Roadfood_ Revised Edition - Jane Stern [241]
Vernon’s Kuntry Katfish
5901 W. Davis St.
409–760–3386
Conroe, TX
LD | $
Hugely popular—you will wait for a table any weekday at lunch—Vernon’s Kuntry Katfish serves not only Mississippi-raised catfish, but also a passel of country-style vegetables every day. Mustard greens or turnip greens, white northern beans, field peas, fried okra, mashed potatoes, and cheese-enriched broccoli are some of the selections, and crunchy, dark-cooked hush puppies, studded with bits of onion and jalapeño pepper, are accompanied by bowls of pickled green tomatoes.
If catfish is not your dish, try the chicken-fried steak. It’s a Texas benchmark, gilded with pepper gravy and served with biscuits or cornbread squares on the side.
Dessert is significant: fruit cobbler, banana pudding, or an item known as “good pie,” which is a uniquely American pastry edifice of pineapple chunks, bananas, cream cheese, nuts, and chocolate syrup.
Weikel’s Store and Bakery
2247 W. State Hwy.
71 979–968–9413
La Grange, TX
BL | $
A Danish-like pastry with Czech lineage, the kolache has become a tasty symbol of the Eastern European roots that have helped make this part of Texas such a culinary adventureland. One of the least-likely places to find superior kolaches is Weikel’s Store and Bakery, a convenience store attached to a gas station by the side of the highway. While it might at first look like any other quick-shop highway mart, bakery cases toward the back tell a different story. Here are handsome cakes, rolls, and cookies, plus several varieties of kolache from a house repertoire of about a dozen. Prune, cream cheese, apricot, and poppy seed are plentifully crumbed coffee companions.
You know Weikel’s is serious about its kolaches when you consider the house motto: “We Got’cha Kolache.” In addition to its pastry treasures, one other house specialty worth sampling is the house-made pig-in-a-blanket. It is a taut-skinned, rugged-textured kielbasa sausage fully encased in a tube of tender-crumb bread that is finer than any hot dog bun we’ve ever eaten.
Williams’ Smoke House
5903 Wheatley St.
713–680–8409
Houston, TX
LD Tues–Sat | $
If you need ribs in Houston, take a drive fifteen minutes north of downtown into the area known as Acres Homes, a tumbledown rural neighborhood that seems a hundred miles from the city. Here you’ll find a cabin by the side of the road that Willie and Hattie Williams opened back in the 1980s. Since then it has become many Houstonians’ favorite barbecue. It’s a shipshape little place with an order window by the door and a cluster of well-varnished tables in the wood-paneled dining room. A lot of business is takeout, but there’s a special pleasure eating here, listening to the fall of the cleaver in the kitchen as chef chops meat, and inhaling the smell of the smoke that makes this food so good.
The ribs in particular are marvelous. They are served severed into individual bats, each one with a heavy lode of meat that still bears a crust from the dry rub that is put on them before they bask for hours over the smoke of oak wood. They come glazed with a pretty-darn-hot sauce, but it’s the pork itself that makes Williams’ bones so good. This meat is supremely tender, except at the tips and edges, which reward a good chew, and it is packed with the sweet flavor that only smoked pork can deliver.
We also believe that the brisket is some of the best in town, and if you order hot links, you now have a choice of beef or pork. We picked the former and were rewarded with disks of zesty, muscular sausage that paired perfectly with Williams’ sauce.
At the order window, we asked for sweet potato pie and pecan pie for dessert at the same time we ordered our meal. When the waitress brought everything out to our table in the dining room, the pies came in take-away Styrofoam containers. In fact, all food is presented on throwaway plates with disposable plastic utensils. But the waitress felt obliged to explain that she put the pies in take-out containers because most people