Sloan Rinaldi, founder of the Houston-based barbecue brand Texas Q, is expanding her influence from the pit to the screen with two new television projects: a nine-episode international series and a Houston-focused culture show. Rinaldi, a fourth-generation pitmaster whose family has been in barbecue since 1909, shared details of her ventures on The Building Texas Show, hosted by Justin McKenzie and recorded live at the San Antonio Home & Garden Show.
Rinaldi’s upcoming series, From Texas With Love: United We BBQ, will film across eight countries and three continents, including Italy, France, Germany, Spain, Argentina, and Japan. Each episode explores a different live-fire cooking tradition—from Ibérico hogs to Japanese wagyu to Argentine gaucho asado—and concludes with a Texas barbecue collaboration. The final episode will bring all featured cooks to Houston for a grand cook-off. This project underscores barbecue’s global resonance and its potential to bridge cultural divides, a theme Rinaldi champions.
Back home, Rinaldi is filming Grillz on Grills, a Houston culture series featuring hip-hop artists Bun B, Slim Thug, Trae tha Truth, and Paul Wall. The show delves into the city’s food, music, and custom-grillz scene, which Rinaldi says has gone global. She and her co-host will have their own custom grillz built during the series. Grillz on Grills is expected to launch on YouTube, with Rinaldi expressing interest in bringing it to Netflix.
Rinaldi’s path to barbecue was unconventional. After spending years in construction, she sold her business at 50 and was uncertain about her next move. A sliced brisket sandwich at Killen’s Barbecue changed everything. She commissioned her own smoker from East Texas Smoker Company, taught herself fire management, and entered competitions. Her first contest, Bands, Brews and Barbecue, benefiting the Ronald McDonald House, led to a 14th-place finish out of 250 teams at a Texas State Championship. She later landed a statewide deal with H-E-B for her original Texas Q sauce, though she pulled it from shelves to reformulate without high fructose corn syrup.
Rinaldi’s international reach is already tangible. She recently hosted two Taiwan-based venture capitalists on a private Texas Q barbecue crawl in Houston. They flew 15 hours and fasted for a full day to prepare, visiting one of only three Michelin-starred barbecue restaurants in the world, plus two Top 15 stops, one of them Top 10. The conversation shifted from barbecue to business, with Rinaldi hinting at which cities are now in play during the full episode.
Central to Rinaldi’s mission is her belief in barbecue’s unifying power. “You can put the richest guy and the poorest guy at the same table, having the same meal. You can’t get that in any other cuisine. So it is the most uniting cuisine or culinary culture on earth,” she said. That philosophy drives her media expansion, which also includes private barbecue crawls and other ventures under the Texas Q brand.
For those interested in learning more or collaborating, Rinaldi can be reached via Email Contact. Her story exemplifies how traditional trades can evolve into global media enterprises, blending culinary heritage with modern entrepreneurship.
