Midway Grocery & Bar-B-Que

Jarriat grew up in Brookshire but works in Sealy now. He makes the drive to meet his wife for a lunch of sliced beef and sausage.

"The meat is very tender," he said. "The ribs are also excellent."

Melissa grew up just outside of Katy.

"This was a staple growing up," she said. "We'd come down here all the time to get a chopped beef sandwich and potato salad."

The signature look and taste of Midway's meat—blackened a bit on the outside and tender inside—has something to do with the restaurant's geographic location, Meyer said. They burn pecan wood and occasionally oak in their pit and smokers.

Pecan wood is far more readily available in the Brazos River bottoms than other woods like mesquite or hickory, he said. Most of the wood is given to him by people who bring it by the restaurant in exchange for a meal or two.

The restaurant is now seeing patrons, like the Joseys, who have grown up eating there and are returning as adults. Meyer's grocery store, however, has been a Katy institution for generations.

Meyer opened Midway Grocery in 1967 after he was discharged from the Army. He'd learned the grocery business beginning as early as the fourth grade, when he started working at a local store owned by Bill Dube. He made $20 a month—big money for a kid in the 1940s.

That job saw him through high school. After earning a business administration degree from University of Texas at Austin in 1958, he was young, single and fresh out of college. That put him at the top of the list for the draft, he said. So he volunteered for the Army and spent two years in uniform, mostly at Ft. Knox. After the service he came back and worked again for Dube until he was able to leverage his own store.

There were only three grocery stores in town at the time—no supermarkets, no Kroger, Randall's or Walmart, he said.

His first store was housed in a 40-foot-by-20-foot space.

"We were primarily a meat market," Meyer said. "We only stayed in that small location from July of 1967 until maybe January of 1968. I started building almost as soon as I got my feet on the ground because I knew that it was too small to do any volume of business in."

Some of the leanest times in the intervening years were the late 1980s and early 1990s.

"You could drive around Katy and there wasn't even a housing start," he said. "It was a tough time."

Midway Grocery also does a sizable volume of game processing—numbering in the thousands of animals, he said.

"We accept game year-round because so many people depend on us to do that," Meyer said. "During deer season—of course that's our big run—we also process elk, caribou, mule deer and so forth from the western states, but our primary business is white tail deer and wild hogs."

In an era marked by football stadium-sized grocery stores, Midway stands out as an exception.

"We do business just a little bit differently," he said. "I think that's just the way we cut meat and the kind of service we provide. You don't just walk up and grab a package of t-bones or round steaks or pork chops. As a service meat counter, you tell the guys back there 'I want those two and skip that one, and give me those next two,' and so forth. It's just a matter of service and knowing your customers."

The hometown service has kept the store alive over the years, Meyer said. Behind the counter customers might see "hanging beef" that's delivered quartered instead of pre-packaged.

"In a lot of instances it's the same beef but it's not covered in plastic. As far as our chickens, we get ice-packed fryers. That makes a difference. They are not pre-packaged at the processing plant. Many people comment that it just tastes better," Meyer said.

Midway Bar-B-Que

6025 Highway Blvd.

Katy 281-391-2830

www.midwaybarbeque.com

Mon.–Sat. 10:30 a.m.–8 p.m.

Sun. 11 a.m.–8 p.m.