by John T. Edge
Charles Kreuz opened the doors to what is now Smitty’s in 1900. He called his grocery Kreuz Market, but meat was his forte. He sold beef tenderloins to his better customers. He ground the chuck into sausage and sold that to laborers. His style became the Texas meat market style: smoked meats served over the counter on butcher paper. No side dishes and no compromises.
The quintessential pit.
A family rift in the late 1990s queered the deal. The children of Edgar “Smitty” Schmidt, whose family had bought the business from the Kreuzes in 1948, locked horns over money. By 1999 Rick Schmidt had erected a dairy barn of a building just down the road, complete with the same style pits his father had worked. Naturally, he called his place Kreuz Market.
Meanwhile, his sister, Nina Sells, put her son, John Fulli love, in charge of the old Kreuz which, if you’re following the plot of this soap opera closely, you know she renamed Smitty’s. The end result is a bit of bad blood and a lot of good meat.
Nowadays, Smitty’s and Kreuz Market offer similar repertoires of beef and pork. A few things have changed: side dishes—like sauce, once verboten—are easier to come by. Kreuz offers sauerkraut. And the no-sauce dictates have loosened, too. Smitty’s even swabs some red on its pork ribs. But much endures.
Both Smitty’s and Kreuz Market smoke beef brisket and natural casing sausage that get their flavor jolt from nothing much more than smoke and salt and pepper. Both separate church and state by separating the pit room, where a worker in a white lab coat cuts and weighs your meat, from the dining room, where you retreat with a bundle of beef brisket, pork ribs, natural casing sausage, and white bread, wrapped tight in pink butcher paper like a Cheech and Chong doobie.
And both make it damn hard to find a fork.
KREUZ MARKET / 619 NORTH COLORADO STREET / 512-398-2361
SMITTY’S MARKET / 208 SOUTH COMMERCE STREET / 512-398-9344
Mexia
GLO’S PLACE
From this roadside trailer outfitted with three folding tables and a red, white, and blue ceramic eagle, Gloria Kirven dishes burgers, fries, catfish sandwiches, and Frito pies. But her true forte is on display in a showcase by the door. Alongside the apricot, peach, and apple fried pies, above the stash of house-baked peanut butter cookies, and beneath the dozens of oatmeal cookies are plastic boxes scrawled with the legend WTS.
Go see Glo for your sugar fix.
Any native of Mexia will tell you those letters stand for Walk to School, as in Walk to School cookies, the sugar and butter and vanilla confections that have been on public school lunch trays here since at least the 1950s. Some believe that Lucy Eslick, who cooked for the Mexia school district for nearly forty years, got the recipe off a sugar sack. Others argue that their popularity is tagged to the availability of government butter, which, like that much maligned commodity government cheese, was foisted on school districts in need of cheap goods.
No matter, Gloria, who began peddling cookies to banks and beauty salons in the 1980s, is now the reigning queen of the WTS. Her half-a-cow butter cookies are simple mixes, plush with powdered sugar and vanilla. I’m keen on their look as well as their straightforward taste. Each bears a ridge down the center, the result of her pinching the dough when she drops the cookie on a cookie tray. And the pink ones, my favorites, get signature ridges and red food coloring, too, flourishes that Glo says local school lunchrooms have abandoned for fear of allergies but she maintains for the sake of tradition.
2293 WEST HIGHWAY 84 / 254-562-6233
San Antonio
MI TIERRA
It’s 8:00 A.M. when I take a seat beneath a constellation of Sputnik-looking chandeliers and psychedelic serapes in the faux-adobe interior of Mi Tierra on Market Square. I order what has, over the course of a ramble about Texas, become my usual: cheese enchiladas in chili gravy with a fried egg on top, refried beans on the side.
A domed plastic sleeve of flour tortillas arrives fresh from the comal. I reach for a tortilla with my left hand, folding it into a kind of floury canoe. With my fork, I cut through the egg and into the enchilada, swirling cheese together with chili gravy and yolk, scooping the whole into my mouth.
This is Tex-Mex for gringos. But it’s undeniably good. Come to think of it, the food and the tropes of its serving owe debts to the days of San Antonio’s fabled Chili Queens, who, beginning in the 1800s, peddled their eats on the same plaza.
