Tejas Chocolate + Barbecue

Post-oak before the counter fills

Briskets meet post-oak smoke at Tejas Chocolate + Barbecue in Tomball. The work here is carried by the founders and the hands around the smokers, the chocolate bench, and the walk-up counter in Old Town Tomball. Scott Moore, a fifth-generation Texan who left a long career in the railroad industry, drives the culinary vision alongside his brother Greg Moore and partner Michelle Holland, and the stated method is a craftsman mindset shared across barbecue and chocolate. The house began in 2015 as a bean-to-bar chocolate project, selling at the Tomball Farmer’s Market before the operation moved into a former residential home on North Elm Street, one of the older structures in town, built in 1907. Barbecue came after chocolate, not as an accessory but as a way to answer Tomball’s appetite for the craft and to support the slower chocolate work behind it. The lineage is local and practical: cacao beans roasted and stone-ground, briskets trimmed by hand, sausage made in house, meats seasoned heavily enough to hold through a long smoke. The daily measure is physical: hand-trimming, seasoning the briskets over the top, and roasting 28 of them a day in offset smokers fuelled by post-oak for a mild smoke.

Brisket funding the chocolate habit

The program keeps two disciplines under one roof. On the barbecue side, USDA Prime brisket, ribs, house-made sausage, smoked pork belly, carrot souffle, brisket nachos, pastrami brisket, and beef ribs form the working vocabulary. The brisket is hand-trimmed, seasoned with force, and cooked in offset smokers over post-oak, chosen for a smoke profile that does not crowd the beef. One account from the house describes 28 briskets a day moving through that system, a number that explains both the morning line and the late-day scarcity. On the chocolate side, the process starts with single-origin cacao, roasted and stone-ground into confections that keep the original craftory visible even when barbecue draws the crowd. The pairing is not decorative. Fat, salt, smoke, chile, sugar, and cacao share the same counter, and the room lets them sit close together without turning either craft into a novelty.

A home-shaped room with smoke in its grain

The room still reads as a house before it reads as a restaurant. Guests move to the counter, study the chalkboard, and carry trays toward a casual dining room or the sunny picnic tables outside. The atmosphere is rustic and close, with conversation at a normal pitch and the rhythm of counter service setting the pace. It is not polished into distance. The old building matters because the craft happens at human scale: a smoker load, a tray of sliced brisket, a case of truffles, a side of carrot souffle leaving the pass. Tomball is present without being staged, in the farmer’s-market origin, the Old Town address, and the way the line forms for food that may run out.

Two crafts, one address

The house holds Michelin Bib Gourmand recognition and a total award count of 2, but its more durable claim is the unusual discipline of keeping barbecue and bean-to-bar chocolate in the same daily practice. The next plate here does not need a new frame. It can be brisket, poblano cheese sausage, smoked pork belly, and a truffle from Tejas Chocolate + Barbecue.