For 80 Years, Barbecue Inn Was Always There. This Weekend, Houston Said Goodbye.
For 80 years, Barbecue Inn was always there, a low brick room in Houston's Independence Heights where four generations of one family cooked since 1946. This weekend the city lined up in the summer heat to say goodbye, some driving 60 miles for one last plate.
On Thursday the parking spots around a low brick building on West Crosstimbers Street in Houston filled up and then kept filling, until cars sat two wheels on the sidewalk and drivers rolled down their windows to ask strangers in line how long the wait was. For some of them the answer was two hours. They were standing outside Barbecue Inn, a restaurant that had fed the north side of the city since 1946, because word had gone around that the coming Saturday would be its last day open. After eighty years and four generations of one family, the place was closing, and Houston was lining up to say goodbye.
The detail that made regulars smile even as they mourned it was the menu. A restaurant named Barbecue Inn spent eight decades being loved, by most of the people in that line, for its fried chicken. The barbecue was on the board, and it was good, but it was almost beside the point. This was a story about the plate people actually ordered, the corner it came from, and the family that finally decided eighty years was enough.
A Place Called Barbecue Inn, Famous for the Fried Chicken
Despite the sign out front, the dish that built Barbecue Inn's reputation came out of a fryer, not a pit. Generations of Houstonians grew up on its fried chicken, fried shrimp, and chicken-fried steak, served the old way with cream gravy on the side and a loaded baked potato. Ask the people who had been coming for fifty years what they ordered, and almost none of them said barbecue.
Scherry Lindley, who first walked in at eleven years old, put it plainly while she waited for a table one last time. She had been ordering chicken and shrimp her whole life. “Never ate barbecue there in my life, ever,” she told Houston Public Media. A few spots back in the same line, a longtime customer named Joe McGee agreed without hesitation, saying he had been coming for half a century and had never once had the barbecue, only the chicken and the shrimp. That was the running joke and the quiet pride of the place, a barbecue joint that turned strangers into regulars on the strength of everything except its name.
Part of what the line was saying goodbye to was permanence. CultureMap Houston called Barbecue Inn a legendary retro spot, a dining room that held onto the same menu and the same feel while the city around it tore itself down and rebuilt over and over. That steadiness, the certainty that the chicken would taste the way it had when you were eleven, was a large part of what kept four generations of the same families coming back to the same door.
Four Generations at the Same Corner Since 1946
The building had been selling comfort food from the same address for longer than most of its customers had been alive. Barbecue Inn was founded in 1946 by Louis and Nell Skrehot, who turned a small property at 116 West Crosstimbers Street into a restaurant and built the storefront and the pit that anchored the Independence Heights neighborhood for the next eight decades. What started with one couple became a family trade, handed down through four generations of Skrehots who worked the dining room, the fryers, and the register.
By the end the business was run by Wayne Skrehot, a grandson who grew up inside it. On the Thursday the lines formed, he was too busy carrying plates to sit for an interview, pausing only to answer a customer's question before getting back to the floor. It had become costly to run the business, he said, which is the plain version of a story that has closed a lot of old rooms lately. The recipes were not the problem. The math was.
For Independence Heights, the loss cut deeper than one dinner spot. Barbecue Inn had outlasted most of the businesses that once stood around it, a fixed point on West Crosstimbers that parents brought their children to and those children brought their own. When reporters asked people in the final week why they had driven in, the answer was rarely the food alone. It was the eighty years attached to it, the birthdays and the report-card dinners and the ordinary Tuesdays that added up to a life spent walking through the same door.
Why an Institution Decides Eighty Years Is Enough
Barbecue Inn did not close because people stopped coming. The crowds in its final week were proof of the opposite. It closed the way many long-running family restaurants close now, on a combination of rising costs and a family ready to retire. Running a scratch kitchen that fries its own chicken and cuts its own steaks takes hands and hours, and when the people who have done that work for decades reach the end of their run, there is not always a fifth generation waiting to pick up the tongs.
Houston felt the size of the loss immediately. Barbecue Inn was not the only farewell on the calendar that weekend, with the city saying goodbye to more than one longtime spot at once, but it was the one that pulled the longest lines. A restaurant that survives eighty years stops being a business and becomes a landmark, a place tied to first dates and homecomings and Sunday lunches, and losing it lands harder than losing a name on a lease.
The Goodbye
You could read the whole eighty years in the crowd. Joe and Debbie McGee drove in from Huntsville, sixty miles north, to eat there one more time. They had been on their first date at Barbecue Inn twenty-nine years earlier, back when Joe wanted to go somewhere else and Debbie insisted on this place and won. She had been coming since she was five years old, brought by her grandparents. He remembered his first visit at seven. When a friend texted Debbie that the restaurant was closing, the couple nearly made the hour-long drive that same night, then waited a day and joined the line with everyone else.
That is what a neighborhood restaurant is, in the end. Not the smoke or the sign, but the standing appointment it becomes across a lifetime, the table where a homecoming photo got taken and a first date turned into a marriage. On Saturday, August 1, Barbecue Inn served its last plates of fried chicken and shrimp and closed the doors on eighty years. The pit that Louis and Nell Skrehot built in 1946 went cold, and a corner of Houston that had smelled like Sunday lunch for four generations went quiet. The people who loved it did the only thing left to do. They lined up, ordered the chicken one more time, and said thank you.
Sources
Historic Houston fried chicken destination will close after 80 years, CultureMap Houston.
Houston Says Goodbye to Barbecue Inn and Traveler's Cart in One Weekend, Houstonia Magazine.