From makeshift stands on the square, these women of Mexican descent served street food—chili con carne, tamales, and other staples—to the demimonde who descended after dark. Of one stand that had morphed into a house restaurant, a contemporary observer wrote, “It was frequented by pimps, gamblers, and courtesans as well as the best people. The two worlds rarely had an opportunity to study each other over a bowl of chili.”
Sadly, the public-health reform movement of the early twentieth century put an end to the festival of street vendors that had come to be appreciated as equal parts tourist attraction and everyman’s food court. Although you could make a case for modern-day taco trucks as inheritors of the tradition, I’m more inclined to take a seat at Mi Tierra, in business since 1941 and, in a tip of the hat to the Chili Queens, open twenty four hours a day.
218 PRODUCE ROW / 210-225-1262
San Leon
GILHOOLEY’S
If a team of New Urbanists set out to design the perfect waterside joint according to the tenets of Gulf Coast vernacular architecture, they would be hard-pressed to find a more honest template than Gilhooley’s, an end of-the-road kind of place, perched on a tongue of land that thrusts into Galveston Bay. On the drive down from Houston, I pass ragtag RV parks, house trailers on stilts, a store called Junk and Disorderly, a boat christened The Filthy Whore of San Leon.
Pull in for the South’s best roasted oysters.
Nowadays fishermen—some commercial, others recreational—rule this randy spit. But in the early years of the twentieth century, San Leon was sold as a planned community, a “city of gorgeous flowers and beautiful shrubbery,” a “playground for untold thousands.” One real estate prospectus promised “cool, delightful breezes in summer” and pledged that San Leon would soon rival Coney Island and Atlantic City. Another, and this one was key, heralded “[e]xtra large and deliciously flavored oysters in almost unlimited quantities.”
Exceptional of the oysters, most of the pledges were wishful thinking at best, swindles at worst. Oysters still matter in San Leon. The best place to get a bead on how much they matter is Gilhooley’s, owned and operated since 1987 by Phil Duke, and always serving local bivalves, harvested by Croatian oysterman Misho Ivic.
The place is ringed by a shell and dirt lot. There’s an old boxcar at center. Inside are a U-shaped bar, low ceilings, and, along one wall, an incongruous collection of African tribal masks. Old license plates cover the truss beams in the accustomed fashion. The menu borders on encyclopedic and features a San Leon BLT, which translates on the plate as a fried bologna sandwich. (They also dish fried boudain balls, employing the preferred Texas spelling for the rice and oddments sausage, known as boudin in Louisiana.)
I order the ur-meal hereabouts, Oysters Gilhooley and a longneck. Back in the kitchen, they shuck a dozen, set them topless over a pecan- and oak-fueled fire, swab each with butter and Parmesan cheese, and cook until the shells shade toward black, the oysters lips curl, and the cheese burbles and spits. They arrive on a metal-lined platter that looks like it was recently liberated from a second-rate steakhouse. You will not taste—I have not tasted—a better roasted oyster. And, yes, I’ve been to Drago’s in suburban New Orleans.
Now for the disclaimer, courtesy of longtime employee Desiree Mack: “Tell anybody who’s thinking about coming that we don’t allow children. None. Not even outside. I’ll catch them before they set their playpen up in the courtyard. No kids, no dogs, no midgets, just like the sign says. Some of us have kids at home and we don’t want them in here.”
221 NINTH STREET / 281-339-3813
; Taylor
TAYLOR CAFÉ
Louis Mueller’s is the Taylor joint everyone touts. The place is an institution. Before long, somebody will erect a historical marker out front. Should it close, crying and caterwauling will be heard from here to Austin. The interior, with its cathedral ceilings and government green walls gone woodsmoke brown, is a large part of the appeal. And I like the brisket, too. For those who believe barbecue is a sport with winners and losers, Louis Mueller’s may well measure better than the smoked hunks of cow that emerge from the Taylor Café pits. But that’s not the way I eat. And neither should you.
The Taylor Café, run by Vencil Mares, gets less love; it feels comparatively precarious. It requires your attention, your patronage. And it has lots to offer beyond mere brisket.
For starters there’s bohunk sausage, a beef and pork homage to Vencil’s Bohemian Czech roots, filtered through his two-year tutelage at nearby Southside Market. As for brisket, Vencil’s is the sort that collapses beneath the weight of cinders and pepper, by which I mean that it’s good.
