and an easy breeze make this the perfect day for a barbecue, and Rouses found just the pitmaster for the job: the man behind Gonzo’s Smokehouse & BBQ in Luling. He has prepared for us the most popular dishes he serves, and the smoky smell of seasoned meats has a dozen of us inching involuntarily closer around him.
While tending the pit, Gonzalez talks proudly about his barbecue shop, five minutes from the Luling Bridge heading toward New Orleans. Gonzo’s is a smokehouse that needs no introduction. Word of mouth is so strong that people gladly wait hours for a table and, on Fridays, Gonzalez keeps an ice chest full of free beer and free water for his loyal — and sometimes a little obsessed— customers. No one would argue that it’s some of the best barbecue in the New Orleans area. Customers drive in from Houston and farther, suggesting that it is probably among the best barbecue joints in the country. For that kind of quality barbecue, you have to come early, but the beer and anticipation give the shop a festival vibe.
Gonzalez gestures at the smoker: “The one we have at the shop is a 500-gallon way bigger than this one,” he says, and leans his shovel against it once the coals are just right. “Before we had a shop, I had a smoker in my front yard for a short time, but people were giving me the eye. It’s 20 feet long.”
Gonzalez is a young 46 fit and draped in the modern chef aesthetic: tattoo sleeves, a black T-shirt emblazoned with the single word brisket, a cap turned backwards and Vans on his feet. The “small” smoker is this great beast of a thing, with faded green paint and rusted iron accents so perfect as to appear painted on, and with white-walled tires and red rims. It looks like photos I’ve seen of the City Produce truck that J.P. Rouse used to haul around vegetables a hundred years ago.
On the platter featured on the cover of this issue, you can see what Gonzalez had in store for us. In addition to his famous brisket, he prepared pork belly burnt ends, smoked turkey breast, beef cheeks, a brisket boudin (made from the smoked-down trimmings of the beef cheeks and his grandmother’s dirty rice), cherry cola brisket burnt ends, pork jowl cracklins topped with Mike’s Hot Honey, which — and you’ll have to trust me on this — was something like a barbecue crème brûlée, savory and decadent and alone worth the trip to Luling. (On the Gonzo’s menu it’s called Hot Honey Jowl Cracklin, and as he described it: “It’s super rich, it’s super fatty,” he said, “but it’s got that crunch on the outside with the honey.”)
Lunchtime can’t come soon enough.
Across the picnic area, Gonzalez’s aunt, sister and father are prepping the service area with stacks of plates and an array of foil containers holding sides and smoked meats, wrapped and awaiting the hungry Rouses team. Gonzalez, a native of the West Bank, talks about life in the barbecue business. Though he has been approached regularly about opening a second location of Gonzo’s in the city of New Orleans, he isn’t interested. “I’m keeping it small,” he said. “One store is enough.”
Before he was a pitmaster, Gonzalez had an office job. He grew up in Waggaman, Louisiana, and had been a draftsman his whole life, working at different engineering firms. In 2014, he bought a little box smoker from Academyand, as a hobby, started smoking things in the backyard. Right away, he knew he had a knack for it and took the task seriously. He started off with books and videos on YouTube, trying to figure out the magic of smoking meats. Franklin Barbecue — a celebrated Austin, Texas barbecue joint under pitmaster Aaron Franklin, who won the James Beard Award for Best Chef and was inducted into the American Royal Barbecue Hall of Fame in 2020 — had posted some videos at the time demonstrating how to smoke a brisket, how to smoke a pork butt, and how to smoke ribs. Gonzalez did his best to follow their instructions and, after finishing, went back to see if he had missed something.
It improved his level of ability, but he wasn’t really comfortable with cooking briskets, which is serious business, involving smoking 12, sometimes 14 hours — and that’s just the cooking. There are still countless hours of preparation beforehand, plus trimming and seasoning it. Depending when you start, it can be an all-night job.
Gonzalez was working at Shell at the time in New Orleans, and had been for about six years. Before long, he started catering on the side for plants in St. Charles Parish.
“I used to work out with some of those guys that worked at the plants,” he said. “They knew I was just doing this in the backyard, but they’d say, ‘Hey man, can you cater for my office?’ That got my foot in the door before I even did pop-ups or did any of the big festivals in New Orleans. People would just put in an order to do a big ol’ pan of brisket and sides, and I’d deliver it to the plant.”
