Devouring the Meaty Heart of Texas, Part 1

Austin is a fantastic city.

As part of my work, I am tremendously fortunate to get the opportunity to travel to various parts of the globe for business conferences and meetings. One particular conference takes us to Austin, Texas every October. I first visited Austin last year, and was immediately taken by its charms: the friendly locals, the endless buffet of live music and the veritable tsunami of great food. So my most recent trip, earlier this month, felt like a perfect candidate for a little write-up. While downtown Austin is relatively small by American standards, the greater city area still a gargantuan stretch of land peppered with little outcrops of activity, like popcorn scattered in a field. Most business trips tend to have a very localized centre of gravity (read: hotel bar & restaurant), but Austin is one of those cities that just beckons to you, the gentle hum of activity carried through the city on a flying blanket of booze and grill smoke. So I was even more fortunate to have a local friend who has been living there for a couple of years. On my last visit we went for a little road trip around the outskirts of town, and this time we decided to do the same again.

Our first stop was a pretty well-known barbecue joint called The Salt Lick. It's been featured on Man vs. Food and countless other "Top Ten BBQ" lists as a great place to visit for an authentic Texas BBQ experience. Now the really hardcore purists may argue that Franklin's has better meat, or that the 'holy trinity' down in Lockhart is a more authentic experience, but for simple atmosphere and rustic charm I love the Salt Lick. It's tucked away on an old dirt road in Driftwood, about a 30-minute drive outside of Austin. On the way, you drive past the following sights:

Now I may be a limp-wristed blue-hearted liberal from Great Britain with an exotic accent (according to most Texans), but things like this just make me smile. Dave pointed out that I find these sort of details interesting because I don't live there and am not subjected to them on a daily basis, and perhaps he's right. But there's a personality  and old-fashioned sense of courtesy around these parts that I find both alarming and refreshing after spending several decades facing down the glowering scowl of your average Londoner. It's easy to take the piss of how backwards or simple they might seem, and many do, but fundamentally these are good people. They probably have very different values to you and me, some of which you may even find repellent, but they are also incredibly kind and friendly. At least, that's my experience of them. Then again, I am hardly a raging firecracker of anti-establishment rebellion, so that might play a part.

Anyway, back to the food. The first thing you see when you enter the dining hall of the Salt Lick is the frankly mindblowing smoke pit. They actually have two, though the one in the pictures is my favourite. The cashier girl, upon hearing my crazy accent, invited me in to the kitchen so that I could get a better picture of the smoke pit, and I happily obliged. You can probably tell from the picture, but the smells coming off this thing are absolutely divine.

According to the cooks, they smoke their brisket for 24 hours, with the other smaller cuts going on for various lengths of time. As we sat down with our menus at an old wooden bench on the far side of the room, I was immediately ensconced in a laid-back, welcoming atmosphere with people eagerly ploughing through mountains of glistening, smoky goodness. As a matter of course, I ordered the sampler plate, which arrived promptly - a small Everest of brisket, ribs and sausage, piled high under a glistening blanket of their incredible barbecue sauce. I could write an entire blog post just about barbecue sauce (and maybe I will!), because they come in all sorts, tastes and consistencies. The Salt Lick's sauce is a thinner, runnier sauce with a sweet and vinegary taste that just does wonders when it hits meat. I actually brought several bottles back with me, because as I have stated in previous posts, you will never get sauce this good in the UK. The meat itself is great, particularly the sausage and ribs. Brisket seems to be the hardest thing to get right (although if reports are to be believed then Franklin's has cracked this conundrum), whereas the sausage and ribs seem to benefit from simplicity and slow cooking. The ribs in particular were juicy and soft, with the meat just disintegrating rather than getting stuck in your teeth. Special mention must also go to their bread hotdog rolls, which come as one of innumerate sides. I am a sucker for soft, squidgy bread, and this stuff is almost comically soft. I'm pretty sure mother nature never intended bread to be quite that doughy, but oh my god it is perfect for mopping up barbecue sauce. This is amply demonstrated by Dave's hilarious looking chopped beef sandwich below, which is actually made up of four hotdog rolls in a row, filled with a hellflood of chopped beef and sauce. I was endlessly entertained by the fact that it looks like the gaping maw of a meat-based doombringer, come to devour your children on some sinister revenge mission.