The real attraction here, however, is octogenarian Vencil Mares. Take a seat at the bar, grab a can of beer—which your waitress will, at no additional charge, slide in a foam Koozie—and let him bend your ear. He’ll tell you about his service in World War II, about his work as a medic in the immediate aftermath of the Normandy invasion.
If you’re successful in steering the conversation away from war and toward his corner restaurant, he’ll regale you with tales of its birth as a saloon in 1892. And he’ll tell you about the day in 1948 when he bought the place and of how he once kept it open twenty-four hours a day, selling beer and burgers and chili and, eventually, barbecue to migratory cotton choppers. “I used to cash their checks,” Vencil says. “I was their bank. And they would spend a good bit of their check with me. I was their sheriff, too. When they got in fights I was the guy who took their knives and locked them in the safe. Told them to come back for it tomorrow.”
Those were also the days when segregation ruled, when the Taylor Café maintained two entrances, two bars, even two jukeboxes—one for whites, the other for blacks and Mexicans. Although the Taylor Café looks like a time warp, that policy has changed. Today, the two entrances and two bars remain intact but no one seems to care who uses which. As for the second juke, Vencil got rid of that a while back. “People kept complaining that they couldn’t hear their music for somebody else’s,” he tells me. “So I just I mixed up all the records and told them to shut up about it. They’re supposed to be here to eat and drink anyway.”
101 NORTH MAIN STREET / 512-352-8475
Waco
DR PEPPER MUSEUM AND FREE ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE
It takes a certain chutzpah to sell the masses on soft drinks. Truth be told, cans of cola and their ilk contain nothing much more complex than fizzy sugar water. Marketing muscle drives the soda industry, a point proven by the worldwide love of that black fizzy sugar water known as Coca-Cola.
If you want to draw a bead on this phenomenon, there may be no better venue than the Dr Pepper Museum and Free Enterprise Institute, set in a grand Romanesque building in downtown Waco. Wander the exhibits and you’ll learn that the drink that became Dr Pepper was concocted in 1885 by pharmacist Charles Alderton at Wade Morrison’s Waco drugstore. According to company legend, the customary call to a soda jerk was “Shoot me a Waco.” No matter, Morrison eventually named it Dr Pepper, after the father of a girl whom he had loved back east.
Such lore is interesting, but the real attractions are the exhibits that focus more generally on the soft-drink industry, which, as any thirsty soul knows, has strong roots in the South where, among many others, Coke was born in Georgia and Pepsi was birthed in North Carolina. The displays are geek troves: while I had never before seen a mechanical carbonator of twentieth-century vintage, I saw two in Waco, one that agitated the water by rocking, a second that employed a paddle.
And then there’s Celery Champagne and Zu Zu Ginger Ale and Lazenby’s Liquid Sunshine. I had not made their acquaintance until I made the rounds in Waco. Nor did I realize that the town also gave birth to Big Red soda, that saccharine Texas favorite, or that the place of birth was at Perfection Barber and Beauty Supply, just around the corner from Wade Morrison’s drugstore. And I certainly wasn’t up on all the Dr Pepper imitators until I perused a showcase full of Dr. Smooth, Dr. Cool, Dr. Terrific, Dr. Topper, Dr. Tex, and Dr. Schnee.
That just about covers the highlights of the first two floors. Typical displays for a museum of commerce. On the third floor, however, things skew strange. More to the point, things skew vaguely toward libertarian philosophies and away from the commie pinko bugbears that Eugene McCarthy once stalked.
A fleet of salesmen at the ready.
Owing to the stewardship of Foots Clements, a titan of the Dr Pepper Cor -poration, the third floor is home to the Free Enterprise Institute, a nonprofit organization intent on teaching grade school and middle school children the virtues of, well, free enterprise, by way of classes in soft-drink concoction and the economic theories of Adam Smith and Ludwig von Mises.
The latter commands a place of prominence, near the commemorative installation honoring inductees into the Beverage World Hall of Fame. According to a plaque heralding von Mises, “There is no third system between a market economy and socialism. Mankind has to choose between those two systems—unless chaos is considered an alternative.” As for what that has to do with Dr Pepper, it seems they’re breeding either economic separatists or Madison Avenue cannon fodder.
