Luling: City Market

June 2008

Manager and pitmaster Joe Capello Sr. checks his meats.
Photograph by LeAnn Mueller

Fielden says: This is it! I have ruminated today two years of barbecue ruminations and commented on all the Top 5 of 2008. In all my carefully planned pilgrimages, midnight runs, business stopovers and quick fixes, City Market in Luling never had a bad day, never lacked for flavor or quality and never let me down. I’ve eaten inside and on the road; I’ve packed it out to the golf course, home 10 hours away and FedEx across the country. I’ve enjoyed it alone, with the preacher and even my mother. Far and away, City Market does it better than everyone else, every time and in every way. I never fear when I order, “Two hots, two ribs, two bread, half-pound brisket, some pickles.” Add to that two Sunkist and a sixty-cent cheese and there’s no better way to spend 30-minutes at the lunch table. Don’t listen to those yahoos at Yahoo who complain about the staff; the people who work at City Market are friendly and purpose-driven to serve customers. YOU spend all day in the only non-ventilated pit room in the Top 5 or separating out all the free beans. This isn’t some cookie-cutter bistro with a horde of co-ed wait staff trying to earn tips. These people live to cook the best, most consistently flavorful meat money can buy in the state of Texas. If I ever had to choose my last meal, it would be Central Texas barbecue- Luling, Texas- City Market- second booth from the pit entrance. Save me a seat. (December 12th, 2010 at 3:22pm)

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You’ve come for wholeness, for satisfaction deep within your soul. Your searching has brought you here, to the company of fellow pilgrims in the snaking line. Slowly, you advance across the tile floor, past the knotty-pine walls, and up to the inner sanctum: a glass-enclosed chamber where a host of priests, in green apron vestments and orange hard hats, labor at a smoky altar. Aware of your unworthiness, you push open the swinging door.

This is barbecue’s holy of holies: City Market’s dark pit room, located in a back corner of the main dining hall. Clouds of post oak incense have been rising from its five pits for fifty years, and the smoke envelops manager Joe Capello Sr. and his crew as they slice your order—a choice of brisket, ribs, sausage, nothing else—onto butcher paper. You pay at the blackened cash register (bread comes free, onions, pickles, and peppers for pocket change), then reemerge into the dining area, where staff at a central counter sell sides and liquid offerings: vessels of potato salad and beans; hunks of yellow cheese; an array of beers, Big Red, IBC Root Beer. You take your place at one of the pine booths or tables among the multitude of other devotees, a startlingly ecumenical mix of faces white, black, and brown. A handwritten notice proclaims the righteous requirements of the meat before you: “No forks—use your hands.”

Your first bite of a generous rib is a revelation. It is tender, salty, fall-off-the- bone succulent. The brisket, perfectly crispy yet moist, emanates an addictive woodsmoke flavor. And, oh, the homemade beef sausage! Epic. Coarse and juicy, it alone is worth the journey. As for sauce? You forgot about the sauce, but it’s in a glass bottle right in front of you. And when you get around to tasting it—a thin, orange-ish, deliciously mustardy concoction—the signs imploring you to “Please leave sauce bottles on tables” suddenly make sense. In fact, your yearnings now met, your hopes fulfilled—suddenly everything makes sense. Katharyn Rodemann

Rating: 5.

Primary heat source: Wood.
633 E. Davis, 830-875-9019. Open Mon–Sat 7–6. Closed Sun. [Map]

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