I included barbecue in the blog about the top 5 things to eat in San Antonio, although, honestly, we never ate barbecue in San Antonio proper.  Instead, we took a day trip to Lockhart, Texas, the “Barbecue Capital of Texas.”  We knew about Lockhart because a barbecue restaurant in Royal Oak, Michigan, near our former sticks and bricks house, named themselves Lockhart Barbecue after this famous Texan city.

It’s not like Lockhart was proclaimed “Barbecue Capital of Texas” by some random person writing a blog.  It was given this title in 1999 by the Texas legislature.  This town of 12,000 hosts four big barbecue restaurants, three of which Jane & Michael Stern’s include in 10th edition of their book, Road Food.  You can do the math for yourself and know that either the people who live here eat tons of barbecue or many people visit this town to eat barbecue.   You may recognize the Caldwell County Courthouse as we did since over 50 movies have been filmed in this historic city.

As ubiquitous as barbecue is in Texas, not all Texas Barbecue is the same.  According to Wikipedia, four distinct styles of barbecue exist in the state:

• East Texas: The meat is slowly cooked until falling off the bone, typically over hickory wood after marinating in a sweet, tomato-based sauce.
• West Texas: The meat is cooked over direct heat from mesquite wood in a method similar to grilling.
• South Texas: The meat is marinated in thick, molasses-like sauces that keep the meat moist during and after cooking.
• Central Texas: The meat is typically rubbed with only salt and black pepper (though some restaurants have been known to use other spices as well), then cooked over indirect heat from pecan, oak, or mesquite wood. Sauce may be served on the side but is considered unnecessary.

If you go, be prepared. This isn’t a seated dining experience where you have a waitress, a menu, and a busboy.  With the exception of Black’s where food is ordered from a single cafeteria-style line, this is line up, and order your meat(s) by weight at the pit.  A pitmaster slices the meat to order then weighs and wraps it in butcher paper with some Butter Krust bread.  In a separate line, you might order side dishes of coleslaw, potato salad, macaroni and cheese, pickles, onions, etc. But let’s get one thing straight about this experience, you are there for the MEAT!    And there are lots of choices — beef brisket, prime rib, beef ribs, baby back ribs, spareribs, ⁠pork chops, pit ham, turkey, sausages, etc.

With an hour’s drive to Lockhart from San Antonio (about 30 minutes from Austin), we were only making the trip to Lockhart once.  There was no way that we would go all that way and only try one of the restaurants.  So we did what any real foodies would do.  We got some meat from the three written about in Road Food: Smitty’s, Black’s, and Kreuz made our way to the Lockhart City Park, found a picnic table, and had ourselves a picnic. 

After we tried bites of everything we purchased, discussed the quality, and each chose our personal favorites, we wrapped up the leftovers for consumption later in the week.  Boy, those leftovers just kept on giving!  We ate so much barbecue over those days that we didn’t need to have more barbecue until our next destination. 😉

As a whole, we found Central Texas-style of barbecue had less smoke to the meat than what we generally prefer.  We assume that’s a result of the indirect heat and the type of wood used for cooking. 

I chose the beef rib from Black’s as my favorite (cover picture).  It’s a preferred cut for me no matter how it’s been prepared.  Brian’s favorite was the prime rib from Smitty’s.  Prime rib is his favorite cut of beef, and he found this one to be delicious. We got brisket from all three restaurants and agreed that we liked Kreuz’s the best. 

But you know what they say about opinions, right?  Everybody has one.  And we don’t call them personal opinions without reason!  The only way to know for sure would be to go and try them out yourself.  It may not be our favorite barbecue style, but I can tell you we found all of it to be tender, tasty, and with no need for sauce.  

Have you eaten Texas barbecue?  What style did you have, and how did you like it?