300 SOUTH FIFTH STREET / 254-757-1025
Country Fried Steak
from Threadgill’s
Serves 8
I’m a fool for pounded and fried meats. Pork chops, venison tenderloins, or cubed beef cutlets—so long as you batter when ordered and cook until crisp, I’m a happy man. Problem is, throughout much of the South, few cooks now batter to order. Texas is the exception, where chicken-fried steak is a sacrament. This recipe, adapted from Eddie Wilson’s Threadgill’s: The Cookbook, uses a nontraditional reverse dip, resulting in a frilly crust.
Country Fried Steak
2 large eggs
2 cups whole milk, room temperature
3 cups all-purpose flour
½ teaspoon salt
½ teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
½ teaspoon hot paprika
½ teaspoon garlic powder
2 cups canola oil, for frying
8 6-ounce tenderized beef cutlets (also known as cube steak), room temperature
Skillet Gravy
Oil left from the skillet
2 to 3 tablespoons all-purpose flour
2 cups whole milk, room temperature
1 teaspoon Tabasco sauce, or to taste
2 teaspoons freshly ground black pepper
Salt
To prepare the steak, whisk the eggs and milk together in a bowl and set aside. Combine the flour, salt, pepper, paprika, and garlic powder in another bowl and set aside.
Heat the oil in a cast-iron skillet or Dutch oven over medium-high heat until an instant read thermometer registers 350° F. Dip a cutlet into the egg wash, then in the seasoned flour. Return to the egg wash for a quick dip, then immediately to heated oil in the skillet. (Be careful: the oil will pop, spit, and hiss.) Repeat without crowding the skillet. Cook until brown, 3 to 5 minutes. Using an offset spatula, turn and cook an additional 3 minutes. Remove to a plate lined with paper towels and keep warm. Repeat with remaining ingredients. Reserve leftover oil from the skillet for the gravy.
To make the gravy, remove the skillet from the heat and pour off the cooking oil, leaving the brown bits and cracklings, until 2 to 3 table-spoons of oil remain in the skillet. Return the skillet to medium heat. Sprinkle the flour into the oil, stirring as you go until you have a golden roux. Cook until smooth, about 2 minutes. Add milk and stir until smooth. Add the Tabasco and pepper. Season to taste with salt. (Gravy making is not an exact science. It’s s
upposed to be thick, but if you think it’s too thick, add more liquid until you’re satisfied.) Serve immediately with Country Fried Steak.
ViRGiNiA
f I had my way, the welcome sign at the state border would read, “Welcome to the Old Dominion, seat of democracy, birthplace of presidents, and home of the perfect cup of peanut soup.” The latter, of course, is a reference to the creamy potage popularized by the Hotel Roanoke and now served by New Market’s finest, the Southern Kitchen. Follow that with a spot of ice cream from Doumar’s of Norfolk—one of the claimants as originator of the modern ice-cream cone—and you have a meal worth traversing the state for. Still hungry? Well, head on up to Ben’s Chili Bowl in Washington, D.C., for a half-smoked sausage blanketed in chili and a talk with present-day proprietor, Nizam Ali, who will regale you with tales of the days when the Civil Rights Movement was in full swing and his family restaurant was the meeting place for student activists and politicos alike.
Charlottesville
WHITE SPOT
You had best learn the lingo before you go because everybody else at this college dive speaks in the cryptic language of the regular. A “Gusburger” is a hamburger topped with an egg fried hard and smeared with any number of condiments. (It probably owes its inspiration to the Western burger made famous by the Texas Tavern down in Roanoke.) A “Motorburger” is a double Gus with ham. “One Hell of a Mess” is just that: patty sausage, fried eggs, hash browns, and toast, all drenched in gravy. In essence it’s a slop bucket on a plate. A “Grill With” is two Duchess-brand cake donuts, heated on the griddle and served with a scoop of vanilla ice cream. “It sounds nasty but it really is good,” says the counterman. “The grease from the burgers gives the donuts a nice flavor.” As for why the place is called the White Spot, no one seems to know, save a greasy kid with distillery breath and the countenance of a suck-egg dog. “There used to be a barber shop here,” he tells me. “It was an old one-stooler, and when they moved it out to make way for this place, the floor was so dirty that the only white spot was where the base of the chair had attached to the floor.”
