A point in the owner’s favor: he freely gives out his methods and recipes, so anyone who’s not inclined to wait in long lines can make Franklin brisket at home.
My younger brother in New York made it for us when I visited last month, and it WAS mighty good. Not worth standing in line all morning, but very good nonetheless.
You’ll need to when you get to my age.
Just another day at the DMV. Ive waited longer to get concert tix.
It doesn’t seem that there’s a six hour line to get food. People start showing up six hours before the place opens to make sure they get food before it runs out- but that’s not the same thing. From what the article says , there’s no reason to think that you couldn’t show up at three pm and get served in 20 minutes- although since it’s barbeque there’s a chance that they are out of food at 3 pm.This is more like people who start lining up hours before the stores open on Black Friday to get the doorbusters before they run out , or the ones who start lining up days in advance to get one of 1000 union apprenticeship applications being handed out, or the people who used to start lining up days in advance for concert tickets or who lined up a day in advance to buy a iPhone 6s
“There’s a chance they’ll be out of food if you show up at 3PM?” - LOL…usually it’s sometime before the 11AM official opening when the line is long enough that they go down and tell everyone beyond a certain point they’re out of luck for the day.
When I was in college, and there was only the original Steve’s Ice Cream in Somerville, Mass. we used to wait in line about hour to get it. But we were young a foolish.
Well, according to his book, Franklin’s using some kind of USDA Prime organic briskets that you can’t just go buy at the local supermarket.
So there’s that, and whatever degree of barbecue lore and experience that would make his barbecue particularly good.
But I agree; 5 hours is too long to wait. I’d just go somewhere else in the area and spend the other 4.5 hours doing something I wanted to do.
In 5 hours, I could buy some meat, marinade, BBQ sauce, charcoal, and fixings. Go home, prepare it, in an hour or so light the grill and start cookin’ . Serve to the family, wrap the leftovers, wash the dishes, kick back and digest. We would all be perfectly happy with this scenario!..I would give some money to a friend or neighbor who wanted to go wait in line and ask them to bring me some back.
You’d be fixing New York State Style Barbecue. Not Central Texas Style.
However, next time I’m in Austin, I’ll get my barbecue elsewhere. Our local PBS station runs Aaron Franklin’s show. He seems to know his stuff & has some interesting guests. But the Austin-centered episodes are knee-deep in hipsters.
We have some pretty good barbecue in Houston, too.
Brief hijack: I enjoy good barbecue from time to time, but it’s not my favorite cuisine, nor do I have a strong opinion about the “right” way to make it.
But there are people with near-religious convictions as to what barbecue is supposed to be. And those people regard any other kind of barbecue as a heresy, an abomination. So, even if Franklin’s food is truly fantastic, there are going to be people in North Carolina or Kansas City who’ll rail that Franklin is doing it all wrong, and doesn’t deserve to be called barbecue at all.
There are people who’ll go to the mat over whether beef can really be called barbecue. There are others who’ll kill you for adding the wrong ingredients to your sauce. There are still others who’ll explode at the very idea of putting ANY sauce on the meat!
I couldn’t care less, myself, but it’s a VERY touchy subject for some.
There is no way you are smoking a brisket in 5 hours. I smoke brisket at home a few times a year and it generally takes about 12 hours. I get up at 7 am to make it. Granted, you don’t have to wait in line for 5 hours for brisket, but comparing what you describe cooking with what they are doing at Franklin’s is like comparing McDonald’s to the Inn at Little Washington.
I’ve visited Austin once, and a friend took me to a bbq joint in a strip mall. It was quite good, so I don’t see a need to wait that long for food.
The longest I’ll wait for food is about an hour, at a breakfast place south of Seattle. But I can tell you that from those waits I’ve learned that I can’t wait any longer. It’s just too hard on the back.
I would not wait in line for 5 hours for anything, nor would I camp out over night for a movie ticket or a new phone, but to each their own.
I won’t buy water either.
Before I went back to school, I worked at Perkins for a while. People would wait TWO HOURS for a table on the weekends.
PERKINS! 
Ha!
I might have stood in long lines for the Cro-nut when it first came out.
The couple of times I’ve eaten there it was pretty good (breakfast), but it’s not even worth an hour’s wait.
There is sushi bar called Sushi Dai in Tsukiji fish market in Tokyo that is known as sushi Mecca. Lines there are typically 4-5 hours long. The best time (in terms of shortest waiting time) to get a seat is to start queing before they open at 5am. Even then, you’ll have people queing from around 4am and earlier.
The day I went I got in line around 10am and told me it would be a 4.5 hour wait. I was prepared and had a plastic lawn chair and a book. With the number of people dropping out throughout the wait, I got in an hour earlier than the estimated time for a nice late lunch.
The verdict? The sushi is amazing but not 4-hour-wait amazing. (I don’t know if any food is…) In fact, you can get the same quality sushi in Ginza just a few kilometres and a phone call away. The only catch is you’ll have to pay triple the 8,000 yen price you pay at Sushi Dai.
Ah, Time versus Money.
It reminds me of when RENT opened on Broadway and offered heavily discounted tickets for the first two rows of the theater 2 hours before the performance. It was designed so young people who had plenty of time, but not a lot of money, could see the show by waiting in line. Then the line started forming super duper early in the morning. The system started to break down I believe since people were starting to wait the night before.
The kid that waits in line for money makes perfect sense. He’s a kid. He has TONS of time on his hands and probably little money. Great exchange.
When I was younger, line waiter was a job you could do in DC to get tickets for important congressional hearings and supreme court cases. I know a few people who did that kind of work through a temp agency.
It’s Austin… what else would you expect? They put the “hip” in hippie and hipster.