“Not a post I’d ever thought I had to make, guys,” he wrote on Sept. 20. “Unfortunately, moving forward, brisket will no longer be a part of our menu.”
Soto figured brisket would have to sell for $51 a pound at the new cost. His customers were already paying $37. “That was the final straw that broke the camel’s back,” he told The Washington Post.
Butter’s has made Texas Monthly’s Top 50 barbecue list twice, in 2021 and again in 2025, and the magazine’s barbecue editor, Daniel Vaughn, says it’s the first restaurant on the list to stop serving brisket altogether. Soto opened the place in 2017 in his hometown of Mathis after leaving a fuel plant job in Corpus Christi to run it full time, and it moved to a bigger building in Sinton once his business grew.
Brisket took up 70% of the restaurant’s food spending
More than 70% of what the restaurant spent on supplies was going to brisket, Soto said in his Sept. 20 Facebook post, and this year’s sales for the BBQ staple are tracking lower than any he’s had. He apologized to customers and said he’d tried everything to absorb the nonstop cost increases.
Menu photos published in 2025 by the Corpus Christi Caller-Times had Butter’s brisket listed at $34 a pound, while diner photos on Google show it at $24 five years ago.
Brisket may still be available to customers who order it ahead, with smoked beef cheek moving onto the regular menu in its place. Butter’s also smokes pork ribs, turkey and a jalapeño-cheddar sausage Texas Monthly raves about.
Beef prices are squeezing BBQ joints all over Texas
Years of drought and high operating costs have left the U.S. cattle herd at its smallest in 75 years, according to the American Farm Bureau Federation, and retail beef averaged a record $9.64 a pound in April, up about 13% from a year earlier, per USDA Economic Research Service data.
Silverado Smokehouse owner William Paul Sissamis said he’d sooner take beef ribs off the menu than charge customers more, and at Hoegemeyer’s Barbeque Barn, David Page told Corpus Christi TV station KIII that beef has climbed about 40% in two years — referring to it as “a killer,” to his business.
Meanwhile, In Lacy Lakeview, Anthony Walton still sells brisket at his Broken G BBQ even though his wholesale cost has gone from somewhere between $3.50 and $4 a pound to $6. Charging what the meat actually costs him would put a pound near $40, he told Waco TV station KWTX, so he takes the loss and earns his profit on everything else he sells.
“When it comes to BBQ, if you don’t have brisket, you might as well shut down,” he said.
What this means for your grocery cart
Even if you don’t own a restaurant, you’re enduring the effects of cattle shortage every time you buy ground beef or steak at the grocery store. The federal government has turned to more imported beef to try to ease prices, despite ranchers saying the imports squeeze their profit margins even further.
As a consumer, there are ways to soften the blow to your wallet until supply recovers. Plenty of shoppers are swapping beef for chicken, which has remained the cheaper protein as it is available in abundance, and cheaper cuts like chuck roast or flank steak can fill in for pricier ones if you cook them right.
If your household goes through a lot of beef and you’ve got the freezer space, buying beef in bulk from a local farm could make the most sense — some buyers split a whole cow — and can shave down what you pay per pound.
Godwin Oluponmile is a content specialist, SEO strategist and copywriter with seven years of expertise in finance, Web 3.0, B2B SaaS and technology. His work has been featured in publications such as Entrepreneur, HackerNoon, Blocktelegraph and Benzinga.
