Before you can get your meat at Smitty's Market, you have to take a walk down the hallway.
"This hallway just depicts Texas barbecue. You can't get any finer than that," Jon Fullilove, with Smitty's, said.
Once a dinning hall, the hallway now leads to the pits, and more than 100 years of barbecue history.
"Their grandparents brought them to eat barbecue here, now they're bringing the grandkids here," Fullilove said.
The old fashioned experience, slow smoked meat, and generations of memories keep customers coming back.
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Barbecue
In his ongoing look at Texas barbecue, News 8's Russell Wilde takes us inside three iconic Central Texas restaurants.
 
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"This makes us different from a lot of barbecue places, here we're doing it old fashioned," Rocky Nino, with Smitty's, said. "We do it simple. We don't add a lot of preservatives, no fillers, it's an honest product."
Llano
Whether it's warm or cold outside people line up to hand-pick their meats at Cooper's Old Time Pit Bar-B-Que in Llano.
The lineup includes prime rib, sirloin, brisket, jalapeņo sausage, ham, chicken, beef ribs, a little bit of goat, and regular sausage, among others.
"It's pretty neat you can pretty much pick out what you want to get," Shane Lynch, with Cooper's Barbecue, said.
For many it's the experience of picking the perfect piece of meat that sets Cooper's apart.
Because when they open the pit mouths begin to water.
"You get a lot of ooh's and awes, you know what I mean," Lynch said. "It's a lot of meat out on the pit. You would expect to see that much at any kind of barbecue place I would think."
Driftwood
Scott Roberts, with The Salt Lick, said his is a very low tech, but very high tech operation, but either way an operation that is classic Hill County.
"It's a combination of the setting, the taste of the food, it's a unique open pit style, and the friendliness of the people," Roberts said.
Forty years ago Roberts helped his father build the Salt Lick's open pit, and as the food's popularity grew so did the restaurant.
"We got gravel out of onion creek and poured the slab for the original building around the pit, and then we built the building around that," he said.
Over the years the Salt Lick has expanded to seat thousands for their family style smorgasbord.
"You get to eat good, then you get full, then you feel good when you leave," Roberts said.
