Arnie Segovia likes to joke that he wasn’t born in Texas, but he crawled here as fast as he could. The avuncular man with the push broom mustache, whose cherubic face belies his 62 years, has amassed 1 million YouTube subscribers and more than 600,000 Instagram followers with his cheerful and plainspoken videos detailing how to prepare the food of his native Rio Grande Valley.
The Segovia family moved to Texas from Arizona when Arnie was 1, staying in Pecos for a decade before moving to Edinburg. Segovia grew up surrounded by the home cooking of his mother and Mexican grandmothers, as well as his father and the farm and ranch hands of Pecos, who regularly cooked whole animals for community celebrations.
In the late 1990s, Segovia and his colleagues at a Weslaco used car dealership where he was general manager would barbecue and grill every day. It was there that Segovia first learned the art of smoking brisket, a hobby he turned into a profession, originally by traveling the state for barbecue competitions with his wife, Terry. In 2008, he bought his brother-in-law’s diner and renamed it Arnie’s Café and Grill, but it only lasted a year with the economic downturn.
After that, Segovia parlayed his barbecue competition chops—in one year he won almost half of the 23 matchups he entered—into a full-time job, earning money on the competition circuit and offering in-person classes.
Stuck at home during the pandemic, Segovia turned to the internet for business advice. Interested in selling fajita rubs that he had created for retail, he started filming videos with the help of his children, Dan and Sophie, who both had professional experience in video production.
What was meant to be a sales tactic opened the door to a whole new world. Segovia’s tutorial on cooking fajitas racked up 500,000 views in three months. Five years later, his videos, filmed at his RGV home, regularly hit six-figure views and turned him into a bona fide internet celebrity. His advice for aspiring YouTube stars? “Just get out there and do it,” he says.
Enjoying this article?Texas Highways: It sounds like food has been holding your family together for decades.
Arnie Segovia: In our family, food has been everything. Every get-together, every function.
TH: What did your dad cook when you were growing up?
AS: My dad was a foreman on this big farm and ranch in Pecos. Two or three times a year they’d kill a whole cow, and we’d have a big three-day party. Sometimes they’d kill a pig and do a pork roast, sometimes they’d do goats.
TH: How was your dad cooking those meats? Was he grilling them or smoking them?
AS: Always grilling. I didn’t learn anything about smoking until I was already cooking here in the Valley. I was working as a general manager for a used car dealer. We had 12 salespeople, and we all liked to drink, fish, hunt, and barbecue. We barbecued six days a week during work. That’s when I started to get my grip on cooking and get my passion.
TH: What inspired you to start cooking brisket?
AS: One of my salesmen knew how to cook brisket. He tried to tell me how to do it, and I didn’t listen. I kept making a tough brisket. One day, my brisket wasn’t quite done. The salesman said, ‘Just leave it in there. Throw a couple logs in; you’ve already got it wrapped.’ When I came back it was melt-in-your-mouth perfect. And that was my aha moment; he was telling me to cook it longer and I wasn’t listening. And he was right.
TH: You’ve mastered fajitas. What’s the key?
AS: Good quality meat, good rub, good spice, a little technique, and marinade. Marinades are usually overnight. It softens the meat and adds a little flavor. I went with both the regular inside skirt and the outside skirt. The outside is super expensive, but it’s so soft and delicious. I would cook some of the inside skirt, which has more flavor, and get some of those natural juices. Doctor that with a little salt and pepper and then pour that on the sliced outside skirt—or what we call sirloin fajitas. So now you have the best of both worlds: the flavor and the tenderness.
TH: You operated your own restaurant in McAllen for a year before the recession forced you to close it in 2009. Did you enjoy running a restaurant?
AS: I loved it a lot. The only thing I didn’t like about the restaurant business is you make most of your money on weekends, and I come from a family where you all got together on Sundays at Mom’s and had breakfast and barbecue later. I would always miss that when I was in the restaurant business. But I really wanted to cook, so I got a job at another car dealership and started cooking competitively again in 2010. By 2013 we started to do it full time.
TH: When did culinary teaching become a part of your life?
AS: In late 2016, we started doing competition classes for barbecue, traveling all over Texas. Some places were backyards, some were stores, some were restaurants.
TH: Were you surprised at the interest from folks wanting to learn how to cook barbecue?
AS: It was more my competition friends who wanted to elevate their games. And the big difference was that I gave them written recipes with exact ingredients. Nobody else did that.
TH: Were you nervous about sharing your secrets with your competitors?
AS: A little bit. But we were making so much money, I didn’t care. As time went, the classes got smaller and smaller because it’s a very niche market. Dan has been in the photo and video business since he was in high school. He was finishing up college, and he said, ‘Dad, let’s do an online school.’
TH: How did you go from being a barbecue guy to teaching people how to cook dishes like Mexican rice and carne guisada?
AS: When Covid hit, we were basically cooking at home. I always wanted to create spices to sell but never had time. So we created our first spice, a fajita and steak rub. I very timidly ordered a pallet from our co-packer, and it sold out in four days. So, we said, ‘OK, we’re onto something. Let’s make some videos to promote our product.’
TH: You and your wife shot all your videos from 2019-2023. How did you learn to do it?
AS: YouTube. And a lot of trial and error. For me it was learning about how to be a little bit better with the camera, with colors, angles, lighting, and audio.
TH: What advice would you give to a nascent content creator?
AS: There are two things I learned: You’ve got to have good audio and good lighting. But anyone can do it if they want to. Just start. Everybody has their own personality and their own style. As for the food, go with whatever makes you and your family happy.
TH: How do you feel being able to translate your culture’s food to a worldwide audience?
AS: It’s an honor to share the things I grew up with. As you get older, you start to think ‘Where did I come from? What is our heritage? What are our traditions?’ You realize this is important, and we need to share this with the younger people.
TH: What would your parents think of you teaching millions of people how to make Mexican food on the internet?
AS: My Dad would have been real proud. My grandparents, too.
