Y’all are welcome to join the smoky, charry action at this Texas-inspired brisket joint

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If you’re not a fan of meat, look away now. For Brisket Boys, an outdoor Texas-inspired barbecued meat empire in Penrith, is a no holds-barred flesh-is-king paean to slow-cooked beef, pork, chicken and spicy sausage.

Great juicy wads of it, cooked over ironbark wood for 12 hours, fostering as much hair on your chest as the resident pit-master can load flesh on your plate.

Opened last year, after several months as a carpark food truck, Brisket Boys offers various ways, most particularly with melty, smoky beef brisket. Served as a sandwich or in three plate sizes, it is reason enough to visit. Served sliced, it is blushingly pink, lolling in hot juice and edged with a marvellous crispily blackened bark of slow-seared seasoning.

Also excellent is the chopped pork, a competitive marvel at this western Sydney meat olympics, with buoyant seams of rip-apart flesh.

There are stacks of sticky, crunchy smoked chicken wings, bronzed and peppered with spices and sauce, sides including belt-loosening macaroni cheese, fresh coleslaw and potato salad, and a hefty chocolate brownie with ice-cream.

“If you want to sit in fine-dining surroundings, need privacy or darkened corners to hide away in, then our courtyard isn’t for you.”

Daniel Latty, Brisket Boys

There is also the house-made hotlink sausage which, on special days, is served one metre-long for a competitive eating challenge. Take a moment to peruse the challenge leaderboard photo gallery near the order counter. It shows that a man, known in professional speed-eating circles as the Wolf of Eat Street, successfully ate one of these in three minutes and 48 seconds to obliterate the competition. He smiles cheerfully post-sausage near a picture of the sausage and renowned barbecue pit-master Wes Griffiths.

Brisket Boys, founded by Daniel Latty and co-owned by Latty, Darren Latty, Mark Fitzpatrick and Derry O’Donovan, sits inside the Manufactor precinct, a vast heritage redevelopment of 1960s-built manufacturing plant Crane Enfield Metal, a copper tubing producer until it closed in 2014.

Revitalised by a privately funded, multimillion-dollar re-fit, the plant’s original red brick factory buildings are accompanied by recently built industrial spaces and various food and drink businesses.

Nearby is DrinkWest, a brewery backed by footballer Nathan Cleary, and mixed martial arts competitors Tyson Pedro and Tai Tuivasa, and around the corner is Flappy’s Chicken.

This diner, also packed, offers Louisiana-style fried chicken – tenders, whole chickens, nuggets – sides including potato toast, Cajun onion rings and mashed potato and gravy, and the opportunity to say the words, “I’ll have a Flappy’s mega box” out loud in a crowded space. On a cold, rain-clouded Saturday evening, Manufactor is thronging with rugged-up couples, families spilling from mini-buses, toddlers barrelling out of prams and luxuriantly bearded groups exiting utes.

All have negotiated the confusing carpark entrance, ringed with bolted-down bicycles as fencing, before passing beneath 1960s-style metal welcome signs and pathways edged by palm trees, manicured hedges, potted trees and Ned Kelly-like rubbish bins.

Children are climbing a mini-playground of historic factory equipment and machinery, including huge vats of lava-like copper seemingly solidified mid-spill. Others, having reached Brisket Boys’ undercover outdoor bench tables, watch the glowing fire-pit or play corn-hole, throwing small bean bags into a wooden box hole. The football is playing on giant screens at DrinkWest and music is playing at Brisket Boys.

Latty says Brisket Boys, which was created after the four co-owners travelled across Texas to sample barbecue, is as much about meat-cooking craft as it is a community space. “If you want to sit in fine-dining surroundings, need privacy or darkened corners to hide away in, then our courtyard isn’t for you,” he says.

When the four co-owners travelled around Texas, meeting pit masters, sampling every style of American-style barbecue, the spirit of barbecuers was infectious. “It was always ‘Welcome, y’all’,” he says. “And then they’d ask, ‘You guys travelled from Oz to try our brisket?’

“We know the American barbecue audience [here] is vast. We want to cater to the obsession of eating perfectly cooked brisket and contribute to building the community of American barbecue lovers, in Penrith and in Australia.”

As night sets in, the air is thick with meat-seekers.