Standing next to the pit outside Rouses, it’s hard to imagine Gonzalez was ever anything other than a seasoned pro, let alone an apprentice with a day job. Like many, if not most, who finally decide to pursue their dreams, it took employment issues to really spur Gonzalez into action. In 2015, the price of oil destabilized and the oil industry generally had a bad year — which meant oil workers had a bad year, too.
“Shell ended up pretty much laying off the whole office,” he said. “They consolidated to a few people and moved everybody to Houston, and then they laid off all drafting and design and engineering people, subcontracting all that work out instead.”
That is when he started to really focus on his barbecue and see if he could actually take it to the next level. He took his severance check from Shell and bought a good-quality pellet smoker, which allowed greater control over the fire and would allow him to better dial in his recipes. He also took one-on-one classes from Dylan Taylor, a well-known pitmaster in Texas. “We did brisket, ribs and sausage,” Gonzalez said.
“I didn’t really understand how important it is to trim the brisket properly to get a really good end product. Watching Dylan trim a brisket properly really just changed everything — making them all the same size, giving them that nice, even fat cap on top. After taking that class, I went back home and it was on. Between that class and the new smoker, the game changed for me.”
He started to think he could make a career out of barbecue. “When I got laid off from Shell, it kind of opened my eyes,” he told me. “I thought I was going to retire there. Once that happened, it was kind of like, alright, we’ve just got to look out for each other.” Before jumping into the barbecue business, however, he found a job at another firm and, for the next several years, continued doing drafting and design during the week. On his days off, he kept his barbecue side business going, building a big customer base in the process, which grew and grew from word of mouth.
In 2020, right before the lockdowns, he finally bought the space of today’s Gonzo’s Smokehouse. It was, and remains, a family-run shop. They didn’t plan to open to the public for dining. Originally Gonzo’s was all to-go and more a place for him to prep meats, make the family’s own boudin, and smoke things for catering, but the demand got too great. “We did that probably about six or eight months. Then we eventually opened up the public and started serving them,” he said.
It was always going to be a family business. His late grandmother, Mabel, was a major inspiration for Gonzalez; he’s even named one of his smokers in her honor. “I remember sitting in her kitchen cooking with her. She was a really, really great cook, and she’s where I got a passion for cooking. I wish she were here to see where I am now.”
Most pivotal during his slow maturity in the barbecue world was a trip to Austin, where Gonzalez had a series of “real eye-opening experiences,” he said. He went to Franklin Barbecue, whose videos he had spent so much time studying. He waited in line for six hours to get barbecue. “It blew my mind,” he said. “From the start, I was like, oh man, we don’t have anything remotely close to this.” He said it expanded his ideas of what barbecue could be.
At other places he later visited, however, he learned another lesson: that just packing a smoky, exquisite flavor profile on a well-trimmed piece of meat did not always make great barbecue — even at some well-regarded barbecue places.
“You can almost taste the love that people put in their food,” he explained. “When I go to Texas, you can sometimes get the sense that, all right, this is good — but it’s not the person who actually started the business. You can tell they’re not there slicing, they’re not there preparing the food. You can taste it when love is missing from the food.”
Technical work and artistic aspirations matter because, in Texas-style barbecue, you can’t rescue a failed dish by simply dousing the meat in a little extra sauce. The sort of barbecue Gonzo’s offers is essentially made with just salt, pepper and garlic. Gonzalez and his father make the sausage and boudin they serve from scratch. The dirty rice in the boudin is made using his grandmother’s recipe. His sister comes up with all the desserts. The rest is all Gonzalez’s.
He built his business slowly. He cooked for plants. He eventually got comfortable with cooking for the public at pop-ups at places like the breweries in New Orleans. Eventually, he was at the big festivals in the city. The response to the smokehouse in Luling has been humbling and fantastic.
“We’re not doing this for cash, right?” he explained. “We just want to put out good food. When you come to Gonzo’s, you’re going to see us. You’re going to see my family there. I’m slicing. My sister’s doing dessert. My dad’s at the door. I just want to keep putting out a good-quality product every week and also just [keep] coming up with new ideas, new cuts, new menus.”
Just before noon, a line formed of more than a hundred hungry Rouses workers. One by one they filed through the serving area, and Gonzalez piled meats on their plates, his hands moving first like a surgeon, then like a pianist: slicing and piling, slicing and piling. He carved the turkey breast thinly using a bread knife, expertly, and then the sausage. (“I was buying these big fancy straight-edge knives that are like $150,” he said. “But the guys in Austin were using these $20 bread knives. I tried them and they’re so much better than the expensive ones!”)
