There is a moment during the preparation of any proper feast when the person in charge of the cooking starts to sweat, worried that everything is not going to be all right. For Quealy Watson, that moment came in the afternoon, a few hours before his guests were due to arrive. He was standing in the yard of a stately brick Victorian home in the King William neighborhood of San Antonio, at the edge of the San Antonio River, looking down at a heavy offset smoker in which he was roasting two ducks under a spray of spices and salt.

Watson is the 33-year-old chef and owner of Hot Joy, a popular restaurant in San Antonio that combines the flavors of Texas and Mexico with those of the Asian diaspora across South Texas and east into Louisiana, where he was born. He is an accomplished cook, secure in his skills and confident in his vision of how his food should taste. So what was he worried about? The ducks before him were doing just fine, burbling a little in their foil wrapping as fat was rendered from their skin.

It wasn’t a complicated party. The idea was the same one that draws together so many of us in the weeks between Thanksgiving and New Year’s Eve: to celebrate friendship and good cheer, take one last chance to raise a glass together before starting a new year afresh. He was just cooking for friends — local artists and designers, hoteliers, fellow cooks — and doing so in the home of friends, to boot: a San Antonio real estate executive named Marshall Davidson Jr. and his wife, Josephine Negley Gill Davidson. Watson had married his own wife, Jennifer Dobbertin, right here on their lawn.

But people cooking big feasts do not just think of what’s in front of them. They take a larger, longer view. Inside the house, in an oven, lay a young goat that Watson had smoked in the morning, then wrapped in foil under a scattering of avocado leaves: cabrito, a specialty of South Texas. His hands were shaking a little, just thinking about it. Because the last time he’d checked, the meat had not reached that collapsing state where it begins to qualify as good barbecue. The expression on his face seemed to indicate that maybe it wouldn’t be ready until after the guests had gone home.