More Texas-style barbecue is coming to Miami — this time from a local
It’s a great time to be a barbecue lover in Miami.
Sakaya Kitchen chef/owner Richard Hales is opening a new barbecue restaurant, Society BBQ, in a Little River food hall. His beef-and-chicken barbecue restaurant in The Citadel joins a pair of barbecue restaurants within five miles of it that have quickly become Miami infatuations.
“It’s a Miami thing: One person does it, then the whole city does it,” Hales joked.
In this case, it’s a good trend.
Society BBQ, which focuses on smoked prime-grade beef brisket and mammoth 1.5 pound beef ribs, follows the recently opened Hometown Bar-B-Cue, which brought Texas-style barbecue to Allapattah after becoming a national hit in Brooklyn. They both join Little Haiti’s Bon Gout Barbecue, which added Haitian flavors to roadside-style barbecue brisket and pork ribs.
“I knew this was rare in Miami,” Hales said. “I just fell in love with this style of barbecue.”
Hales says for the last six years he has been studying Texas-style barbecue, which uses minimal seasoning and low, slow indirect smoking to produce succulent and purposely fatty briskets that melt in your mouth. He took two-week trips over the years, traveling from Austin to Taylor to Dallas and throughout North Carolina and Georgia, tasting and trying different techniques, he said.
“You have Texas-style and everything else is … not Texas. It intrigued me to want to do it,” Hales said.
At Society, he said to expect the highest-grade prime beef, burnt ends, smoked chicken and chicken salad, and sides to include loaded smoked baked potatoes, sweet potato casseroles, and squash and cheese casserole with hatch chiles.
His wife, Jenny Hales, bakes the desserts, from smoked bourbon bread pudding with a bourbon-maple syrup to an ice cream sundae with balls of vanilla ice cream rolled in cocoa to look like a baked potato. Prices for meats range from $6-$9, include $9 for a half-pound brisket. They can also be made into sandwiches, ranging from $8-$12.
Hales’ restaurants are usually groundbreakers.
He was among the first to bring the gourmet food truck movement to Miami with his Dim Ssam A Go Go truck after his affordable and refined pan-Asian Sakaya Kitchen. He also introduced Nashville-style hot chicken to Miami at his Bird & Bone in Miami Beach and upscale Szechuan cuisine at Blackbrick Chinese.
Society would have been the first Texas-style barbecue if not for a series of health scares. He was diagnosed with thyroid cancer in September 2018 and early this year had to have a pair of benign brain tumors removed.
Instead of opening Society, which required him to be on-site as the pit master, he kept the lease and opened a version of Sakaya, which has been running for a decade.
Society’s stall in The Citadel opens Dec. 6 with a limited menu and daily starting Monday, from 11 a.m. until the meat runs out.
Society BBQ
8300 NE 2nd Ave. in The Citadel food hall, Little River
