Magazines » July/August 2009 » Trailing Texas 'Cue
We have come for meat. Brisket, all manner of ribs, sirloin, pork chops, cheese jalapeño, and other sausages, maybe even goat. Smoked, and sold by the pound. Served with no sauce or sauce on the side.
There is little more basic, some might say primal, than the central Texas pit barbecue experience. Consider the simple act of collecting your meat at City Market in Luling. You stand in a line that starts in the dining room, waiting to enter the glass-enclosed pit room, where it’s furnace-hot, smelling of smoke and meat simmering in its own juice. Inside you place your order, then watch the carver prepare your choices and plop them on a sheet of butcher paper to be weighed. Pay in cash before exiting this hallowed chamber to stand in another line for the rest of your meal.
The routine varies from one joint to another, but in no case will it be alike in east Texas or west Texas, let alone be akin to sitting down at a table in some other barbecue destination such as North Carolina to mull over which sides, including choices of real vegetables, to order from a waitress. Sure there are sides in Texas -- most commonly coleslaw, potato salad, and pinto beans -- and desserts, but they aren’t why diners drive for hours to stand in long lines.
Since Texas Monthly published its first article on barbecue in 1973, the list of essential Texas stops has changed little, although last year the magazine sent shockwaves through the state by declaring that Snow’s BBQ in Lexington, an upstart in the business only since 2003, serves the best barbecue around. If you prefer to visit spots with a longer track record, you can fill your tummy along a route around Austin that measures a modest 125 or so miles, starting in Taylor northeast of the city and finishing in Driftwood. The trip should take only... well, it depends how fast you eat and if you make six stops or 16, and if you grab something to eat later, for instance, from Southside Market, which opened in the sausage-making town of Elgin in 1882.
The trail wanders through small towns where the names on storefronts and street signs reflect the region’s Czech and German heritage. Nineteenth-century immigrants receive credit for starting a Hill Country barbecue tradition that focuses on meat -- most often beef, given that this is cattle country -- rather than spices or sauces. German-born Charles Kreuz was one of them, founding Kreuz Market in 1900 in Lockhart, selling fresh meat during the week and smoking the leftovers on the weekend, cooking them over indirect heat until they were properly tender. To this day Kreuz Market boasts, right on a T-shirt you can buy in a very large size, “No sauce, no forks.”
Kreuz (pronounced “Krites”) settled into expansive new quarters in 1999, built to accommodate massive Saturday crowds of meat lovers who start piling in as soon as the doors open at 10:30 a.m. A mountain of post oak sits beside the giant parking lot, and two large dining rooms flank the long hallway leading to a bricked arena with eight pits. Kreuz may have tripled in size, but the quality of everything from shoulder clod to pork ribs proves its devotion to pit tradition hasn’t changed. (Pits aren’t really pits, but waist-high rectangles with a fire going at one end, smoke passing in and around the meat to reach the chimney at the other.)
Smitty’s Market now occupies what was Kreuz (blame a family dispute that turned out well for barbecue lovers), just off the town square. Most customers enter through the back door next to the parking lot, standing beside the brick pits as they wait in line. It’s hot in spring and hotter in summer, the walls black with layers of soot, caked thick enough in spots to look like burnt wood. Quarters are tight; when I visited, I saw one of the workers managing logs set his boot on fire.
For barbecue tourists, such moments are nearly as beguiling as the meat itself. At Louie Mueller’s in Taylor it’s the screen door banging behind you as you step into a spacious smoky room (the pits aren’t isolated here) and a long line. Not much sun slips through windows that turned brown or black long ago, so bare fluorescent tubes and beer neons provide most of the light in this former gymnasium (a brighter “porch” was added later). Get your meat from the carver, who dares you not to order brisket by cutting off a small taste and putting it on your tray. Then sides -- a few still insist that crackers and jalapeño peppers are the only appropriate ones -- from the next person. And perhaps beer, because Mueller’s offers Shiner Bock on tap.
Shiner Bock is about as exotic, and certainly as dark, as beer gets in small-town smokehouses. Sonny Bryan’s in Dallas might offer Budweiser American Ale, but that’s the big city. If you want to drink a “designer beer,” your best bet is to head for a dry county, but more about that momentarily.
It seems astonishing that with perhaps 2,000 barbecue restaurants in 269,000 square miles to choose from, Texas Monthly’s five favorites would be so closely situated, but my family was not about to contest the wisdom. Smitty’s served our favorite brisket, but all we sampled had wonderful peppery crusts and sweet, tender meat with just enough fat. We liked the jalapeño sausage at Kreuz best, and the falling-off-the-bone ribs at City Market. And, oh, that City Market sauce. Most often the sauce on the side is a house concoction of ketchup, vinegar, and meat drippings. But City Market’s is tinged with mustard and so good the management posts a stern warning: “Please leave the sauce bottles on table.”
For those not interested in standing in line for meat there’s the Salt Lick not far from Austin, which delivers barbecue to the table for 5,000 diners each weekend. Because the town of Driftwood is dry, customers may haul in their own alcoholic beverages, quite often bringing large coolers. I opted for Real Ale Full Moon Pale Rye Ale brewed in nearby Blanco, but Shiner’s new seasonal, Shiner Smokehaus, seems just as good a choice. Shiner’s brewers built special screens and smoked malt over local mesquite wood, adding sweet and spicy notes to a traditional helles.
Given that you can already breathe smoke and eat smoke in Texas barbecue joints, you might as well drink smoke, too.
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This article originally appeared in the July/August 2009 of DRAFT Magazine
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