Tootsie’s barbecue pulls pilgrims across Texas
82-year-old pitmaster embraces newfound celebrity as a top chef
LEXINGTON — Everything changed for Norma Frances Tomanetz when Texas Monthly ranked her barbecue among the best in the state. Suddenly, hundreds started making the trip to this tiny central Texas town to eat her brisket, ribs and sausage at Snow’s BBQ.
It got worse in February when the James Beard Foundation, which gives out the top honors in food, named Tomanetz — known by all as “Ms. Tootsie” — among the top 20 chefs in the southwest region, a remarkable achievement. She’s a pitmaster, not a French culinary whiz. She’s a woman in the almost exclusively male world of barbecue. And she’s one month shy of 83, with no signs of slowing down.
Tomanetz at first had no idea what the Beard nomination was and ultimately didn’t make it into the final cut, but the flow of pilgrims driving miles across Texas to stand in line in the predawn
dark for the chance to eat her food has become a deluge.
“It has been a continuous stream of people coming in,” Tomanetz said. “Everybody in the world hasn’t been here yet.”
Tomanetz never aspired to become a barbecue legend. She likes to work, meet people and make good food. But she’s reluctantly learned to embrace her newfound celebrity.
The line started to form outside Snow’s two hours before sunrise on a recent Saturday, a little later than usual. Some of those waiting had risen hours earlier to drive there. The sky was black. Crickets sang in the predawn darkness. A cow lowed nearby.
The customers on the porch in the dark were the first of 300 to arrive. They brought camping chairs and books. They greeted each other. They gazed out at the action and wondered what they would order from this woman with weathered hands and a charming smile.
Tomanetz drove herself to Snow’s a little before 2 a.m. She started on the chicken, pork and a tall pot of beans, which she — at 5 feet 3 inches tall — had to reach up to stir. She made the mop — a liquid seasoning (onions, mustard, vinegar, butter, Worcestershire sauce) to baste the meat.
There was still much to do, but it didn’t daunt Tomanetz. She has been shoveling hot coals, seasoning mighty slabs of meat and blinking through unrelenting smoke at Snow’s nearly every Saturday without complaint for 15 years.
Lexington, population 1,100, is hidden among rolling ranch land east of Austin. A plaque in Heritage Square, a block down Main Street from Snow’s, tells its history. The city is named for Lexington, Mass., “where the American revolution began.” A teacher from Ohio settled there in 1837. He opened a post office nearby in 1849. The railroad was built in 1890.
Along the square are all the town’s quaint necessities: the police station, painted peach; the chamber of commerce, painted hunter green; the masonic lodge, with its pale brick facade; and the city hall.
Residents in town have long known Tomanetz as the no-fluff woman she has always been. The local newspaper, the Lexington Leader, ran a front-page story when the James Beard list was first released. “Tootsie is still Lexington’s home-town girl who loves the country and a low profile,” the story read, “which is pretty hard to keep, given all the publicity that surrounds her.”
Snow’s is in a narrow, brick-red building, with a metal roof and fading paint. Locals know to call in orders ahead. Between the picnic tables and serving station inside, it’s a tight space, one that customers who have waited an hour or two in line are thrilled to reach.
Tomanetz grew up in Lexington and helped on the family farm. She still tells the story of the barbecue her father would bring home on Saturdays.
Her husband worked at the meat market in Giddings, 18 miles to the south. She agreed to help when they were shorthanded one day in 1966. It was fate: She wound up staying 10 years, then went on to operate a market in Lexington. On Saturdays, of course, she barbecued.
In town, Tomanetz knew who was who, and who was related to whom. Among those she watched grow up was Kerry Bexley, 51. He remembered paying $1.85 for a ham sandwich several days a week at the market. He knew how good her barbecue was.
He tried selling her on the idea of Snow’s.
“If you can have the pits ready,” she told him after a few years of thinking on it, “I’m ready.”
Manning the pits at Snow’s is not Tomanetz’s only gig in town. For 20 years, she’s worked in the maintenance department at the Giddings Independent School District.
Shane Holman, an assistant superintendent who hired her, recalled seeing her carry two desks at once, one under each arm. She works six hours a day and still mops the floors. She once dug through a dumpster to find a girl’s retainer.
