Smitty’s Market, Lockhart, Texas

After a truly great lunch at the City Market in Luling, Nancy and I headed north toward Austin. She’d mentioned several times our visit to Smitty’s back in 2010 when I spent a term as a visiting professor at Baylor Law School. Back then Smitty’s was one of the top places in Lockhart, the epicenter of Texas barbecue, just up the road from Luling. Smitty’s barbecue didn’t impressed me, but it made a strong impression on Nancy because of the open fire on the floor right next to the line of customers.

Hmmm. Looks due for a couple new logs. At the City Market, as at other places, the fire for their offset cooking was separated from the customers by a metal door, and was off to the side, out of the way. Smitty’s was right there, right by small children. Based on her extensive experience, she naturally was worried that a child might fall and be burned. My own childhood made me worry more that some kid would toss a cherry bomb into the fire.

I was all for a stop in Lockhart at Kreuz Market, which I’d liked a lot, but Nancy wouldn’t go for a second lunch within 20 minutes. I decide that my best play would be to earn some Good Husband points by stopping to see the fire at Smitty’s rather than to go deeper into debt with a trip to Kreuz. So in we went and I took a picture of the fire. We started to leave without ordering, but I started to feel guilty, so I went back in, shooed a five-year-old boy imitating a moth away from the fire, and ordered a quarter pound of brisket. I took it out to the car and opened it up on the hood.

I grabbed that piece of the bark, and it was tough and leathery, a tad more leathery than beef jerky. The interior meat was tender and juicy, but excessively fatty, even by moist brisket standards. I won’t say it was bad brisket, but there’s no reason not to eat the better brisket that’s available in Texas, and certainly no reason not to go instead to the magnificent brisket 20 minutes away in Luling. Still, you might drop in to see the fire.

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