Weikel's and the Bon Ton

The bakery on the west side of La Grange is the fourth act of a family business that began in 1929 with a cafe. Alvin Weikel and his brother, known to everyone as Pop, opened the Bon Ton Cafe in downtown La Grange that year, and their first steady customers were the crews laying the first pipeline through Fayette County. The kitchen combined German family cooking with French technique, an unlikely pairing that came straight out of the brothers' own background, and the cafe became the place where locals, pipeline workers and passing travellers all ended up eating the same food at the same counter. It stayed that way for decades, half a block off the courthouse square. By the time the last of that generation retired, the cafe had fed three decades of Fayette County. Alvin's son Jim came into the business in 1969 and understood something about the road that his father's generation had not needed to. He moved the operation's centre of gravity out to State Highway 71, where the Houston to Austin traffic actually was. He sold the restaurant in 1985, then opened something that barely existed as a category at the time: a convenience store with a genuine bakery and deli built into it. The kolache recipe is not a generic one. It came to Texas with Annie Kulhanek, grandmother of Jim's wife Jo Ann, who emigrated from Czechoslovakia as a child. The bakery ships nationally now, and the cases are still emptied and refilled all day by drivers who stop here every single time they pass.