The Pitmaster Next Door

How Trey Sanchez Built One of Texas’s Highly Acclaimed BBQ Spots Right Here in Allen

Vaqueros Texas Bar-B-Q earned a New York Times Top 20 nod, a James Beard nomination, a D Magazine ranking, and a Texas Monthly taco list spot — and most of Allen still doesn’t know it’s there.

Walk through the Watters Creek district on Garden Park Drive and you might mistake Vaqueros Texas Bar-B-Q for a Texas Hill Country transplant — something that belonged in Lockhart or Llano before it wandered north. The brick-and-stone exterior, the blue patio umbrellas stretched along the sidewalk, the weathered wood facade — it reads like a place that has been here longer than it has. Step through the entrance (a handmade log sign reads “This Guey,” which in Spanglish lands exactly as intended: This Way) and the picture sharpens fast.

The dining room opens wide — reclaimed wood dividers trimmed in corrugated metal, big windows onto the street, exposed ductwork overhead, ceiling fans turning slow. Lunch tables fill steadily. The service line stretches long and low, manned by a crew in black moving with quiet efficiency. Behind the glass: brisket, ribs, chipotle cheddar sausage, pulled pork, turkey — each resting under heat lamps in the kind of amber glow that makes you forget you had plans for the afternoon.

At the center of all of it is Arnulfo “Trey” Sanchez — pitmaster, owner, and a man who has been doing this longer than most of his customers have been eating barbecue seriously.

It Started with His Father

Trey’s relationship with large-scale cooking didn’t start in a backyard. It started in the smoke.

His father, Arnold Sanchez Sr., rose to local fame on the barbecue and chili cook-off circuit in the late 1970s before opening Arnold’s Texas Bar-B-Q in East Dallas. That restaurant — and the competitive cook-off world that preceded it — is where Trey learned to cook. Creativity and showmanship were always part of what the family did, and those qualities never left him.

He can still recall a 1988 catering event in Frisco where the crew brought everything: Western town decor, props, entertainment, and a custom trailer mounted offset smoker. They cooked onsite through the night in shifts, slept in an indoor driving range, and worked two days with little rest. That kind of all-in commitment — the planning, the execution, the refusal to cut corners — runs straight through to how Vaqueros operates today.

Two lessons from his father still guide him: Perfect is good enough and Plan your work and work your plan.

Trey also trained under pitmaster Don Glasco, who became both a close friend and a major influence on his technique. In 1989, Trey, his father, and Don opened a barbecue restaurant together and ran it for ten years.

The Years Away

When that restaurant closed in 1999, Trey stepped away from the pit and into a classroom. He spent nearly two decades teaching art and Spanish — a pivot that sounds like a departure but wasn’t entirely. Teaching, he’ll tell you, is about guidance and influencing others to reach their full potential. That same instinct shows up in how he runs a kitchen and how he now teaches barbecue classes.

His mother’s career in advertising left its mark too. He used to tag along to her office as a kid, watching professional designers and art directors work. That early exposure to visual craft and intentional creativity became part of his identity — and eventually found its way back into his food.

The Accident That Wasn’t

In August 2018, Trey launched Vaqueros as a pop-up out of a food truck at Hop & Sting Brewery in Grapevine. He didn’t set out to build a restaurant empire. He was just cooking.

By November of that same year, three months in, someone overheard a conversation and started asking questions. That person turned out to be the former Director of Culinary for a major DFW restaurant group. It was the beginning of a long, slow process — one that included a national television shoot in early 2020, the disruption of COVID, and years of proving the concept before the current brick-and-mortar location at Watters Creek became real.

Through all of it, Trey kept working. He calls the momentum he sensed early on “something always in the works,” and he was right.

What the Critics Noticed

In 2024, the New York Times named Vaqueros one of the top 20 barbecue spots in Texas.

That same year, Trey Sanchez received a James Beard semi-finalist nomination for Best Chef Texas.

D Magazine ranked Vaqueros the #5 BBQ joint in North Texas and #36 overall among the best restaurants in the region. Texas Monthly put them on its 50 Best Tacos in Texas list.

What’s Actually on the Plates

Trey works with prime brisket and cooks exclusively over hickory wood. That choice matters. Hickory runs hotter and imparts a stronger smoke flavor than oak — it’s not the fashionable wood in the current Texas BBQ conversation, which tends to favor post oak, but Trey isn’t chasing fashion. He treats every piece of beef the way a steakhouse treats a prime cut, and the result has a smoke ring and bark that earn the price on the board.

The menu at Vaqueros reflects who he is: a man who is equally at home in both cultures his food comes from. Texas barbecue and Mexican tradition aren’t a gimmick combination here — they’re a natural one. Smoke, he’ll tell you, adds a depth of flavor to regional Mexican dishes that takes them somewhere most kitchens never go.

