In the face of adversity, Michael Johnson Jr. continued to build Cen-Tex Smokers, a company that now has a year-long waiting list for its pits.
You won't be able to put these down.
Luling, Gonzales, and the park itself provide lots of fun options.
At this tropical, mystical park, you’ll find animals and plants unlike anything else in Texas.
Beaver Aplin built the quirky convenience chain into a Texas empire. Will his tactics translate outside the state?
”The most peculiar angel” and a man of faith.
Welcome to the golden age of Texas barbecue.
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.
The best events across Texas this week.
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
Luling’s artful pump jacks.
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
The state's top events and offerings, from Willie Nelson's Fourth of July Picnic to Luling's Watermelon Thump.
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
From Luling’s Watermelon Thump Queen to Gilmer’s Queen Yam, small-town Texas is full of festival royalty, and pretty is the head that wears the crown.
She’s the girl who wears cowboy boots under her poufy white taffeta dress every weekend as she rides in some other town’s parade.
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
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
Richard Linklater, the Watermelon Thump, Audie Murphy Day, and the Star Wars Exhibit . . .
Watch out for sunken logs and fallen trees, which rest in the river like sleeping monsters in tangle of smaller deadwood.
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
William Martin reviews our places of worship.
Oil wells in Luling.
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
