Texas BBQ

"Roadfood" rates City Market in Luling, Texas, as one of the shrines of BBQ. Are they correct?

Yes and no. Here we encounter one of those "Wise Men of Hindustan" problems: seven wise blind men approach an elephant, each grasping one part of the beast, each defining the big fellow as his particular sampling – a snake, a wall, a tree trunk, a leaf, &c. Each is right for the trunk, the body, the leg, the ear – and each misses the nature of the elephant.

City Market BBQ meat is perfect.

Texas BBQ concentrates on quality of meat, spice rubs and slow process, not sauce. The ribs are fall-off-the-bone tender. The brisket is firmer but wonderfully succulent. The City Market signature sausage rings are among the best sausage I've ever encountered. Meaty, moist, natural casing, a hint of consolidating filler (which retains the tasty meat juices, a plus), and mildly spiced, not at all hot-spicy. The rings are in casings about 1.25" in diameter, looped into a 6" round.

Let your GPS find Luling and City Market. You could miss both. They do not stand out or shout superlatives of any kind. This is a neighborhood joint and you'll share your lunch (they don't serve dinner) with locals. As a courtesy to locals and as self-preservation, do not associate yourself with Abraham Lincoln, General Grant, or Harvard.

Ordering lunch is a two-phase operation. First, go to the meat room in the back where chunky men in white butchers gear and pale green sanitary gloves are carving and serving. The meat room has Lexan window-walls to keep the smoke in. It's thick. The menu is on the wall, a plastic "Coke" sign with small plastic snap-in-letters. But it's cohabited with the smoke for too long, the selections are hard to read. No matter, the choices are severely limited: beef brisket, pork ribs, sausage, Wonder bread or crackers, sweet or dill pickles, Saran-wrapped sweet onion thirds.

The fat butcher boys want to process you in and out briskly, "What you want? What can I getcha?"

I order half a pound of brisket and a sausage ring. The beef is cut, weighed, and slammed onto butcher paper with the sausage.

"Bread? Crackers? One or two? What can I getcha?"

I get two slices of bread and a dill pickle, pay about $8, and scoot out into the booths and tables.

Phase two, the counter at the front of the City Market space, where you can get a beer or soda and a stated amount of beans. I get a root beer and a pint of beans.

City Market doesn't take its reputation seriously. It's local joint, formica table tops and aluminum tubing chairs with vinyl cushions. Two utensils are available: plastic spoons for beans, plastic knives. No music, no funny business. Serious eating, some talk. Some men retain their cowboy hats, more retain their John Deere hats. The women are dedicated eaters, hefty redneck women, some black, some Hispanic, some with hospital scrubs or hair salon tunics. The light is dim, unenthusiastic light, which probably suits a place sitting in southern Texas heat.

There are two sauces, in bottles. One is standard hot sauce, the cheap Mexican red. The other is the City Market's barbecue sauce, a discouraging mustard-based yellowy-orange mix flecked with something.

Texans take their BBQ seriously, granted. What they don't take seriously is a meal. It's not enough to provide perfectly smoked, slow-cooked meat if you don't care about the meal around it. If you throw Wonder Bread and very bad big-jar dills into the butcher paper with exquisite meat, the meal goes downhill. The pinto beans are genuinely awful, without character, a pasty dried legume taste.

The City Market makes exquisite BBQ but they don't put any effort into the meal it makes. I like minimalist food, foh joints, holes-in-the-wall, even plastic utensils. But there is no respect for a meal, here, or for eating well, or for the magic balance of a meal. There's something smug and rural and wrong-headed about hunks of great meat served with disdain for anyone who wants more, like lunch.

I wish I could take half a dozen of those incredible sausages and eat them with a tasty salad and sourdough bread. At Bo's in Lafayette, Bo serves equally good BBQ supported by a real meal and careful tastes. The City Market is an experience in redneck stubbornness: you got your meat, you want fancy, too?

Yes. Why not? Food is one of the best things in our lives and it takes only a little care to elevate it to real cuisine. If that's fancy, yes; I want fancy, too.

Braxinoso Speaks

This is our second successful search for road food. We found it, we et it. I agree with Himself in this instance: it would have taken a tiny nudge of effort to make this world-class but some Texan sullenness keeps it "country," which may be a virtue to rednecks (and I consider Himself a prime redneck) but is a pejorative in cuisine.

We found the 50/50 burger – half ground bacon, half ground beef – and loved it. After City Market we finally found the much-touted Texas kolaches, a Czech pastry. Purely awful, cheap, nasty. It made us long for a nice cherry hamentaschen.