“She’s working circles around me,” said Holman, 30 years her junior. “You can’t replace somebody like Tootsie.”
Bexley, the owner of Snow’s, also works a variety of jobs during the weekdays. But for him and Tomanetz, Saturdays belong to Snow’s.
To see Bexley and Tomanetz together is to watch co-conspirators in action. They stood on a piece of cardboard side by side at a metal table, wrapping each brisket in foil before 5 a.m. Both had on jeans, sturdy shoes, Snow’s T-shirts and aprons. They had a singular mindset: If there was something to do, it was done immediately.
The pair had learned with time to trust each other. This was where they saw the first signs of the brain cancer that killed Tomanetz’s son. This was where Bexley helped Tomanetz’s husband move around in a walker, then a wheelchair, before he died.
Tomanetz has six grandchildren and 10 great-grandchildren. On her only day off, Sundays, she attends two church services, one at 9 a.m. and another at 11 a.m. She still wears a wedding band on the pinky finger of her left hand.
“We just don’t know what God has planned for us,” she said, “and we just have to take it a day at a time.”
There is a certain rhythm to the work: Tomanetz skewers and lifts each 5pound hunk of brisket with ease. She shovels hot coals and carries them to the box pits, knowing that grease dripping down could create a fire.
It is 68 degrees outside, much cooler than in the summers, but the pits warm the space. Tomanetz doesn’t read the temperature gauges. She feels the lids of the pits with a bare hand. More coals. More mop.
It’s hard work, but Tomanetz looks strong. She has missed only two Saturdays, when she had a knee replacement last year.
“I do not feel like an 83year-old person,” she said. “I do not consider myself that age”
Working at her age isn’t unheard of in Lexington. The woman who had made the potato salad died at 100, as the Snow’s staff recalled it. And she’s not the oldest pit master in Texas. That distinction possibly belongs to 94-year-old Vencil Mares at Taylor Cafe in Taylor, who goes in at 5:30 a.m. in his wheelchair.
Nearby in Taylor at Louie Mueller Barbecue, which received a James Beard Foundation award in 2006, Bobby Mueller worked until the day before he died in 2008 at 69, recalled his son Wayne. It now takes a team to do what his father did on his own; he and Tomanetz were cut from the same cloth.
“What she does is amazing,” Mueller said. “The fact that she can haul wood, just be as physical as the demands require her to be... and do it after all these years. That to me is the biggest story. Because people burn out. People stop caring.”
After 7:00 a.m., birds were chirping. The cloudy sky lit up a gray-blue. There were 32 people in line, a number that would more than triple before Snow’s opened at 8 a.m. First in line were Kim Clark, who is stationed with the Air Force in San Antonio, and her visiting nephew, Devin Lewis, 22.
“First stop!” Clark, 48, declared from the porch. “The people are just as nice as the food is good.”
Farther down were three neighbors from Houston, who had pulled away around 5:00 a.m. They’d talked about barbecue techniques on the drive up. One of the trio, Kevin Brady, 52, clad in an Astros jersey, had met Bexley when he came down to help with evacuations during Hurricane Harvey. Brady greeted him that morning, as others nosed around the pits.
Bexley and Tomanetz took their first photo with a fan at 7:35 a.m. Brady would get one later.
“Y’all need anything, holler to us,” Bexley shouted at the crowd.
Saturday mornings in Lexington mean stepping outside and catching a whiff of smoky meat.
At 8:03 a.m., Bexley said “let’s roll,” and the slow procession to the meat counter began. The first customer, who’d won a raffle to move to the front, walked away with $209.36 worth of chicken and brisket (some frozen). Clark and her nephew next ordered sausage (half for her, whole for him), two ribs each and a mound of brisket, plus iced tea in souvenir cups. They skipped the bread and sides (that was filler, they decided) and sat down.
“Brisket first?” Clark asked.
“Brisket first for sure,” Lewis replied. He took a bite. “Oh my god,” he said. Tomanetz was outside mopping more meat.
Only at 11:20 a.m. did she pause to chomp down on her second white bread sandwich of the day, along with a jalapeño.
Her jeans were dirty. She leaned her elbows on her knees, then stood while chewing her last bite.