Sauce can start fights. Sauce is a cover, Rick Schmidt insists, for poor meat. Atmosphere plays a huge role in the business. Customers flock to Lockhart from around the world to enter Kreuz down a long, dark, wooden hall, drawn into the back of the building by the sound of meat sizzling over stone pits. There, in a room ablaze with post-oak fires, lie slabs of pork chops, rings of sausage, and hunks of glistening shoulder.
People buy by the pound, a ton or more on busy days.
In a vast, cool room up front, diners sit on long benches beneath a portrait of Smitty and his two sons and eat their meat on crackers or between slices of white bread. The elder Schmidt bought the business in 1948 from the family of Charlie Kreuz, who had run it since the turn of the century. In 1984, he sold everything but the building to his sons, and before his death, says Rick Schmidt, promised to leave that to them as well. But in the meantime, their sister, Caldwell County Clerk Nina Sells, who says she grew up, just like her brothers, in the restaurant, had made an appeal to the old man's sense of fairness. As a result, the building went to her and, since then, the siblings have been at odds.