Local Flavor in Texas
6 places
History·Brewster County
Marathon Motel
The Marathon Motel is a survivor of the auto court, the form American roadside lodging took before the motel chains arrived: a low run of cabins around an open court, built for people coming in by car on a two lane highway. It went up in 1940, just under a mile west of Marathon on what is now US 90, and it went through the same century as every other independent motor court on a road the interstates drew traffic away from.
Entertainment·Presidio County
Marfa Burrito
Marfa is a town where a gallery dinner can cost a day's wages, and the most beloved food in it comes out of a small kitchen on South Highland Avenue. Marfa Burrito is Ramona Tejada's place, and the press has long called her the Burrito Queen: flour tortillas rolled by hand, fillings cooked the way ranch and railroad kitchens on both sides of the border have always cooked them, seven or so items written in marker on a poster and no interest in adding an eighth.
Entertainment·Val Verde County
Memo's Restaurant
Memo's has been a Del Rio restaurant since 1936, opened by Guillermo Calderon, whom everyone called Memo, and moved in the 1940s onto land on the bank of San Felipe Creek near Brown Plaza, where it still is. Three generations of the family have run it, and dishes on the menu carry their names. What turned it from a good border restaurant into something more particular was one of those generations.
History·Bastrop County
Meyer's Elgin Smokehouse
Meyer's is two businesses about a quarter of a mile apart in Elgin, founded half a century apart. The sausage company came first. R. G. Meyer started Meyer's Sausage Company in 1949, working from a recipe his father Henry, a German immigrant, had taught him around 1915. By the family's account they had bought the Rock Front Store at Main and Loop 109 in 1943 and were already making sausage in a smokehouse behind the grocery, on a dirt floor.
History·Presidio County
The Hotel Paisano
The Hotel Paisano was built for an oil boom that never arrived. Marfa raised the money by subscription, Trost and Trost of El Paso drew the plans, ground broke in October 1929 days before the crash, and the hotel opened on 30 June 1930 into a region whose expected petroleum fortune had not turned up. What sustained it instead was cattle: through the 1930s and 1940s the lobby was where ranchers, buyers and drummers did the business of the Marfa plateau. Its second life made it famous.
Industry & Science·Val Verde County
Val Verde Winery
Frank Qualia came to Del Rio from Milan in 1881, when the town held about two hundred people and the San Felipe canals had already been watering thousands of acres for a decade, which is a large part of why anyone was farming there at all. He found the Lenoir grape growing in the valley, bought into it, and founded a winery in 1883.