RICK SCHMIDT 

KREUZ MARKET
619 N. Colorado St.
Lockhart, TX 78644-2110
(512) 398-2361
www.kreuzmarket.com

“People say, ‘Well, I have to have sauce with my barbecue.’ And we say, ‘Well, have you tasted it yet?’ And they say, ‘No, but I always use sauce.’ And our suggestion is, ‘You taste it and see if you need it.’ And ninety-nine percent of them will come back and say, ‘You’re right; I don’t need it.’ And that’s unique in the state; there’s not many of them that don’t serve sauce.” – Rick Schmidt

Born in 1945, Rick Schmidt grew up with his brother and sister in Kreuz’s, their father’s meat market. Well over 100 years old, Kreuz Market fits firmly in the tradition of central Texas German meat markets that evolved into barbecue restaurants over time. Today, Kreuz has evolved even further, with Rick at the helm. Situated in Lockhart, the town designated the Barbecue Capital of Texas, Kreuz now occupies a new and roomy building, while Smitty’s, owned by Rick’s sister Nina, runs from the original location. Rick connects past and present, tracing the history of knives chained to the tables, hot sauce being brought in by Hispanic customers, and why his menu got a little larger when he moved locations.

Listen to this 4-minute audio clip Rick Schmidt talking about what makes Kreuz Market different [Windows Media Player required. Go here to download the player for free.]

NOTE: What follows is a portion of the original interview that has been edited for length. To download the entire transcript in PDF form, please click here.

EDITED TRANSCRIPT

Subject: Rick Schmidt
Date: September 30, 2007
Location: Kreuz Market – Lockhart, TX
Fieldwork Director: Dr. Elizabeth Engelhardt
Fieldwork Team: Eric Covey and Gavin Benke

Produced in association with the American Studies Department at The University of Texas at Austin and the Central Texas Barbecue Association.

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Eric Covey: All right, we are recording. Uh, I’m Eric Covey, and I’m in Lockhart, Texas, with Gavin Benke, here at Kreuz Market. And if you could, for me, can you go ahead and, uh, give us your name and, uh, your date of birth?

Rick Schmidt: I’m Rick Schmidt. Uh, date of birth is December 6, 1945.

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OK. I noticed that this is definitely the biggest, the biggest barbecue restaurant in Texas that I’ve been in. Can you maybe tell me a little about the history of the building here?

Well, this building, uh, I get asked, “What did it used to be?” Well, it used to be a vacant lot. In 1999, I was, uh, we were in another location and had been there ninety-nine years here in town, and we, uh, couldn’t buy the property. We were told that we were going to be out of it in five years; they would only give us a five-year lease, wanted a lot of work done to maintain that five-year lease. Anyway, long story short, negotiations, uh, ran up against a brick wall, and I was either going to have to move then, or move in five years. And, uh, I chose to move at that time. And, uh, we’d been in—I owned the name, had bought the name from our father, my brother and I had. My brother retired about that time. So, in ‘99, we moved up here. I bought this property, and I built this building. I lost a lot of—oh, what’s the word I’m looking for?—its “ambience” and “atmosphere” in the old building because it had been there a long time. It was, uh, kind of a dungeon-type place to work in, uh, but we liked it, and we didn’t want to move. And so, losing those memories, I had to create something different up here. I had movie-set people that are good customers of mine say, “Well, when you build the new place, we can come in and make it look like it’s a hundred years old.” And my answer was, “That’d be great, but everybody knows it’s not.” So I just built it, uh, I wanted something big enough for our Saturdays; we do the biggest part of our business on Saturday. I said, “Well, I want it to where everybody can be in here and be comfortable.” It’s a little large for the week, but the week business is, is growing. Saturdays, it’s just right. We get it about eighty-percent full, which makes it look like it’s full, and, uh, what I lost in the old smoke and everything else, we’re building up here. We’re getting smoked up and getting used up, and, uh, the size and the layout of it impresses a lot of people, so we’re just creating some new memories.

It is impressive. About how many people can you seat in here?

About 560. The fire marshal allows us 605, I think, but, uh, we’ve found that, uh, the seating we have now for about 560 is adequate. You know, if we outgrew it we could still add another close to forty-five.

OK, and what about the, uh, you have more pits than any barbecue restaurant also I’ve been to. How many pits do you have back there?

