Texas barbecue history is written on the walls
There are many reasons to love Texas barbecue. First, it’s delicious. The alchemy of fragrant wood smoke combined with carbonized and caramelized beef and pork is a mouthwatering trigger for any true Texan’s appetite.
Also, the people. A Texas barbecue experience isn’t complete without a visit with the pitmaster, who is rarely shy about proclaiming the superiority of his smoked meats and telling the story of how his barbecue joint came to be.
However, other aspects of the experience can be overlooked. Especially when visiting a place for the first time, we are often solely focused on the prodigious tray of food before us. Nowadays, barbecue fans huddle over the smoked meats with cameras snapping away or ask for a selfie with the pitmaster as they stand in line, oblivious to the other elements around them.
I make it a habit to stop and smell the barbecue, so to speak — to simply look around the restaurant’s dining room. The true narrative of the establishment’s history, as well as the eccentricities and predilections of its owner, are often hung, posted, etched, scribbled and plastered onto the walls.
In Houston, the walls at Pizzitola’s Bar-B-Cue offer a local barbecuehistory lesson. Though I have visited dozens of times, I still find myself hovering along the walls, picking out memorabilia I’ve never seen before. In between mementos from owner Jerry Pizzitola’s beloved alma mater, Texas A&M University, there is a corner that documents the founding of the restaurant as Shepherd Drive Barbecue Stand in the 1930s.
There is a grainy picture of Shepherd in the 1930s or ’40s, showing the original location, which was bulldozed in the 1950s to make way for nearby Interstate 10. There are pictures of original owners John and Lela Davis chopping wood and manning the order counter. A portrait of the owners’ son Lynwood, perhaps from the early 1950s, radiates with the ambition of a young man who would graduate from Prairie View A&M University and eventually return to the family business.
In Central Texas, the main dining room of Louie Mueller Barbecue in Taylor is a physical manifestation of the great traditions of Texas barbecue. A close examination of the walls reveals a patina of smoke built up over 50 years from the giant brick pit that dominates the room.
Perhaps the most iconic image of Texas barbecue that’s not a pitmaster or a tray of smoked meats is the wall of business cards at Louie Mueller, each pinned by customers who visited dozens of years ago or dozens of hours ago. Some cards are stark white, some are frayed and browned. They are layers of history, with the new cards covering the old, without harm because the old cards are so old they are no longer legible.
On the opposite wall, a collection of framed magazine and newspaper articles narrates the joint’s history from past to present. There is a tribute to the late Bobby Mueller, father of current owner and pitmaster Wayne Mueller, anchored by the bronze medal awarded to Bobby in 2006 as an “American Classic” by the prestigious James Beard Foundation.
For places like Pizzitola’s and Louie Mueller, it’s impossible to grasp the history of the place in just one visit. Of course, the barbecue itself commands our attention in just the first few visits alone. As familiarity sets in, a closer examination of the surroundings is warranted. The best Texas barbecue joints are soaked in both smoke and history.