A Barbecue Crossroads

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TAYLOR — It’s quiet on a weekday morning in downtown Taylor. I finished my research in the library an hour earlier than expected, so I’m walking around, killing time before my lunch appointment at the Taylor Cafe. The sky is overcast with faint rumblings of thunder and a few fat raindrops. A welcomed storm came through the night before, awakening me in my friend’s guest bedroom. All rainstorms are invited guests in Central Texas, large or small.

I peruse an antique/used bookstore to kill time. An old fellow is rocked back in an old chair on the sidewalk, surrounded by various merchandise. Not much interests me in the bookstore, but the other store, which is piled nearly to the ceiling with dusty furniture and all manner of strange stuff, has a few dining room chairs that bear further investigation. He tells me to help myself and pull outside anything I want to examine further, since there apparently aren’t any working light bulbs.

“Hard to see in there when it’s cloudy like this,” he says, and goes back to studying the back of his eyelids. I wander through, using my cell phone’s flashlight app feature, and tell him I’ll be back after lunch to look at a couple of chairs with a $10 price tag. It’s time to meet my acquaintance at the Taylor Cafe. It’s in a largely sheet-metal building painted red, down on Main Street under the overpass and hard by the railroad tracks. Vencil Mares opened this barbecue joint in 1946. He will turn 90 this year and is still at work, though I didn’t see him on this day.

The Taylor Cafe has two front doors, from the days when blacks and whites entered from different portals and sat on opposite sides of the bar that separates the two dining rooms. On the day we ate lunch there, the only black man eating lunch there was eating on the “black” side of the cafe, though the days of segregation are long over. Old habits are hard to break.

The décor of the Taylor Cafe is what draws folks like me. Town folks eat there because that is what they have been doing since their grandparents brought them as little kids. It is non-airconditioned, which is why I’m here on a cloudy May day. A couple of deer mounts stare across above a Miller Lite display, near faded newspaper clippings praising Vencil’s barbecue, next to an old-time hand-crank telephone and a framed print of Clint Eastwood as the Outlaw Josey Wales.

OK, I cheated on that description. I remembered some of what was on the walls of the Taylor Cafe. But most I gathered from looking at a photo shot by my friend O. Rufus Lovett, who photographed Vencil Mares for a new book called “Barbecue Crossroads: Notes and Recipes from a Southern Odyssey” that has just been published by University of Texas Press. The writer is Robb Walsh, a noted food writer from Houston. He and Rufus spent a year-and-a-half on the road, looking for places like the Taylor Cafe, which Robb has been visiting for years.  When I ate at the Taylor Cafe, where I haven’t visited at least 20 years, I forgot the Taylor Cafe was in the book. As I wrote a few months ago, my favorite barbecue shrine is around the corner — Louie Mueller’s Barbecue. But the Taylor Cafe has decent brisket and an ambience worth a visit. The building shakes every 10 minutes or so when a train passes, and the jukebox, while not the original one that drew raves when there was a separate one for the black customers, sounded like it still had some great tunes.

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If you enjoy barbecue and someone who can write well about food, road trips and the type of folks who strive to preserve cooking barbecue in the traditional way — and if you appreciate fine photography, this book is worth picking up. Plus, it has more than 80 recipes that Walsh collected on their travels for folks with culinary ambitions. Ever wondered how to prepare beer-joint sausage? Or chess pie? How about Baby J’s Palestine Brisket? You can find out in “Barbecue Crossroads.”

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I waddled out of Taylor Cafe, a bit worried about staying awake on the trip home. I bought two chairs from the somnolent storekeeper and then headed east. Rain clouds still loomed on the horizon.

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