For 39 Years, Roy Perez Kept the Fire at Kreuz Market. Now Lockhart's Legend Is Hanging Up His Apron.

The message from Kreuz Market landed like a bell over Lockhart. "THE LEGEND HANGS UP THE APRON," the barbecue institution wrote, announcing that Roy Perez, the pitmaster who has stood over its post oak fires for 39 years, is retiring. For a man who spent nearly four decades letting the smoke do the talking, it was a rare moment of the spotlight finding him instead of the meat.

Perez is not a name most people outside Texas would recognize, and that is part of what makes him beloved inside it. He is the quiet keeper of one of the most famous smokehouses in the country, in the town the state legislature calls the Barbecue Capital of Texas. Kreuz Market will gather customers and longtime fans to honor him on Saturday, September 5, at 10:30 in the morning, at the restaurant on North Colorado Street. This is the story of the fire he tended, and why so many people want to shake his hand before he sets down the apron.

The fire that never goes out

To understand Perez, you have to understand what Kreuz cooks and how. There is no sauce and there are no forks. The brisket, the sausage, the pork chops and shoulder clod are smoked over post oak in long brick pits, served on butcher paper, and judged on the meat alone. It is the oldest, plainest expression of Central Texas barbecue, and it leaves a pitmaster nowhere to hide.

The hardest part is the fire itself, because at Kreuz it is never allowed to die. The pitmasters bank hot coals from one day to start the next, a fire the restaurant says traces back more than a century. Perez became the living link in that chain in the most literal way possible. When Kreuz moved from its longtime home on South Commerce Street to its current building in 1999, he was the one who carried hot coals from the original pits across town, so the new fire would be the same fire. He did not relight Kreuz. He relocated its flame.

That is the discipline behind the plainness. Perez has described the work as showing up before dawn, reading the wood and the weather, and holding a pit steady for hours on feel rather than a dial. Post oak burns hot and clean, and it forgives nothing. A pit run too hot renders the fat wrong; run too cool, the brisket turns tough. The reward for doing it right is that no one notices the effort at all. They notice the brisket.

It is worth remembering that Kreuz was a meat market first and a restaurant second, which is why the barbecue still comes without a plate to dress it up. The counter smokes what a butcher would sell, and hands it to you hot on paper. For most of the last four decades, the man at the center of that ritual was Perez, and regulars came to read his presence at the pits as proof the place was still itself.

From the sausage pits to the Hall of Fame

Perez did not arrive as a star. He began on the sausage pits, the entry job in the smoke room, and worked his way through every station until he mastered the whole operation and took over the fire. His reputation was built the slow way, in long hours and quiet consistency, until he became for many Texans the living face of Kreuz Market.

National recognition finally caught up with him in 2025, when he was inducted into the Barbecue Hall of Fame for decades of preserving Central Texas tradition. He accepted it the way he cooks, without noise. Perez had suffered a stroke not long before, and he spoke about the honor with disarming humility. "I just want to say thank you for being elected to the Hall of Fame," he said. "I'll take anything I can get in my life now. Since my stroke, it has woken me up to a lot of things, and I thought I could live forever, but I know that's not the case." He was careful to add that the award belonged not only to him, but to the team and to the pitmasters who came long before him.

That instinct, to hand the credit backward down the line of people who tended the same fire, is the whole ethic of the place. You can follow his own record of it on his pitmaster account, where the smoke, not the man, is usually the subject.

A hundred years of smoke in Lockhart

The fire Perez guarded is older than anyone alive. Kreuz Market started in 1900, when Charles Kreuz bought a meat market and began smoking the cuts he could not sell fresh, the origin story of a great deal of Texas barbecue. In 1948 the Kreuz family sold the business to Edgar Schmidt, a longtime butcher there, and a member of the Schmidt family has run it ever since.

The most Texas chapter came in 1999. A family disagreement split the business in two. Rick Schmidt moved Kreuz into the new building on North Colorado Street, while his sister kept the original 1900 location and reopened it as Smitty's Market. Lockhart woke up with two legendary smokehouses instead of one, each carrying a piece of the same lineage. It is why the town, along with Black's and Chisholm Trail, wears the Barbecue Capital of Texas title without irony. Perez tended the fire through all of it, the constant while the names on the building changed.

What retires with him, and what does not

Here is the part that matters for anyone who loves this food. Perez is stepping back, but the fire is not going out. That is the point of the tradition he protected. The coals he banked last night will start tomorrow's smoke, the way they have for more than a hundred years, and the next pitmaster will inherit the same flame Perez once carried across town by hand. A great institution does not depend on one person, precisely because people like Perez spent their lives making sure it would not.

What retires with him is harder to replace than technique. It is the memory in the hands, the decades of small corrections that never made it into a recipe, the face regulars looked for when they walked in. That is why Kreuz is throwing open its doors on September 5 rather than letting him slip out quietly. A place that serves its barbecue with no sauce and no forks, that trusts the meat to speak for itself, understands exactly what it has in a man who spent 39 years making sure it always could. The fire will keep burning. Lockhart just wants to thank the person who kept it lit. You can read Kreuz Market's own history of that fire on the restaurant's site.

Sources

CBS Austin, "Lockhart BBQ legend Roy Perez retiring after 39 years at Kreuz Market" by Stephanie Gonzalez (Aug. 10, 2026). Post Register, "Kreuz Market Pitmaster Roy Perez inducted into Barbecue Hall of Fame" by Anthony Collins (Nov. 26, 2025). Kreuz Market history and official site. Texas Monthly, "A Timeline of Lockhart Barbecue". Post Register, "Barbecue dynasty comes together again" on the Kreuz and Smitty's split. Images: courtesy Kreuz Market, Texas Co-op Power, and the Lockhart Post Register.