Oktoberfest is underway in Munich, a good excuse to point out that Dallas has had its own German kitchen for 65 years. It is in Snider Plaza, and it is called Kuby’s Sausage House.
By Dallas standards, 1961 is ancient. By the family’s standards, it is recent. In 1728, Friedrich Kuby opened a meat market in Kaiserslautern, Germany, and the recipes passed from father to son for generations. “The original one was bombed in ’44,” Karl Kuby Sr. has said. “It was wiped out.”
The family never went easy on its sons. Karl’s great-grandfather, Phillip Kuby, a head butcher who left each of his boys a shop, reportedly told them, “If you can’t make it with what I left you, you don’t deserve any of it.” With little room for him in the business back home, Karl came to Texas. He started in the Lower Rio Grande Valley, then moved to Dallas and opened Kuby’s to give Texas the sausages he grew up on. His son, Karl Kuby Jr., runs it now, the fourteenth Kuby in a row to run a meat market, and Karl Jr.’s son has joined him.
The front is a full European market, with house-made sausages and smoked meats at the counter and shelves of imported mustards, chocolates and pantry goods. The restaurant is in back, serving breakfast and lunch six days a week.
Breakfast, from 7 to 11 a.m., includes Wiener schnitzel à la Holstein, a breaded cutlet under two sunny-side-up eggs, and Oma’s Kartoffel Pfannkuchen, Mrs. Kuby’s potato pancakes with house-made applesauce and sour cream. The King Ludwig stacks Canadian bacon, eggs and tomato on rye under hollandaise.
Lunch runs 11 a.m. to 2:30 p.m., and the Wurst Teller is the house favorite: your choice of links with sauerkraut and warm German potato salad. Options run from bratwurst, knackwurst and weisswurst to venison chipotle and a jalapeño cheddar link that is about as Texan as Kuby’s gets. There is also Jäger schnitzel, double-smoked Kasseler Rippchen, currywurst bites, house-made pastrami and a Reuben on Kuby’s own corned beef. Finish with apple or cherry strudel. Beer, wine and mimosas are poured.
Across town on Sovereign Row, Kuby’s also runs a wild game processing plant, turning hunters’ deer and other game into sausage, bacon and jerky.
Plenty of Dallas restaurants talk about tradition. Kuby’s has a family tree to back it up.
Kuby’s Sausage House, 6601 Snider Plaza, Dallas. Restaurant open Monday through Saturday, 7 a.m. to 2:30 p.m.; market open Monday through Saturday, 7 a.m. to 6 p.m. Closed Sunday. 214-363-2231.