Well, in this retail area, I have eight, and they’re all sixteen-foot long. Uh, they’re built identical. They have adjustments on them that I can, um, make them cook either hot or cold, or cool. Uh, make them cook on, totally on the whole grate one temperature, or I can make it hot in front and, and just warm in the back. I, I was able to build these pits myself, and, and fortunately, the City of Lockhart Fire Marshal knew my reputation about lack of fire losses, allowed us to have the open fires, which a lot of cities won’t. And, uh, I got to design them like I wanted to, and, uh—so I’ve got eight of them now; they’re all the same, but they all cook differently, because I cook different things on them. And then we have in our, uh, processing plant, we have another cooker back there that, uh, we cook our sausage on for the first time. Part of our—part of our process from day one has been to make the sausage and cook it, then chill it and reheat it on the pit, and sell it—sell it hot, and, uh, it’s, uh—like a lot of foods, it tastes better the next day. Our sausage is that type; it tastes good the first time it’s cooked; it tastes a lot better chilled and reheated thenext day. And so, we cook the sausage back there, and, uh, all the meat and everything out here.

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OK, I want to ask you a little more about—about Lockhart, but first, just to rewind a little bit, you had mentioned, uh, you’ve added the sides here. You have the sauerkraut and the beans, and then you have the German potatoes. How long have you had those for?  And—and where are the recipes from, I guess?

Well, I don’t give the recipe out, but, uh, when we moved into this nice, big facility, uh—when we were—go back to when we were in the small facility, we were almost had a barbecue-stand atmosphere, and so when you had a limited menu, it worked. People go up there, “Oh, that’s all you have.” And, uh, and we had, you know, barbecue and sausage, bread and crackers, and, uh, pickles, onions, and cheese, and tomatoes and avocado, and all those items came out of what used to be in the grocery store. Kreuz Market as it is now—our menu is a product of evolution. Going back to when they used to barbecue the meat to keep it from spoiling, well, they had butcher paper is all they had from the meat market, so that’s what they served it on. Uh, they bought barrels of crackers. It wasn’t store—it wasn’t sliced bread. And people would buy their meat and get their crackers and sit down. If they wanted an onion or some rat cheese or anything like that, a tomato, they’d go up into the meat market, in the grocery store, and buy it up there, then go back into the restaurant and eat it. When we quit selling the groceries in the late-sixties, mid- to late-sixties, uh, we took those items that they’d been buying and put them in the—on the menu, like the tomato, the avocado, and the cheese, and the onion, and we always had—then we have pickles. When I moved out here, people were surprised, and they said, “This is a big place, and that’s all you got to eat?” Well, it was kind of offending at first, but then finally I said, “Well, I need to try to, you know, please more people,” and so I put the beans in first. I said, “Well, they’re a protein; we’re a protein place.” It kind of went with it, and the beans were popular. And, uh, then later on, I got a good recipe for German potatoes. I didn’t want a traditional potato salad; I like being different. And, uh, then instead of coleslaw, my cabbage is sauerkraut. And, uh, that’s the three sides that we’ve added. And, uh, another thing we added when we moved into this new facility is dipped ice cream. And, uh, those—all those items are—are—give people that want a little bit more variety something to choose from.

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Sure it is. Uh, what time do you have to start cooking the meat, speaking of hard work?

 Well, we—we cook differently than most people; we cook fast by the industry standards. We’ll take a fifteen-pound shoulder clod and get it done in four-and-a-half hours. And, uh, we, uh, sometimes can pre-cook meat and then finish cooking it the next day. So, we start about seven—between seven and eight in the morning now, and, uh, and have everything—we open up at ten-thirty, and we have everything good and fresh, and we have our ways of doing it. Uh, and that’s because we have enough pit space here. At the other location, we didn’t have enough pit space; we were starting at four-thirty in the morning and stuff, but people that cook briskets, eight, ten, twelve, fourteen hours, uh, that’s their way of doing it. I—I don’t—I’m not that patient. We get our briskets done in about six hours, five-and-a-half to six. And, uh, it takes more attention; you don’t just put it on there and then come back in six hours. You have to turn them about every thirty minutes or so, move them around, find your hot spots on your pit, and do a little juggling. It’s a—the way we cook, we cook so fast, it’s almost a combination of barbecuing and grilling, but it’s all done with wood.

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OK. Uh, now back to Lockhart. Lockhart’s the Barbecue Capital of Texas. How—how did that happen?

