4:15 pm Friday: Louie Mueller BBQ - Are the BBQ Gods Against Me?

We should begin with a description of our plan for this journey. Steve will eat anything, but primarily wants brisket. Kim, as many of you know, leans toward the veggie side and wasn't really interested in the adventure until Steve started telling her about the amazing sausage - her one meat weakness.

We arrive at Louie Mueller and spend a few minutes deciding whether to be a purist and go with regular sausage or go with the more exotic chipotle sausage. Maybe a link of each?

Turns out, the two old cooters who arrived literally two minutes before us (yes those two minutes we spent lost on Rt. 79, not Rt. 79 business) scored the last two pieces of sausage in the place. Not a good omen!! Kim actually considered asking them for just a bite - it looked amazingly good.

Instead, she was left with a stack of wonder bread (which she comes to learn is the only truly acceptable bread to serve with real BBQ) and some tasty BBQ sauce while Steve dove into his first real Texas brisket in nearly 20 years.

Now, the ratings:

Ambience: 9 (10 if the jukebox had been playing). It's definitely an old school joint in a town with about 15 buildings total that took us 3 hours of driving through the Texas plains (oh, I mean what the Texans call Hill Country) to get to.

The menu—all seven items--is hand written on pieces of butcher block paper taped to the wall with masking tape.

This place is actually a James Beard Award winner from 2006, and has been featured on many TV shows. We can see why. It’s as close to stepping into a time machine and returning to a time none of us are old enough to remember as we are ever likely to get. The top of the walls and ceilings are covered with grease that has been carried through the air via the smoke of the BBQ and then has slowly dripped down the walls. This, we will come to learn, is one of the true marks of a BBQ joint versus a BBQ restaurant.

Clientele: 10+ - the two old cooters plus one lone 500 lb BBQ aficionado.

The Meal: 1/2 lb of brisket and 1/2 lb of beef ribs. Like all true BBQ joints, the meal is served straight onto butcher paper with no utensils. You eat with your fingers, just as God intended. As Thomas Aquinas said in his Apologia “If God had intended us to use this infernal device called a fork, he would not have given us fingers.”

This is a bit jarring to Kim, but she quickly conquers her aversion to actual contact with her food, understanding that this is a brave new world she’s stumbled into, and she must somehow try to face it head on if she is to survive this quest.

The brisket was tender and moist, but served thicker sliced than Steve's used to. The beef ribs were big and outstanding, with a really crisp, hot peppery crust, dripping with moisture and probably outshine the brisket...enough so that the rib we were going to box up to go is quickly disappearing. A side of BBQ sauce accompanied it. It was on the watery/oily side, but with a nice spicy kick.

Not wanting to be left out of the rating game, Kim reports that the wonder bread is just how she remembered it from childhood – perfect for balling up.

All in all, a soul-satisfying reintroduction and a reminder that BBQ in Texas bears no resemblance whatsoever with what the Mid-Atlantic calls BBQ. The pig is a nice little animal, good for a pet or runing into bacon, but BBQ is for cows.

Even in Texas, though, DC is not far away. The TV is playing CNN with talking head coverage of the Clinton/Obama race....a little jarring and possibly a reason to mark ambience down to 8 :)

Fortunately, or unfortunately, the next joint is just 20 minutes away...not a lot of time to digest the first pound of meat.

The rating: Louie Mueller’s is worth a special destination trip.