David Longoria announced it the way he ran the place, with no fuss. “HELLO, we are closing BBQ shop,” he posted last Thursday. Friday was the last day.
Longoria’s BBQ, the corrugated-metal joint at 100 Christopher Drive on the Everman edge of south Fort Worth, is closed after 31 years. In his goodbye post, David listed what the shop had earned: a dozen magazine stories, two spots on the most famous Top 50 barbecue list in Texas, and a Travel Channel episode. He wrote that he was “closing the doors and cutting the light one last time.”
The story starts with his father. Fidencio “Fred” Longoria was working at Bell Helicopter in the mid-1970s when he began making sausage at home, trying to recreate the links he grew up on in Gonzales. Around 1990 he landed on the recipe that made the family’s name, a coarse-ground brisket sausage with a spice blend nobody outside the family has seen. In 1995 he opened the restaurant around it.
Fred later handed the business to his sons, Danny and David. When Danny moved to Mexico, David took over the pits. He brought years of experience as a Kroger meat cutter and cooked on wood-fired rotisserie smokers burning post oak and pecan…