Well, a long time ago, there were a lot of barbecue places here, and then they—one by one, the meat markets closed up, and it wound up being just two: uh, Kreuz Market and Black’s Barbecue. Then, uh, Chisholm Trail Barbecue started up, and we—there were three of us. Now, Lockhart at that time was around 9000 people and three barbecue places, and you have to—makes you be good. I mean, you got—you can’t just let your quality slip when you have that much competition. And then when we were forced to move in ‘99, uh, my sister opened up the old location. She inherited the building, and so she took it and opened it up. And, uh, there was four. So you have four pretty substantial barbecue places in a town of 11,000 now. Like I said, seventy-five percent of my business is from outside the county. I would say that per capita, we probably sell more barbecue than anybody else just because we’re a small town with—with four barbecue places. Most of your smaller towns have two. And, uh, it’s, uh, it’s flattering to be called the Barbecue Capital of Texas. Our legislator, state representative, a few years ago did that in the legislation, and—and got us a—a declaration, it’s on the wall over there, that Lockhart is the Barbecue Capital.

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OK. And when—when we talked earlier before we started the interview, you said that, you know, a lot of people write about Kreuz, but a lot of people get it wrong. They don’t check their facts. What kind of things are they—are they getting wrong?

Well, small details, like, uh, they’ll ask me how many rings of sausage do we, uh, do a week, or how many rings of sausage do we make, and I’ll say, “Well, on a weekly basis, we’ll make about 15,000, sometimes up to twenty [thousand], sometimes a little less. Depends on the time of the year.” And it’ll come out that we make 15,000 a day, you know, and that’s kind of embarrassing. I was—and that—you know, it—that’s a lot of sausage, you know. Things like that. And—and then, on a personal level, it’s, uh, the reason we—you know, like I said, I didn’t want to move from the old location; the business had been there ninety-nine years, and I wanted to keep it there, and, uh, tried hard to. But, uh, most of the stories that came out about it, they called it a feud between my sister and I, and it wasn’t a feud. She just said, “I’m not going to sell it to you; I’m not going to lease it to you more than five years; and that’s it. What else you want to talk about?” Well, there wasn’t anything else to talk about. So, it wasn’t a feud. And a lot of them say that, uh, she inherited the building, and my brother and I inherited the business. Well, that’s wrong. We bought the business, and we paid hard dollars for it. And, uh, it’s—it just gets a little irritating sometimes when people tell me I inherited this business, and I say, “Well, I guess all that money I paid my father, I just threw away.”

Well, you said you bought it in ‘84, right?

Yes. Yeah. Bought it in ‘84, and at that time, we were supposed to buy the property too, but, uh, Sister, uh, talked our father into not selling the property to us and just renting it to us. And then he died in 1990, and, uh, when we opened the will, she was our landlady. And my brother and I said, “That’s fine. Uh, you know, we’ll pay her rent just like we’ve been paying Dad.” And, uh, but things got a little sticky, and so, nine years later, here I am, and, uh, I’m really not sorry for it now. I—I was not happy when I had to do it, but I was forced to do something that I probably never would—would’ve had the fortitude to do on my own, because this was a big step.

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OK. And what about the story of, uh, the knives being chained to the tables in the past?

The knives were chained to the tables. Uh, that was to keep them from being stolen. Uh, Kreuz Market back in the early, or the mid-part of the century, fifties and sixties, was in the middle of a block that had about seven or eight, uh, beer taverns. “Beer joints” is what we called them, but—and, uh, somebody would get a little bit too much to drink and—and, uh, want to eat; well, they’d come over. And most of them behaved themselves and stuff. And there was—the story was that the knives were chained to keep people from fighting, and that wasn’t the case. They carried their own knives. It was to keep them from walking out. The Health Department, uh, at a point somewhere in the seventies or so, uh, told my father to—he couldn’t put any more out. And they did let us leave the ones that were on the table, and we washed them all day long periodically. When we cleaned tables, we—we wiped them off with sanitizer and stuff. And, uh, but we couldn’t—when they got—when they disappeared, someone would steal it, they’d take wire cutters and cut the chain or something and steal them for souvenirs, we weren’t allowed to replace them. If the inspector came in and saw a new knife on the table, he’d—and so, about the time that we moved up here, uh, in ‘99, I had, uh, I had eight knives left. They were on chains, and I made the announcement that—well, because of a breakdown in communication and negotiations in moving, in two weeks, five of those knives disappeared. People wanted them for souvenirs. So I had three left, and I took them off the table myself, and they’re hanging behind you over on the wall. There’s two of them against that wall crossed, and then there’s another one there. And I said, “Well, at least I’m going to keep three of them.” I’ve been offered a lot of money for them, and I—well, it’d be nice to have the money, but it’s nicer to have the knives. But, uh, they were there as a product of that evolution, you know?  You needed something to cut your meat with, and so the Kreuzes put an old cabbage knife on a chain and chained it to the table.

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To download the entire transcript in PDF form, please click here.

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