What I wouldn’t give to have been in on the planning meeting for the maniacally delicious brisket boudin mac and cheese quesadilla served by Cobo’s Que.
“OK, it’s a quesadilla with our smoked brisket, see, but we put a layer of mac and cheese in there,” is how I imagine the brain trust at EaDo’s brash new sports bar figuring out the format. “And we make the mac and cheese with our smoked boudin! Stir it right into the queso base! Why not?”
I ordered the quesadilla as a lark, wanting to find out if pitmaster Raul Jacobo and crew could bring off this preposterous-sounding idea. I ended up a devoted, if slightly perplexed, fan of the Mexican/Creole/Soul dish, with all its madcap vibes of Houston Barbecue Fusion 2022.
“How can this taste so good?” I groaned inwardly as I dove into the order of four fat flour tortilla triangles. They were forcefully griddled to a crisp, with pale cheese and shreddy brisket poking out the edges, along with a shy white curl or two of elbow macaroni. They oozed satisfyingly to the bite, with smoke the first, rounded flavor note, followed by beef and mild milky cheese.
Then the macaroni curls made themselves felt, as an unearthly cushion of softness that buoyed up the whole. The overall effect is so lush as to be head-spinning.
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And … what’s that … the slight, tantalizing funk of boudin percolates in the background. The Cajun/Creole sausage that is so beloved here gets its unique character from the pork liver that is mixed in with rice and other pork cuts, and it adds a further umami dimension to the quesadilla.
It’s a memorable bite that only requires a bit of sweet raw onion crunch to soar, scooped from the heap of cilantro and chopped onion on the side. I tried adding a little green salsa that came with the birria tacos in my order, but the quesadilla needed no such adornment.
It is very rich and filling. I scarfed two triangles in midafternoon and hardly ate for the rest of the day. One triangle is kind of its own little meal. And they keep — reviving nicely the next day with 30 seconds in the microwave, followed by pan-toasting on both sides.
This work of undeniable genius comes with a very Houston version of a Horatio Alger story. Jacobo started selling barbecue out of his Atascocita backyard back in 2010. Once he’d scraped together enough money to buy a big barbecue trailer, he and his wife, Monica, worked catered events and parked their rig at car wash parking lots and the like to sell to customers.
There were times when he wanted to give up.
But by 2017, they had a solid enough customer base to open up a stand on a semirural stretch of Atascocita Road, with outdoor seating on the huge, grassy lot. During the pandemic, I used to ogle photos of customers’ aluminum trays groaning with food, awed by the sprawl of quesadillas and — later, when the birria craze hit — the bulging tacos.
Well, now the Jacobos have moved their operation to an EaDo spot roughly equidistant from Minute Maid Park, Toyota Center and the Dynamos’ stadium. Which in terms of social media prominence, is the big time. And it turns out attaching their concept to Houston’s sports mania was a smart move.
The bar was profiled on television when it opened just before the World Series, and with myriad big screens and special pay-per-view events, Cobo’s has become a pregaming mecca that has seen a steady stream of prominent sports figures come through. There’s even a striking wall mural of an astronaut with Minute Maid Park reflected in his helmet visor, which makes a nifty selfie backdrop for the famous and the not-so-famous alike.
It’s a great story — including the wrinkle that Monica is the owner with 51 percent of the operation, while Raul holds 49 percent, a detail he delights in recounting. The Jacobos have a great, only-in-Houston dish to go with it.
I tried the beef birria for which they are known, too, and which offered an economic lifeline to some pitmasters when beef prices soared during the pandemic. (The rib, chuck and shank cuts often used in the stewed dish are far more economical than brisket.)
The birria was fine, but I found that that red-chile beef broth dip tipped the flavor profile into a salt flat. And the thin corn tortillas had been griddle-fried to a near-blackened state on a Saturday afternoon when business was so brisk, thanks to the UFC bout at Toyota, that the kitchen was in the weeds.
I couldn’t have cared less. It’s not every day I get to add a dish as wild as Cobo’s brisket boudin mac and cheese quesadilla to my Houston Hall of Fame roster. And there it will stay. Fight me.
alison.cook@chron.com
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February 16, 2022 at 01:11AM
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Alison Cook: Cobo’s Que brisket boudin mac-and-cheese quesadilla is pure Houston genius - Houston Chronicle
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