![]() ![]() According to family lore, Jack Patillo was the son of George Alexander Pattillo and his black housekeeper. The Patillos were dismissed before they even started selling links. I could blame geography or beef fat for Patillo’s relative anonymity, but I know it’s neither. “After I got to be a certain age, I don’t want to have that stress on me,” he said. I asked Robert Patillo, now 67, if being overlooked on barbecue best-of lists bothered him, given the long history of the place. Locals call them “grease balls,” and the nickname likely repels some diners. Patillo’s most famous menu item is an all-beef sausage link stuffed in beef casing and imbued with a heavy hit of garlic. Beaumont’s only claim to fame is Spindletop, an oil well that went dry in the 1930s. If you told everyone in Austin that Beaumont was part of Louisiana, half of them would believe you. The location in often-overlooked Beaumont doesn’t help. Visits to the central Texas stalwarts of Kreuz Market in Lockhart, Prause Meat Market in La Grange, or Southside Market in Elgin are prized check marks on a barbecue tourist’s list. Texans revere their state’s century-old barbecue joints. And “she developed the all-beef link, and that’s the way it has always been made.” The thin, gravy-like barbecue sauce they still make was hers, says Robert. (She made him drop one of the “t’s” to become Patillo.) Five years later, they opened a small restaurant together downtown, cooking with recipes from Roxie’s mother. Robert Patillo says that Jack married into the recipe by way of his second wife, Roxie, in 1907. He hand-stuffs the same spicy beef links that his great-grandfather Jack Pat(t)illo cooked when he opened the doors in 1912. Robert Patillo runs the restaurant now in a wooden structure his forebears built in 1950. These family ties aren’t simple, and the stories behind them don’t figure into Patillo’s marketing strategy. The recipes they still use today came from a woman who traced her ancestry to the McFaddins, a powerful local family who amassed wealth from land and cattle. ![]() Founder Jack Pat(t)illo is believed to be a direct descendant of one of the earliest Texas settlers, George Alexander Pattillo. Patillo’s Bar-B-Q in Beaumont, Texas, is the fourth-oldest barbecue joint in the state. Grease Balls of Southeast Texas The not-so famous beef links of Patillo’s Bar-B-Q by Daniel Vaughn ![]() Join us or renew your membership for 2016. SFA members help support Gravy and receive a print subscription. The author, Daniel Vaughn, is the barbecue editor for Texas Monthly and the author of The Prophets of Smoked Meat. This story first appeared in issue #57 (fall 2015) of our Gravy quarterly. Robert Patillo of Patillo’s Bar-B-Q in Beaumont, TX. ![]()
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