Courtesy
Do you know the identity of the brisket bandit.
Hide yo' kids, hide yo' wife...hide yo' brisket? Another local barbecue joint has fallen victim to the beef-stealing jackass we've dubbed the Brisket Bandit. This time, B & B Smokehouse at 2627 Pleasanton, was broken into last Friday, January 31.
General Manager Catherine Lopez was the first to notice the burglary, who discovered the Brisket Bandit had made away with more than 200 pounds of brisket halfway through the smoking process.
"The footage shows it happened at around 3:20 a.m., but you can only see a shadow," Lopez said of the break-in, where the BB cut into their fenced in enclosure and picked the lock. B & B Smokehouse has upgraded their camera system and changed their locks.
The Austin Chronicle first connected the break-ins: Conger's Smoke Shack was also hit in early January, a Jason Dady's Two Bros. BBQ Market lost $2,500 worth of product in the early hours of January 16.
As NPR's Here and Now reported in late January, brisket prices are up 60 percent from last year, so we can speculate that this is a) not going to stop any time soon; b) there seems to be an underlying connection as the guy knows his way around the pits; c) someone somewhere is selling a whole lot of black market brisket; and d) local barbecue joints would do well to beef up security (pun very much so intended), like, yesterday.
