Kreuz Market sits in Lockhart, a town of roughly 15,000 people about thirty minutes southeast of Austin that has somehow earned the unofficial title of Barbecue Capital of Texas. The market’s own history stretches back to 1875, when Jesse Swearingen opened the town’s first meat market. Charles Kreuz Sr. bought it in 1900 and put his name on it, and by 1948 the business had passed to a longtime butcher named Edgar Schmidt, whom everyone called Smitty.
For decades under Smitty and later his sons, Kreuz Market did one thing and did it without apology: meat smoked over post oak, sliced and served on butcher paper, no sauce, no forks, no sides beyond crackers, pickles, and onions.
Then came the split that turned a family barbecue business into a genuine only-in-Texas legend. When Smitty died in 1990, he left the business itself to his sons Rick and Don, but he left the actual building, a brick structure on South Commerce Street dating to 1924, to his daughter Nina Sells. That decision made Nina her own brothers’ landlord. Rick bought out Don in 1997 and became sole owner of the business, and almost immediately the relationship with his sister over rent and a long-term lease started to sour. Local papers started calling it a family feud, and by 1999 it had gone national. Nina wouldn’t sell the building. Rick wouldn’t keep paying what he considered an unsustainable lease. So he moved.
What happened next has become part of Texas barbecue folklore. Rather than let the fire go out on ninety-nine years of continuous smoking, pitmaster Roy Perez and Rick’s sons carried the actual hot coals from the old pits down the street in a washtub to light the new ones at Kreuz Market’s current home on North Colorado Street, preserving an unbroken flame across the move.
Nina, meanwhile, stayed in the original 1924 building and opened her own barbecue restaurant in it, naming it Smitty’s Market after their father. Both restaurants still operate today, a few blocks apart, run by the same family that split over a lease disagreement twenty-five years ago. Rick Schmidt passed away in 2019 at seventy-three, and his son Keith now runs Kreuz Market, having also launched Lockhart Smokehouse locations elsewhere in Texas.
The current Kreuz Market building, at 619 North Colorado Street, is enormous by old-school barbecue standards, built to roughly triple the seating capacity of the original. The menu still centers on what made the place famous: brisket, pork ribs, and a house-made sausage that regulars order by the ring rather than the link. Smoked turkey and pork chops round out the main lineup, with prime rib showing up as a weekend-only special worth planning a trip around. Sides have crept onto the menu since the old no-sides era, mac and cheese, beans, roasted potatoes, and corn among them, and dessert closes things out with Blue Bell ice cream and a banana pudding pie that shows up in nearly every recent review. The state of Texas designated Kreuz Market a Texas Treasure Business in 2022, official recognition for a place that had already spent more than a century earning it the hard way.
Kreuz Market isn’t just old. It’s a rare case of a family dispute becoming a genuine piece of culinary history, two restaurants born from one broken lease, both still smoking meat over post oak within walking distance of each other in a small Texas town that turned a sibling feud into a tourist economy. The barbecue would be worth the drive on its own. The story is what makes it unforgettable.
