Luling

BBQ |
March 27, 2017

Stuffed Chicken Legs at Baker Boys BBQ

In Luling, Wayne Baker grew up on the basics of barbecue. Brisket, ribs, and beef sausage came wrapped up in butcher paper at City Market, the favored barbecue joint of his youth. “I didn’t really know a barbecue plate existed,” he told me at his barbecue joint, Baker Boys BBQ in Gonzales.

By Daniel Vaughn

BBQ |
January 13, 2015

Houston Wright, a Butcher

Houston Wright cut meat, made sausage, and cooked barbecue at Kreuz Market in Lockhart for sixty years. He was tying sausage there before the brick building that housed the market (and is now home to Smitty’s Market) was built in 1924. He was deaf and mute by then—former Kreuz Market

By Daniel Vaughn

BBQ |
January 15, 2014

Interview: Joe Capello of City Market in Luling

Pitmaster: City Market in Luling, opened 1958Age: 67Smoker: Wood-fired brick pit and a gas-fired rotisserie smokerWood: Post OakIf you’ve been to City Market in Luling, chances are you’ve seen the hard-hat clad Joe Capello. If their doors are open, then he’s probably there working the pit like he’s done for the last few

By Daniel Vaughn

BBQ Joint Reviews |
May 16, 2013

City Market (Luling)

There are few places we love as much as the pit room at City Market. Entering the smoke-filled, glass-enclosed chamber at the back of the dining room is an experience you will remember for decades—a trip into an iconic, sacred space in the world of barbecue. Like Kreuz Market and

By Texas Monthly

Food & Drink |
January 20, 2013

Luling: City Market

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

By Texas Monthly

BBQ Joint Reviews |
December 13, 2012

City Market (Luling)

There are many folks around the country that may have just been introduced to the existence of City Market, in Luling, earlier this year when Newsweek published their list of the “101 Best Places to Eat” around the world. I myself

By Daniel Vaughn

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April 30, 2010

San Marcos River

Watch out for sunken logs and fallen trees, which rest in the river like sleeping monsters in tangle of smaller deadwood.

By Texas Monthly

The Culture |
May 31, 2009

How to Spit Watermelon Seeds

Emily Post may have deplored any sort of public spitting as “disgusting” and “too nauseating to comment on,” but such notions of etiquette have never stuck with the patrons of Luling’s annual Watermelon Thump. Every June, the World Championship Seed Spitting Contest draws hundreds of spectators who hope to witness

By Andrea Valdez

Food & Drink |
April 30, 2003

The Best of the Best

Cooper’s Pit Bar-B-Q MasonThe name “Cooper’s” has long been synonymous with Llano, but now the Mason operation of the same name has overtaken its distant cousin. Cooper’s Pit Bar-B-Q was opened in Mason in 1953 by the late George Cooper, whose son Tommy (also deceased) cloned it a decade later

By Joe Nick Patoski, Paul Burka and Michael Hall