Kerry Bexley, owner of Snow’s BBQ, and Ms. Tootsie Tomanetz, pitmaster, discussed opening a Lexington, Texas, barbecue joint at the end of the 1990s to serve Saturday barbecue to their community. It took a few years, but they opened Snow’s BBQ on March 1, 2003.Since then, good barbecue, good service, and friendly people have helped maintain a steady and consistent business for the last seventeen years. Snow's BBQ has been deemed best in Texas twice by Texas Monthly magazine in their Texas Barbecue Top 50 list.
Read morePlantation BBQ
Lolo Garcia claims to be the architect of both the smoked brisket-filled tortilla and the brisket and egg taco. He’s certainly one of the first to present the combo to customers. Garcia’s Plantation BBQ (since 1987) is a food trailer parked along a busy industrial highway in Richmond, Texas. The twelve-hour briskets are prepped, smoked, and sliced in the tiny confines of the trailer. Fresh scratch-made tortillas, pico de gallo, and fried eggs, round out one of the most inventive tacos in the area.
Read moreThelma’s Bar-B-Que
Born in Ville Platte, Louisiana, Thelma Williams relocated to Houston in 1969. After working and learning the restaurant and brisket trade at Kessler's Barbecue, she opened her own place in December 1999. Thelma cooked, her five-year-old granddaughter worked the cash register, and her customers ate in living room-type surroundings. A fire forced Williams to move in 2009; on Southmore she again smoked briskets for 16 to 18 hours over a mix of hickory coals and “a little bit of this, and a little bit of that.” Early in 2013, a rent dispute forced Thelma’s Bar-B-Q out of business.
Read moreGatlin’s BBQ
Greg Gatlin opened his family’s namesake restaurant with his mother and father in June 2010. A graduate of Rice University, in business, Gatlin and his parents run their establishment like, what he calls, “a conglomerate of heads.” The brisket is smoked over hickory wood at 250 degrees for a dozen hours. Gatlin’s menu reflects Houston’s melting pot of cultures, including some traditionally non-Texas items like pulled pork, smoked turkey, deer sausage, and Louisiana-style dirty rice.
Read moreMama Sugar
Nathan Jean “Mama Sugar” Sanders is a legend in the east Texas “Cowboy World” and the matriarch of a riding and roping family that bridges four generations. Born on a farm in Nacogdoches, Texas, by the time she was twenty years old, Sanders had enough of horses, mules, and cows and set off for Houston, to work in a series of restaurants. She became a leader and cook for her riding group, the Sugar Shack Trailblazers, cooking flapjacks with homemade sugar syrup, stews, and, of course, barbecue over an open fire.
Read moreKreuz Market
As a child, Joe Sullivan ate at House Park Bar-B-Que and thought to himself that someday he wanted to own this restaurant or one just like it. In 1981, he fulfilled his childhood ambition by purchasing House Park, which sits near the Austin neighborhood of Clarksville where he was born and much of his family still lives. Sullivan cooks all of the restaurant’s meat himself, on the brick pit, which has been in place since 1943. Those wishing to try their first taste of House Park barbecue need to keep in mind that the doors are open only between 11am and 2:30pm Monday through Friday.
Read moreBarbecuties
As a child, Joe Sullivan ate at House Park Bar-B-Que and thought to himself that someday he wanted to own this restaurant or one just like it. In 1981, he fulfilled his childhood ambition by purchasing House Park, which sits near the Austin neighborhood of Clarksville where he was born and much of his family still lives. Sullivan cooks all of the restaurant’s meat himself, on the brick pit, which has been in place since 1943. Those wishing to try their first taste of House Park barbecue need to keep in mind that the doors are open only between 11am and 2:30pm Monday through Friday.
Read moreCooper’s Old Time Pit BAR-B-QUE
Terry Wootan worked at Cooper’s when he was in high school. After spending some years away from barbecue while focusing on his real estate business, he took over Cooper’s in 1986. In his first years operating the business, Wootan did all the cooking and his wife operated the cash register. They have since expanded to thirty-eight full-time employees, who serve the thousands of hungry customers who descend on Cooper’s each day. While Cooper’s is a favorite of both Texas Hill Country locals and road trippers, dedicated eaters also fly into the tiny Llano airport for lunch by the hundreds each month.
Read moreLouie Mueller Barbecue
Bobby Mueller was born in Taylor, Texas, in 1939. Louie Mueller was Bobby’s father, who opened the restaurant and grocery store in 1949. When not in school or in the service, Bobby worked with the family business, which he bought from his father in 1974, around the same time Louie Mueller stopped selling groceries. It was about this time when Bobby, himself, learned to barbecue. Today, Louie Mueller Barbecue remains a family business. After Bobby’s passing in 2008, his son Wayne took the helm to continue the tradition of quality barbecue in Taylor.
Read moreThe Salt Lick
Lolo Garcia claims to be the architect of both the smoked brisket-filled tortilla and the brisket and egg taco. He’s certainly one of the first to present the combo to customers. Garcia’s Plantation BBQ (since 1987) is a food trailer parked along a busy industrial highway in Richmond, Texas. The twelve-hour briskets are prepped, smoked, and sliced in the tiny confines of the trailer. Fresh scratch-made tortillas, pico de gallo, and fried eggs, round out one of the most inventive tacos in the area.
