I’ve eaten and enjoyed barbecue my entire life. I’ve also went to barbecue festivals and enjoyed barbecue. OMG the wonderful smell of a dozen or more smokers cooking pork.
The sauce has always been in a plastic squirt bottle or paper cup. A good restaurant has several sauces on the table. Sweet, tangy, 
(peppers) etc.
Have you ever eaten barbecue with a heated sauce? Why is that even a thing? The meat is already served warm. Hopefully on a lightly toasted bun.
I’m not a BBQ sauce guy but I’d serve my own, that I just prepared in a saucepan, hot. Open Pit or Mango Froot Chipotle, who cares? A restaurant might be doing something else altogether that’s is getting called BBQ sauce like au jus or birrera consumme that is always hot.
au jus is served warm because the grease would congeal after cooling.
I would be furious if a restaurant put it in a take out bag almost boiling hot.
Glad that unfortunate woman got compensation.
Traditional barbecue sauce is ketchup, brown sugar, water,Worcestershire sauce, dry mustard and various spices. Hot pepper sauce if you like it hot.
People who barbecue for competitions take their sauce very seriously. Bragging rights. 
I tend to keep my BBQ sauce in the fridge. I always heat it a little before using because cold BBQ sauce sucks.
I make my own and serve it hot. Wouldn’t want to put cold sauce on hot meat.
I’d do the same thing. Warm it up.
The sauces in restaurant squeeze bottles are at room temperature.
That restaurant gave the customer 189F sauce. That’s way, way too hot.
Dickey’s (yeah, not the greatest BBQ around, but they can be passable) has served their sauce heated for ages. But there’s no way it would even cause a first degree burn if I poured it on my legs. This place was going nuts with the heat.
Texas style sauce is typically made from the drippings from the brisket, combined with other stuff- vinegar, brown sugar, hot chiles, tomato puree, cumin, chili powder, etc… It has a definite Mexican influence in terms of the spices.
It’s not that thick, gloopy stuff they serve in Kansas City, but it’s not straight vinegar like in North Carolina either. And it’s often served hot, or at least warm. Not boiling hot though; you shouldn’t burn your mouth on it.
This afternoon I ducked into the closest “Sports Bar”, because the KC Chiefs game had already started. I hoped they’d have some good food and omigahhhhd, they had a Cubano with pulled pork, ham, bacon, pickles, fried onions…
… and warm BBQ sauce on the side.
The whole concept of “barbecue sauce on the side” is alien to me. For me, barbecue sauce is a cooking ingredient, not a condiment.
Most American BBQ sauce is so sugar-laden that it can’t be used as a cooking ingredient if the food is being prepared other than as a stew. It’ll be burned to a char if roasted or grilled or …
So it has to be poured on as a condiment at the end.
In the alternative, a lot of modern BBQ restaurant practice is to have 3 or 6 or 12 kinds of sauce. So the customer can have it their way. That won’t work of they have to cook each of their mains 12 different ways. Instead they cook the ribs or pulled pork or chicken or whatever mostly plain, then the customer customizes their plate with the sauce of choice.
Speaking just for me, I can’t/won’t eat American BBQ sauce; far too sweet for my weak pancreas. So I’m darn glad I can get a restaurant meal of various smoked or dry-rubbed meats not coated in ketchup+treacle.
I’m the farthest thing from an expert on “barbecue”, as defined by the American southwest, with which I have zero experience. But I will say that this observation, while not entirely wrong, is not entirely correct, either.
Barbecue sauce works just fine on pork chops or skinless chicken breasts that are going on the grill, because in the time it takes to grill them the sauce just browns and caramelizes. But this is mostly a throwback to my youth, as I’ve found many much better marinades. But for larger cuts that take much longer on the grill or rotisserie for which you may want to use barbecue sauce, you would brush it on as a glaze near the end of the cooking. In both cases, but especially the latter, the meat would already have been treated with a dry rub.
Article states this was drive-thru. I could understand why a restaurant would heat up sauce for drive-thru or to-go orders, to help the meal hold heat better while it’s being carried away to be eaten elsewhere. Maybe the BBQ artist preparing the order got a little excited with the microwave.
Just 5 minutes of cooling probably would have made it a nice dish rather than a lava trap. After all, BBQ is a sloppy, messy, sticky food. Who in their right minds would eat it in a car? I guess now we know.
Or they put the sauce in the microwave, ran it the usual time, got distracted, thought “Did I push ‘Start’ or not? Not sure, I’ll do it again”, pushed ‘Start’ a second time, and inadvertently delivered boiling sauce.
You do not cook barbecue in, on, between, or any way in contact with barbecue sauce. It’s a condiment.
Barbecue sauce heat is supposed to be defined by its ingredients, not temperature. Room temp or at best warm sauce is fine.
A deeply stirring closing argument. One for the books. “I call Your Honor’s attention to the precedent set in Morales v. Miller’s Barbecue.”
Good barbecue doesn’t need sauce. It’s a condiment that’s entirely optional.
True, if you define “barbecue” strictly as the US southern thing most often associated with Texas. For most of the rest of us, it’s a term for any kind of outdoor grilling, whether on direct flame heat or indirect heat (burners under the meat are turned off, or the meat is on a rotating spit). Thus why that thing sitting out on your back deck is called a “barbecue”, whether gas or charcoal, at least by us here northerners.
And for that kind of cooking, which produces wonderful smoky goodness with any method of direct or indirect grilling or broiling, barbecue sauce is often a useful cooking or basting sauce. Besides, all the commercial barbecue sauces I’ve tried have too strong a flavour for use as something like a dipping sauce or add-on over the meat. The stuff us here northerners use for that is called “gravy”.
Here in Corpus Christi heated barbecue sauce isn’t a thing*. At every other barbecue place in the Coastal Bend, and I’ve eaten at all of them, barbecue sauce is served at room temperature.
*. Except presumably at Bill Miller’s, which I don’t eat at by choice because it’s by far the worst barbecue in the area. The gap between Bill Miller’s and the second worst is larger than the gap between the second worst and the best. When I do have it’s because someone ordered it for a banquet. It’s reheated (they make it in San Antonio, refrigerate it, then ship it to Corpus) and the quality of the meat makes me think they use the bottom of the barrel supplier.
Reheated barbecue at a restaurant sounds disgusting. Part of the barbecue appeal is the smokers cooking meat as I arrive.
I use a little sauce on my bun. Not too much. I like tasting the smoked meat.
I occasionally buy a plate with sliced barbecue, beans and slaw. I’ll try the meat first before dipping it in a sauce. Sometimes it’s so good that I don’t need sauce.