The thick wooden carving board from which he worked gleamed with fats and oils. The long line didn’t faze him — it was just another day in the office for the pitmaster. His father and sister and aunt ladled sides and offered dessert — things like mac and cheese and strawberry shortcake. When Donald and Donny Rouse reached the front of the line, Gonzalez served them.
“That’s amazing,” said Donald.
“Can’t wait to try it,” said Donny.
The picnic tables filled, and the Rouses team talked excitedly between bites about the usual topics: ports and work and kids and summer. Donald and Donny sat across from each other, next to Lee Veillon, the vice president of human resources for Rouses Markets. The topic of conversation turned to barbecue, and their own memories growing up.
“My grandpa, Emile, had a homemade smoker,” said Veillon. “It was a big metal thing. It wasn’t an offset like this one,” he added, and pointed at the smoker brought from Gonzo’s.
“During the summer we would spend a lot of time at my grandparents’ house in Morgan City. My cousins and I would always go there. They lived near Lake Palourde, so we would get to go fishing there — for bass, catfish, perch. We didn’t have a boat or anything, so we were just fishing off the land. We grilled hamburgers, lots of chicken. Turkey too. My grandfather used to smoke a turkey that would take 24 hours — he’d have to get up in the middle of the night. It was all Cajun cooking.”
Donald Rouse said, “My dad would barbecue. Now, Donny and I — we do it! But there were days long ago when dad would do the barbecue. He’d do brisket or steaks or whatever might be for a special occasion. Certainly, he didn’t barbecue the way Gonzo does — but we thought it was good.”
Between bites, Veillon said, “My favorite thing today was the brisket boudin. Apparently, the dirty rice in it is his grandmother’s recipe.”
He and Donald turned and looked at the Rouses team, most of whom were eating desserts, or drinking Cokes and bottles of water. “We’re so proud of what our team has accomplished and it’s great to see some of them today enjoying themselves, and supporting a great local establishment in the community like Gonzo’s,” said Veillon. As for the dessert, he told me: “They said I’ve got to try it, and I said I’d just have a little bit. And then I ate the whole thing. Now I need to go find a hammock.”
Donald laughed at this. “Jason does such a good job,” he said. “He’s young, he’s aggressive. And every day there are people lined up at his restaurant. They give beer to people because the lines get so long! And we love that. We’re not only about Rouses. We’re about community. And we love seeing members of our community succeed.”
Success has come fast and hard for Gonzo’s Smokehouse. They don’t really advertise, aside from posting to their social media accounts. Their Instagram account, which consists mostly of images of meats they’ve cooked, alongside glimpses of Gonzalez’s family behind the scenes, has already grown to more than 22,000 followers. “I try to help with the food photography,” he told me. “I’m getting better — things like lighting, I’m still trying to learn all that!”
Gonzo’s Smokehouse, located at 12325 River Road in Luling, is open for lunchtime on Thursdays, when they sell smashburgers — brisket trimmings that are ground in-house and seasoned, and smashed on a flattop grill with brisket tallow — and Fridays, for meat trays that include smoked brisket, pork belly burnt ends and brisket boudin, from 11:30am to 3pm, or until they sell out of food.
Those two days of service take an entire week to prepare — and you can taste the love that goes into it. Gonzalez does his ordering on Monday, trimming the meats when they arrive. He keeps at it on Tuesday, and begins hand-making the boudin as well. His father comes in on Wednesday, and they start smoking the boudin. On Thursday, Gonzalez gets in at 5am and begins cooking the brisket for Friday. Pork shoulders are on one pit, and on the others are brisket burnt ends, beef cheeks, oxtails, pork jowls and other cuts. He prides himself on changing up the menu, offering cuts of meat that no other shops around here are willing to do, with the extensive work required to prep and smoke. His sister and aunt come in on Thursday for lunch service and, while Gonzalez is seasoning meat, checking fires, and taking meat off and wrapping it, they’re making patties. His dad is on the grill smashing burgers. Then they’re all back at it again on Friday for an even longer lunch.
The work is relentless, and requires attention and artistry. That’s just the way Gonzalez likes it.
“There’s no plans to get any bigger,” he said. “I thought about maybe like hiring a bigger staff, adding more days. I went back and forth, struggled with it. But I’m keeping it small. I’m keeping the love in what we do, and I’m keeping it in the family.”
