Hruska's Store and Bakery

Before kolaches became a chain product they were a Saturday morning thing at a filling station in Ellinger. The family opened a store here in 1912. In 1952 Frankie Hruska and his wife Bessie built a service station on Highway 71 and moved the store into it, and from 1962 a local woman baked kolaches there on Saturday mornings, which is how a place selling fuel turned into a place people planned around. Health department rules on the sale of home baked food ended the practice in 1990, and for five years there were no kolaches at all, which in this part of Fayette County counts as a minor local tragedy and is still spoken about that way. The place has been a store, a filling station and a bakery in that order, and each version was built on traffic the previous one had attracted. Their granddaughter Teresa James took over in 1995, added a licensed bakery and a grill, and rebuilt the pastries from the original recipe. The result is now among the best known food stops between Houston and Austin, open long hours and busy through most of them. Texas Monthly put the cheeseburger at number forty two on its list of the fifty best burgers in Texas in 2009, which is not remotely what the place is famous for and is a fair indication of what the kitchen is doing. Ellinger is a small Czech and German settlement strung along the highway, and the store sits at the junction where the traffic has to slow down anyway. The building is unassuming to the point of being easy to overshoot.