Normally after a meal like that, I would curl up into a ball of guilt and self-pity while sucking on the bones. However after several beers, Dave had the genius idea to ask for the dessert menu. Hey, you only live once right? (and at this pace, that is virtually guaranteed). Swallowing my immediate terror, he ordered the cobbler and I ordered the pecan pie. His cobbler looked like the site of an icecream meteor hitting the earth's crust, a steaming vat of molten fruit and sugar bubbling beneath. My pecan pie turned up, and looked like this:

Yes, that is a standard sized fork stabbing it. The pie laughs at the fork with disdain, like a goldfish attacking a whale shark. I'll leave you to eat the pie with your eyes by just saying that it absolutely shit on any pecan pie I have ever had in the UK. That probably goes without saying, but there was just no comparison between the two. Warm, crispy caramelised pecans layered on top of a slick, sugary something and a light, flakey pastry crust. This was pretty much my coffin nail, consciousness slowly drifting away from me like smoke vapours. Dave, sensing my incoming food coma, said "let's go, I need to show you something."

We jumped in the car and headed east, through a little town called Buda (pronounced "byoodah", bizarrely) filled with random trailers and shanty town storefronts. As we slid over the undulating hills of southeastern Austin, my food-addled brain took note of the several water towers dotted across the horizon, like toothpick cocktail snacks. "Is that normal?", I asked. "Those are tiny ones," Dave replied. "Wait till you see the one where we're going."

We pulled up in a typically gargantuan carpark outside what looked like a standard B&Q, a place called Cabela's. I couldn't have been more wrong in my initial assessment, however. This is no ordinary DIY store. This is a guns and hunting supermall.

Stepping inside, there is a lot to take in. There is a stuffed yak mounted above the entrance to the toilets. There is a fully camouflaged mannequin chilling out in a sniper nest. There is a rocky outcrop at the far end of the enormous store, covered in mountain goats and other killable beasts. There is a fishing section the size of a Costco. There is a goddamn aquarium. This is no ordinary store. Actually no, hold that. This is an ordinary store in Texas.

As I started wandering the aisles of excess, hunting / camping / hiking gear as far as the eye can see, I stumbled upon a little enclosure at the back of the store, where things started getting really weird.

Throughout the entire rear of the store, there were stuffed animals. Everywhere. Of every kind. Lions, tigers, elephants, water buffalo. Deer, mountain lions, prairie dogs, moose (meese?). Bears, wolves, muskox, a freaking polar bear! There was even a separate room on one side with every type of deer, squirrel and turkey I've ever seen! And that room had its very own animatronic George Bush-lookalike in hunting gear, recanting tales of early hunters and how they blew animals away with rifles. And throughout all of this, there were parents strolling around, kids in tow, looking at the various stuffed animals alongside all of the equipment used to kill them. Now don't get me wrong, I am not a hemp-wearing animal-loving hippy. I have skinned a rabbit with my bare hands at a stag party (long story), and spent time on a farm so I have no issues at all with killing animals for food. But this was a thoroughly creepy experience because of the manner in which it's aimed at children and the conveyor-belt sense of educating them for commercial purposes. See that deer? That was killed with hollowpoint ammunition from a Barratt sniper rifle while dressed in a full-body camo Ghillie Suit, sat up in your Buck Buster. And guess what? We sell all of that here.

Inevitably, we ended up in the gun section. I'll let the pictures do the talking here, and just simply say that taking pictures surrounded by people checking out fully automatic Assault Rifles and comparing scope sights was one of the most physically uncomfortable experiences of my life. When you take pictures in Texas, you get looks from a few people. When those people are holding an AK47, it's a very different look. Unfortunately the pictures don't convey it, since I wasn't comfortable picturing people buying guns directly, but this was easily the busiest section of the store as well. Men, families, daughters, grandparents. They were all here, looking at different rifles the same way you might look at a camera in Dixons. It was truly surreal.

Seeing all of these weapons, ammo and accessories lead me to an interesting reflection. I play a lot of video games where you fire weapons at people / monsters / orks, etc. So according to the Daily Mail I should be a dyed in the wool mentalist, grabbing guns off the shelf and running through the store shooting people on a GTA-style murder spree while furiously masturbating. But seeing all of this up close and personal had quite the opposite effect. Dave kept egging me on to go up to the counter and ask to see the biggest gun they had, but I wasn't interested in any way. Ever since I accidentally shot my sister right above the eye with a BB-gun as a kid, I have been vehemently disinterested in weapons. That was one of the scariest moments of my entire life, and when you see just how easy it is to inflict so much more harm with a real weapon, it actually makes my skin crawl.

Hunting, and more importantly owning a gun, is at the core of living in Texas, and nowhere is that more apparent than when you see the way in which it's been turned into a business. Seeing this in action was sobering, mildly terrifying, and deeply insightful. It would be grossly arrogant to simply assume that all of the people shopping at a place like this are patently insane. Owning a gun is a way of life here, and while the right to bear arms may no longer have anything like its original constitutional context, many people and families in the US still consider it a god-given right alongside freedom of speech and the right to a fair trial. It may be alien and strange to the rest of us, but it's a fundamental part of the patchwork quilt of the American identity and I'm glad I got to witness it first-hand.