Kreuz Market, and the Year the Family Split the Building from the Business

The 1999 Split That Made Two Institutions

Kreuz Market in Lockhart traces its founding to 1900, when Charles Kreuz Sr. acquired a meat market on the town's main square and added a pit. For most of the twentieth century the business and the building were the same thing. That changed in 1999, when the Schmidt family, which had owned and operated Kreuz for decades under Edgar "Smitty" Schmidt and then his sons, reached an impasse over the property. Rick Schmidt took the Kreuz name and the recipes north to a new building on the edge of town. Nina Mukerjee Furstenau, writing on Central Texas barbecue lineage, and Daniel Vaughn, the Texas Monthly barbecue editor, have both documented the split as a turning point — not a collapse, but a multiplication. The original building on the square became Smitty's Market under Don Schmidt and his family, who kept the pits, kept the open-flame brick fireplaces that pre-date the offset smoker era, and kept the no-forks, butcher-paper tradition. Texas Monthly's barbecue coverage has returned to both addresses in every major list since.

What the 1999 split produced, practically, was two institutions sharing a single lineage. Kreuz at its new location seats hundreds and operates at a scale that handles the highway traffic off U.S. 183. Smitty's, in the original building with its low-ceilinged pit room and coal-dark walls, runs on a shorter schedule and a smaller staff. Neither replaced the other.

Taylor, Luling, Lexington — The Surrounding Record

Lockhart draws the most attention — the Texas Legislature designated it the Barbecue Capital of Texas in 1999 — but the lineage map extends well beyond it. Louie Mueller Barbecue in Taylor, in Williamson County, opened in 1949 as a grocery and evolved into a destination pit over the following decades. Wayne Mueller, Louie's grandson, now runs the operation out of the same building on West 2nd Street, and the business has appeared on every Texas Monthly Top 50 list that has been published since the magazine began compiling them in 1997. The joint's post oak smoke, the brisket's fat-cap render, and the building's honeycombed ceiling tiles — stained amber over decades — are documented as frequently as any interior in Central Texas food writing.

City Market in Luling opened in the 1950s and stayed in the Bracewell family for generations. It operates with a cafeteria-style service that predates the queue-and-counter format now standard at newer operations. The pit room is separated from the dining room; customers carry meat through a connecting door. That physical layout — the pit as a distinct, smoke-saturated space — appears at Smitty's too, and represents an older design logic in which the smoke is treated as an industrial process, not a theater element.

Snow's BBQ in Lexington is the newest of the canonical lineage, but its pitmaster, Tootsie Tomanetz, has worked barbecue pits since the 1960s. Texas Monthly named Snow's the best barbecue in Texas in 2008, when the magazine's list was compiled by the journalist Joe Nick Patoski and a small team of contributors. The selection drew national attention to a small town of roughly 1,100 people and a joint that operated only on Saturday mornings. The 2008 Texas Monthly list established Snow's as an institution in a single issue. Tomanetz, who was working a second job as a school custodian at the time, continued both for years.

What these businesses share — across founding dates that span half a century — is a supply logic built on post oak and local beef, a direct-heat or offset-smoke method unchanged in its essentials, and an ownership structure that runs through families rather than investment groups. The 1999 Kreuz-Smitty's split is the sharpest single episode in that record: a moment when succession produced competition instead of consolidation, and both sides held.