Roadfood_ Revised Edition - Jane Stern [231]
The City Café menu goes beyond such country classics as chicken-fried steak and chicken ’n’ dumplings to include modern salads, fajitas, hamburgers, and all-vegetable plates with a choice of four from a repertoire of at least a dozen. Our favorites, other than the sweet carrots and mashed potatoes, are black-eyed peas and fried okra.
City Market
633 E. Davis St.
830–875–9019
Luling, TX
LD | $
The dining area at the City Market in Luling is cool and comfortable with faux-granite tables and clean tile floors. To fetch the food, however, you must walk into hell. A swinging door leads into a back-room pit, a shadowy, cave-like chamber illuminated by the glow of burning logs in pits on the floor underneath the iron ovens. It is excruciatingly hot, but pit men, apparently at ease in their sweltering workplace, assemble meats on pink butcher paper with gracious dispatch. They take your money, then gather the edges of the paper together so it becomes a boat-like container you easily can carry back into the cool, pine-paneled dining room. City Market’s specialties are circular rings of sausage with chewy skin and coarse-chopped all-beef filling as well as overwhelmingly succulent pork ribs.
Uncharacteristically (for Texas), the City Market also makes significant barbecue sauce—a spice-speckled, dark orange emulsion that is so coveted by customers that signs on the wall above every booth implore “Please Leave Sauce Bottles on Tables.” One-serving Styrofoam sauce containers are available to go for forty cents apiece; if you need more, the management finds a clean empty jar, fills it, and charges you accordingly.
Clark’s Outpost
101 Hwy. 377 (at Gene Autry Dr.)
940–437–2414
Tioga, TX
LD | $$
Clark’s Outpost, a good hour north of Dallas, is a Lone Star legend patronized by local horse breeders, city folk hungry for a country meal, flamboyant high rollers who arrive by helicopter in the field across the road, and good-food pilgrims from all over the United States in search of Texas on a plate.
Its fame is built on brisket, slow cooked for days until it becomes beef and smoke laced together in exquisite harmony that words cannot convey. Rimmed with a crust of smoky black, each slice is so supple that the gentlest fork pressure separates a mouthful. The warm barbecue sauce, supplied on the side in Grolsch beer bottles, is dark, spicy, and provocatively sweet. Pork ribs are another treasure, rubbed with a seasoning mix and cooked until tender. Rib dinners arrive at the table severed into individual bones, each one lean and smoke-flavored, glistening with its own juice but also begging for some of that good sauce.
Country-style side dishes include crisp-fried okra, jalapeño-spiked black-eyed peas, and a marvelous oddity, French fried corn-on-the-cob. Lengths of corn, unbattered and unadorned, are dipped in hot oil about a minute or so, just long enough for the kernels to cook and begin to caramelize. The result is corn that is cooked and crunchy and astoundingly sweet. Each piece is served with blacksmith’s nails stuck in its ends to serve as holders.
Despite success and renown, Clark’s is pleasingly rustic. Located in a town that is little more than a farmland crossroads, it is a small agglomeration of joined-together wood buildings surrounded by a gravel parking lot and stacks of wood for the smoker, with the flags of Texas and the United States flying above.
Cooper’s Pit Bar-B-Q
502 San Antonio St.
915–347–6897
Mason, TX
LD | $$
At the northern edge of the Hill Country in Mason County is a grand barbecue shrine, Cooper’s, where the ritual is that you eyeball the meat on its grate, tell the pit man what you want, and he hoists it off. Once it is sliced and priced, you find a seat at one of a handful of tables inside the cinder-block dining room (or at a picnic table outside) and feast. The repertoire of meats is huge, including brisket, all-beef sausage, pork chops, pork tenderloin, and lamb ribs. The brisket is