The service line covers traditional Texas meats (brisket, ribs, sausage, turkey, pork) alongside a Tex-Mex section that includes BBQ birria, suadero, barbacoa, carnitas, and cochinita pibil. The window signage calls it a “Smoke Lab.” That’s accurate.

The Signature Platters tell the full story in three tiers:

• Tex-Mex Tour (feeds 2-3, $62): Half-pound brisket, half-pound chipotle cheddar sausage, three BBQ birria tacos with consommé, two pints of sides and tortillas.
• Texas Tour (feeds 2-3, $59): Half-pound brisket, half-pound ribs, half-pound Texas hot links, two pints of sides.
• Grand Tour (feeds 4-5, $110): A full pound of brisket, a full pound of ribs, five BBQ birria tacos with consommé, three pints of sides and tortillas.

For first-timers, Trey recommends going beyond the obvious. The smoked pork neck is one of the more uncommon items on any DFW menu, and he considers it essential to understanding what the kitchen is doing. The BBQ birria tacos — brisket-grade meat, house consommé for dipping — are the kind of thing you stop mid-bite to think about.

Sides run apple gorgonzola slaw, III Cheese Mac, potato salad, Texas Trail Beans, and house-seasoned fries. Banana pudding closes it out. A margarita machine and a Paloma machine sit behind the bar. Topo Chico is stocked in a deep ice bath on the dining room floor, the way it ought to be.

The Pit Room

The visual centerpiece of Vaqueros isn’t on the dining floor. It’s through the back, in what is one of the only climate-controlled pit rooms in the state: a pair of massive custom rotisserie smokers covered floor-to-ceiling in Aztec-inspired artwork — swooping geometric patterns in silver, white, and black. The design was fabricated by Ryan Newland at Backline Fabrication, who knows Trey’s aesthetic well enough to have executed it largely on his own instinct. Trey didn’t see the finished design until the pits were revealed.

The Aztec imagery is deliberate. Trey spent a significant part of his early twenties traveling through Mexico and visiting Aztec ruins. That visual tradition is deeply embedded in Chicano culture, and embedding it in the functional heart of his kitchen is as personal as it gets.

He runs 1,000-gallon offset smokers and finishes in the rotisserie — deep smoke penetration from the offset, consistency from the rotation during the hold. On any given service day, sheet pans of house-made sausage line the rack beside the pit, links already carrying a deep mahogany from the smoke.

This is not a restaurant that drops a frozen product in a warming drawer and calls it a menu.

BBQ School and What’s Coming

On June 28, Trey is hosting a BBQ class at the restaurant. As of this writing, five spots remain. The chalkboard at the service counter calls it “the perfect Father’s Day gift,” and it’s hard to argue with that.

He’s also planning a World Cup launch event on June 19 in partnership with Jim Beam — the opening game on-screen, a gin and lemonade launch party, Jim Beam reps on-site with giveaways, and a new cocktail added to the menu. For every Mexico match throughout the tournament: $5 tacos, $5 margaritas, and $5 Mexican beers.

Father’s Day weekend brings beef ribs as a special. Full plate bones, not trimmed baby back — the kind that require a dedicated cook day.

Still Introducing Himself

Here’s the thing Trey mentioned more than once: Allen doesn’t fully know he’s here yet.

The New York Times knows. The James Beard Foundation knows. D Magazine knows. Texas Monthly knows. Barbecue travelers who plan trips around ranked lists have made Vaqueros a destination. But the people who live within three miles of 965 Garden Park Drive — many of them are still finding out.

The murals inside the dining room honor his father’s original East Dallas restaurant, Arnold’s Texas Bar-B-Q. The Aztec smokers carry decades of personal history. The food on the line is the product of a life lived at the intersection of two cultures, two creative disciplines, and more than thirty years of learning to cook under pressure.

That gap between what Vaqueros has earned and what Allen knows about it is closing. The dining room runs steady through lunch service. The patio fills on good days. The bar area — Topo Chico on ice, a competition trophy beside a bottle of BBQ wine, the Paloma machine humming — has the feel of a place where people stay longer than they planned.

But if you haven’t made it in yet, that’s the story. One of the most decorated pitmasters in Texas is running a restaurant in Allen. The brisket is prime. The wood is hickory. The birria tacos come with consommé. And the pitmaster has been doing this since before most of us thought to care about any of it.

Vaqueros Texas Bar-B-Q 965 Garden Park Dr, Allen, TX 75013 Watters Creek District vaquerostxbbq.com
BBQ Class: Sunday, June 28 — 5 spots remaining.World Cup Launch Event: June 19 with Jim Beam.Father’s Day Special: Beef Ribs.