A small barbecue restaurant in Grand Prairie, Texas, is gearing up for an unusually busy summer as FIFA’s 2026 World Cup brings millions of visitors to the area. According to the report, Zavala’s Barbecue is staying open for 30 days in a row, which the business says is a record stretch for the operation.
The workload is enormous. The team is preparing 20,000 pounds of brisket, along with hundreds of pounds of sausage, to keep up with the crowds. Each week, about 200 beef briskets are trimmed, coated in a dry rub, and smoked. The seasoning is kept simple, relying on salt and pepper to help define the restaurant’s brisket.
Sausage production is also running all day long. Roughly 250 pounds of links are made in-house and begin hitting the grill at 4 a.m. Once they reach the restaurant’s preferred snappy bite, they are plunged into ice water. Carnitas are handled in a different way: they’re grilled for hours, then returned to the smoker with coke and oranges for another three hours until the meat becomes tender enough to pull apart.
Owner Joe Zavala says the operation depends on teamwork across six smokers, with everyone watching temperatures and fire conditions to keep the barbecue consistent. He says that shared attention helps hold the whole crew accountable. Alongside the food, the restaurant is also leaning on the kind of Texas hospitality that has long defined its appeal, now on a much larger scale as World Cup visitors stream into town.
Source: eater.com
