94Salt, Pepper, and a Whole Lot of Prayer

Drive out Highway 6, cross the Twin Bridges over Lake Waco, and on the white metal flank of Helberg Barbecue a pair of folded hands fills the wall: gold rays coming off them, a banner curling underneath, a red rose at the bottom. It is drawn exactly the way a tattoo parlor's flash sheet draws praying hands — heavy black outline, flat color, the banner waiting for a name — and the words wrapped around it are the whole recipe. SALT, PEPPER, AND A WHOLE LOT OF PRAYER.

That is not a slogan somebody wrote for them. It is what the Helbergs say when you ask what is in the rub: there is no secret ingredient, it is all salt, pepper, and a whole lot of prayer. Central Texas brisket has always been salt and pepper. The prayer is the part they mean.

Phillip and Yvette Helberg — a Texas boy, a farmer's daughter and a little backyard smoker, as they tell it — started cooking in Southern California in 2017 and opened on this stretch of Highway 6 on April 27, 2018, a roadside joint with a drive-through window. Texas Monthly named them one of the best new barbecue joints in the state the next year, and put them in its Top 50 in 2021. Then, in November 2023, the building burned. Less than a month later they were serving again out of donated trailers. They broke ground on a new building that spring, cooked from a trailer beside the construction through 2024, and opened the doors on March 8, 2025, with some of the wood and the art from the old place carried inside. These hands are on the new building's wall. When these people say prayer is the third ingredient, they are describing what got them here.

The painter is Mike MacDonald of The Old 93, a Waco sign painter who came here from Montana by way of Austin, where he learned the trade under Todd Sanders at Roadhouse Relics, and who spent years photographing old neon signs before they disappeared. Everything on this wall is brushed by hand, the way a sign would have been in 1950 — you can see it in the lettering, which leans into the curve a little differently every time. His shop mark, THE OLD 93, is tucked small under the banner's right-hand curl.