A Beef Over Barbecue

For 100 years, Kruez Market of little Lockhart, Texas, has been serving barbecue. Located in Texas, a state known for its barbecue, it has a reputation as one of the best. It is a Texas landmark.

But as Correspondent Harold Dow reports, that landmark is now in the middle of a heated family row.

The family has taken great pride in not changing a thing: There are still no plates, no forks and no sauce. "Meat tastes pretty good on its own," Schmidt says.

The future of that tradition is up in the air. After the landlord raised the rent, Schmidt had to close. The landlord just happened to be Nina Sells, Schmidt's younger sister.

"She wanted a 126 percent (rise) in rent and then $100,000 to $200,000 of repairs done to it," Schmidt explains.

"There is five years between us," Sells says. "We got on the outs about different things."

In 1982, Schmidt and his brother bought the business from their father, who retired. For years, Sells never had much to do with the barbecue, until the elder Schmidt died in 1990. In his will, he left the building to his daughter. It was a recipe for disaster.

"He ran the business; I owned the building," says Sells. According to Sells, she asked for a larger role in the business, and her brother refused.

The bad blood really began to flow when Sells raised the rent. Schmidt offered to buy the property, but his sister said it wasn't for sale.

"I don't want to sell the building," Sells says. "It means just as much to me. I was raised in that business."

Rather than surrender to his sister's demands, Schmidt packed up and moved to his new Kruez Market, a mile away. "We lost that tradition but this one is going to continue," he says.

"It is sort of like moving the Alamo," says John Kelso, the barbecue columnist for the Austin American-Statesman. "It was in good location to start with."

Sells may have done her brother a favor. Since the move, business has doubled. Schmidt says that he owes his little sister a thank-you note. "His sister has forced him to become wealthy; that is what it is," Kelso says.

What happened to the old building? Sells and her two sons decided to start their own barbecue joint, called Smitty's after her dad. They opened it in the old Kruez Market.

His sister wants to show Schmidt that she can succeed as well as he can, he says: "She looked me straight in the eye, (and said) twice, 'You don't think I can't run a barbecue place?' I didn't want to argue with her. The second time I said, 'We don't know; you never have.'"

"Little sister is grown up," Sells says.

Schmidt, though, isn't sure: "She doesn't know enough about this business to know when I was right."

Who has the better beef? After it opened, Kelso took a taste test. Smitty's "is pretty good, not as good as Kreuz's," he says. The "pork is a little dry. It has been done too much."

Then Kelso tried Kruez Market, at the new location. "It's moister, thicker," he says of its barbecue. "Has much more flavor to it here. Everything here has much more flavor to it."

In Kelso's judgment, Kreuz wins hands down. He went back recently, and he still has the same opinion.

So what is the moral of the story?

Kelso has an idea: "Don't take your sister's skate key when she is 9."

Web story by David Kohn;