AUTHOR INTERVIEW: WYATT MCSPADDEN

A barbecue bible

The Austin photographer lets us tag along as he makes his monthly pilgrimage to the Lockhart culinary shrine that inspired his new book

By John DeFore
SPECIAL TO THE AMERICAN-STATESMAN
Saturday, April 04, 2009

You might expect that a first-time author wading into the fractious world of Texas barbecue - where partisans are just as passionate as fans of South American soccer teams, if a bit more sluggish - would be reluctant to go on the record about his favorite joint.

Not so in the case of Austin photographer Wyatt McSpadden, who has just published the handsome coffee-table book, "Texas BBQ." No matter how many smoke-stained eateries he captures on film, McSpadden declares, Lockhart's Kreuz Market is the only true religion.

"We always go to Kreuz," he tells me from the driver's seat of a Honda Element that, to my great satisfaction, will enter Lockhart's city limits about 35 minutes later. "Every month or six weeks for the last 12 or 14 years."

"We" means McSpadden, "Texas Highways" editor Charles Lohrmann, and journalist John Morthland who introduced the photographer to Kreuz's shortly after McSpadden moved from Amarillo to Austin in 1992. (As if that weren't favor enough for a lifetime, Morthland also supplied an essay for "Texas BBQ.") The three men, it must be said, are enthusiastic even by the standards of barbecue devotees.

"We've created this rich fantasy world about the place," McSpadden says. According to them, restaurant owner "Rick Schmidt is this sort of godlike figure who controls the place from his table with his mind, and Roy - you know Roy (Perez), the pit master with the great muttonchops - we fantasize about Roy and how, at the end of the day, Rick chains him to the floor of the place, and late at night you can hear Roy's voice ringing out, `Riiiick!' "

Perez, the man some visitors refer to as "Elvis," figures prominently in the new book. On one two-page spread, he stands outside dwarfed by a wood pile big enough to fill your front yard. In a black-and-white image accompanying the introduction, he and his magnificent sideburns work deftly above a cutting block at the original Kreuz location, back in the golden years before family squabbles forced the business to move in 1999.

("We were crushed at the notion that they were going to move," McSpadden remembers, "because the [original] building is so fantastic. We thought certainly there was no way the food could be as good in a new place. I went down there and spent a week photographing the old place.")

That black-and-white photo of Perez is among the images Texas Monthly fans might recognize from the magazine's numerous barbecue stories, the most famous of which is a recurring feature picking the state's top smokehouses. Of the three published to date, McSpadden has worked on two, and it seems fair to suggest that his atmosphere-heavy images, which both fetishize the atmosphere of barbecue houses and do justice to the men and women working in them, have helped make the stories a "great cash cow" for the magazine.

Idea starts to smoke

After selling the University of Texas Press on the idea of a barbecue book - his wife, art director and "the brains behind the operation" Nancy McMillen, made a mock-up book for the pitch - McSpadden set out to find new subjects. "Probably 70 percent of the book is new pictures," he says.

"We knew we wanted to match the look of those first pictures," he continues, explaining that while he now routinely uses a digital camera for assignments, for personal work he is "still inclined to use film" and shot all of "Texas BBQ" on film with a medium-format camera.

Being exclusively interested in the look of a place - the thick black buildup of three decades of grease on a brick wall, the deep wear patterns on a butcher's block, the sticky crust clinging to a well-used knife - meant the author was under no obligation to rank one place's ribs against another's or crown a new king of brisket.

"I just scratched the surface, places where I like the way they look. I probably went to 50 or 60 places (just over two dozen made it into the book), and there were a lot of places I'd just go into and leave, which is a wonderful luxury when you're doing a project for yourself." And as shocking as it might be for his readers, "a lot of the places I went to, I didn't eat."

"You know, even a glutton like me has to draw the line," he says, almost defensively. "On blogs, you've got these guys talking about going to five, six places in a day! I can see the attraction of a road trip, but I think you could go into a meat coma or something. I don't know if that's a real medical condition."

It's the chops

By the time we get to Kreuz Market, where Nikki Silva of NPR's "Kitchen Sisters" will join the interview, I know what McSpadden's barbecue staple is. Though he admires places that make their own sausage, "probably this book would not have happened were it not for the Kreuz pork chop," he speculates. "That's what we always order. We'll get a chop and a (sausage) link, or something. We talk about it being the three food groups: The chop would be the meat, and then the link would be the vegetable, and the rib would be dessert or something like that." It's the opposite of my own (more boring) M.O., in which the only real essential is fatty brisket.

Our lunch hour at Kreuz passed as such events often do: Conversation was lively, but conducted under the seriously distracting influence of a half-dozen or so pounds of moist, densely flavored (but barbecue sauce-free) meat. One radical diner squeezed chunks of avocado onto his meal (yes, he's from California). McSpadden, feeling richer than usual, splurged on the prime rib and appeared to relish every bite. Silva struggled to wield her microphone without getting it slathered in grease.

Our entire party walked away happy from the picnic table on Kreuz's side porch, holding grease-stained to-go packages and carrying the place's smell on our clothes. For months after finishing work on the book, McSpadden and his camera assistant Jeff Stockton say, they couldn't open a camera bag without smelling beef and pork.

Some people might seek to erase that olfactory evidence, but McSpadden used it to his advantage when recruiting Jim Harrison, the "Legends of the Fall" author who spent part of his career covering food for "Esquire," to pen the introduction to "Texas BBQ."

"We really had to woo him," the photographer recalls. "We started sending e-mails and phone calls, and shipping him Kreuz sausage and pork chops." And then, to cement the connection between McSpadden's work and the food they were sending, they went the extra mile:

"We wanted to show him a portfolio of pictures, and Nancy had this idea: I brought the portfolio down here to Kreuz and put it in the pit and smoked it. So it would smell like barbecue."

Wyatt McSpadden

What: Book discussion and signing

When: 7 p.m. April 10

Where: BookPeople, 603 N. Lamar Blvd.

Information: 472-5050, bookpeople.com

What: Book signing

When: 11 a.m.-2 p.m. April 11

Where: Kreuz Market, 619 N. Colorado St., Lockhart

Information: www.wyattmcspadden.com