Read moreHouse Park Bar-B-Que
As a child, Joe Sullivan ate at House Park Bar-B-Que and thought to himself that someday he wanted to own this restaurant or one just like it. In 1981, he fulfilled his childhood ambition by purchasing House Park, which sits near the Austin neighborhood of Clarksville where he was born and much of his family still lives. Sullivan cooks all of the restaurant’s meat himself, on the brick pit, which has been in place since 1943. Those wishing to try their first taste of House Park barbecue need to keep in mind that the doors are open only between 11am and 2:30pm Monday through Friday.
Read moreChurch of the Holy Smoke
Born in 1944, May Archie had a career with the telephone company. When she married her husband, Horace Archie, in 2002, she joined his church, the New Zion Missionary Baptist Church, famous in Huntsville for running a barbecue restaurant. In 2004, the original operators, Mr. and Mrs. Ward, needed to step down from running the restaurant they had started as a fundraiser more than twenty-five years previously. After learning the secret recipes and practices, Mr. and Mrs. Archie took over the business and have run it ever since.
Two interviews, May and Horace Archie, are featured for this establishment.
Read moreBurton Sausage
Interviewers: Marvin Bendele and Andrew Busch
Location: Burton Sausage, 11700 Hwy 290, Burton, TX 77835
This interview was originally produced through a collaborative effort of the American Studies Department at the University of Texas at Austin, The Central Texas Barbecue Association, and The Southern Foodways Alliance.
It is shared with Foodways Texas as part of a collaboration with the Southern Foodways Alliance to document food stories in Texas.
Describing himself as three-quarters German and one-quarter Bohemian, Jerry Schultz learned the meat business in central Texas’ Czech and German traditions.
Today he owns and runs Burton Sausage, a company that is part slaughterhouse, part sausage producer. Along with his daughter, Nicole Harmel, who also sat down with our interviewers, Schultz has more than twenty employees in the family business. Born in 1945, Schultz says he got into the meat business in 1972; two years later Nicole, the first of his three children, was born. The company started seriously producing sausage in 1982.
City Market
Born in 1947, Joe Capello started to work for the Ellis family at City Market in Luling when he was twelve years old. He has managed the restaurant since 1969, overseeing the post-oak-smoked brisket and sausage Mr. Howard Ellis learned to make at Kreuz Market in Lockhart. Known today for its Watermelon Thump festival that creates lines around the block for City Market, Luling has changed around Joe, but City Market has remained much the same—from the recipe for the barbecue sauce to the absence of forks in the restaurant.
Read moreD. Wiley Inc.
Since 1981, Don Wiley has built over 1000 custom-made barbecue pits for businesses, college football teams, and individuals in and around central Texas and as far away as New Jersey and Colorado. Each pit is numbered and built to customer specifications. Some of his pits can cook up to 90 briskets or 1000 turkey legs at a time, depending on the needs of the customer. When asked what qualities distinguish a Texas-made pit from others, Wiley is quick to point out that Texas pits just “cook right.”
Read moreMeyer's Sausage Company
As a child, Joe Sullivan ate at House Park Bar-B-Que and thought to himself that someday he wanted to own this restaurant or one just like it. In 1981, he fulfilled his childhood ambition by purchasing House Park, which sits near the Austin neighborhood of Clarksville where he was born and much of his family still lives. Sullivan cooks all of the restaurant’s meat himself, on the brick pit, which has been in place since 1943. Those wishing to try their first taste of House Park barbecue need to keep in mind that the doors are open only between 11am and 2:30pm Monday through Friday.
Read moreRuby's BBQ
As a child, Joe Sullivan ate at House Park Bar-B-Que and thought to himself that someday he wanted to own this restaurant or one just like it. In 1981, he fulfilled his childhood ambition by purchasing House Park, which sits near the Austin neighborhood of Clarksville where he was born and much of his family still lives. Sullivan cooks all of the restaurant’s meat himself, on the brick pit, which has been in place since 1943. Those wishing to try their first taste of House Park barbecue need to keep in mind that the doors are open only between 11am and 2:30pm Monday through Friday.
Read moreSouthside Market
Lolo Garcia claims to be the architect of both the smoked brisket-filled tortilla and the brisket and egg taco. He’s certainly one of the first to present the combo to customers. Garcia’s Plantation BBQ (since 1987) is a food trailer parked along a busy industrial highway in Richmond, Texas. The twelve-hour briskets are prepped, smoked, and sliced in the tiny confines of the trailer. Fresh scratch-made tortillas, pico de gallo, and fried eggs, round out one of the most inventive tacos in the area.
Read moreDziuk’s Meat Market
Originally from Poth, Texas, Marvin Dziuk moved to Castroville in 1974 at the age of eighteen to manage Dziuk’s Meat Market, the latest branch of the family business. Dziuk’s Meat Market is known as one of the few establishments in Texas that makes and sells fresh Alsatian-style sausage, using ingredients from recipes that the pioneer families of Castroville brought with them when they arrived in Texas in the 1840s. The market is also a popular stop for deer hunters on their way to and from south and west Texas hunting leases.
Read moreMeyer's Elgin Smokehouse
As a child, Joe Sullivan ate at House Park Bar-B-Que and thought to himself that someday he wanted to own this restaurant or one just like it. In 1981, he fulfilled his childhood ambition by purchasing House Park, which sits near the Austin neighborhood of Clarksville where he was born and much of his family still lives. Sullivan cooks all of the restaurant’s meat himself, on the brick pit, which has been in place since 1943. Those wishing to try their first taste of House Park barbecue need to keep in mind that the doors are open only between 11am and 2:30pm Monday through Friday.
Read more