ONE SUNNY MORNING LAST FALL, Chuck Charnichart—arguably the top brisket cook working in Texas today—walked into Kreuz Market in Lockhart in a Lady Gaga T-shirt. ¶ Among the Texas barbecue faithful, Kreuz is well known as one of the no-frills German American meat markets where Hill Country–style barbecue originated. It’s an institution built on greasy butcher paper, along with the likes of the iconic Southside Market & Barbeque in Elgin and Louie Mueller Barbecue in Taylor. Opened in 1875 in Lockhart as Jesse Swearingen’s meat market, Kreuz moved to its current location—a barnlike building where smoke hangs over old-style brick pits—in 1999, after a dispute between siblings. Like other early Texas barbecue joints, Kreuz began as a grocery store where the owners smoked the meats they couldn’t sell, offering them by the pound. ¶ Today it stands as one of a handful of barbecue pillars in Lockhart, a charming small town of some fifteen thousand people that the Texas legislature named the state’s official barbecue capital about twenty years ago. And Lockhart will soon be home to a new entrant in the state’s long barbecue history. Charnichart has been visiting often lately, looking at locations for her first barbecue joint, driving three hours down from Fort Worth and bringing friends from Austin and her hometown of Brownsville, about three hundred miles south on the Mexican border.
Until a decade or so ago, serious Texas barbecue fans made pilgrimages to Lockhart the way their Eastern counterparts might spend time in Lexington, North Carolina, or small towns in the South Carolina Midlands. Many still do. But things started to change in Texas around the time a thirty-something in a white V-neck and thick-rimmed glasses named Aaron Franklin opened a barbecue trailer by an interstate highway in Austin
