Methodology
Smoke Stack is an independent, AI-assisted guide to Texas-style BBQ in Cook County and the collar counties — DuPage, Lake, Will, Kane, McHenry. We don't take payment for placement, we don't accept comped meals in exchange for coverage, and the same scoring lens applies to every spot.
What counts as Texas BBQ
Texas BBQ centers brisket — smoked low and slow over post oak or another hardwood — and puts beef in the lead role. Sausage (especially jalapeño cheddar), beef ribs, and pork ribs round out a typical plate. Sauce is traditionally on the side. We organize by sub-style: Central Texas (salt-and-pepper rub, no sauce), East Texas (sweeter, more sauce), South Texas (barbacoa influence), and Hill Country (German-Czech sausage tradition).
How a listing gets in
We import candidates from Google Places using BBQ-specific queries, then a human checks each one. Spots that clearly serve Texas-style BBQ get the full treatment:
- Menu extraction. We scrape the restaurant's own website and parse menu items, prices, and descriptions.
- Photo gallery. Customer-attributed photos from Google Places (not just staged marketing shots).
- Social links. Instagram, Facebook, TikTok pulled from the website.
- Reddit signal. We search r/chicago, r/chicagofood, r/bbq, and r/smoking for mentions, then a human reviews each one before it goes live with a direct link to the original thread.
- AI summary. A grounded summary written from the actual source material — never invented.
What we don't do (yet)
- Delivery-app price comparison. GrubHub and DoorDash markups are real, but their data isn't reliably scrapable. We'll add this as admin-curated data once we have a workflow.
- Hot takes from random Yelpers. We use Google ratings as the rating baseline because they're the most consistent.
Coverage
Phase one is Cook + collar counties Texas BBQ. We'll expand to Kansas City, Memphis, Carolina, Korean BBQ, and fusion as the directory matures.