Farewell to the Barbecue King of the Southwest

We all have some restaurants that just mean a little more to us than others.

Jerry Mikeska’s Bar-B-Q in Columbus was one of those for me.

It began initially as a catering business 70 years ago, and then added a restaurant 39 years ago.

But Mikeska’s is closing for good this Saturday.

The combination of it’s founder dying a few years ago, rising prices, and some horrendous construction along I-10 that makes it really difficult to even get to the restaurant right now have converged to close the book on this historic place.

When I was a kid we went to a lot of weddings (my parents knew everyone), and it was always a special treat to find out when a wedding we were at was being catered by Mikeska’s.

On all their styrofoam cups they had this cartoon grill master with a crown on his head, above their slogan “Barbeque King of the Southwest.”

As you went through the food line, instead of scooping up barbecue yourself, they had guys with big sharp knives carving up the meat right on front of you.

It was all very impressive. In more recent years, whenever I was passing through Columbus around meal time, a stop at Mikeska’s was in order.

When my wife and I got married 23 years ago at High Hill, I knew nobody else but the Barbecue King of the Southwest was good enough to cater the event – with brisket, sausage and chicken.

On the day of the wedding my parents surprised us by telling me they wanted to pay for the meal.

So naturally, when I heard last week that Mikeska’s was going to close, my wife and I invited my folks to go to one last meal there – a small way to return that wedding day kindness, 23 years later.

We loaded up our three boys and my parents in the minivan and headed to Columbus for lunch Sunday. We had to take some backroads just to get to the place because of that aforementioned construction.

It was a light crowd for noon on a Sunday, I thought.

But the food was just as good as I remembered. The brisket and sausage were amazing but the pork ribs might have been the star of the plate.

Their barbecue sauce, like always, had just the right amount of sweetness and diced pieces of cooked onion floating in it. My sides, cucumber salad, pea salad and buttered potatoes, were almost as good as the meat.

As for the restaurant, a lot of the iconic decor on the walls (deer, moose and elk heads, stuffed bears and ducks) had already been taken down. All the photos of Jerry Mikeska posing with presidents, governors and astronauts were gone.

The place was getting prepared for its last days.

But the big photo of Jerry Mikeska, in a huge bow tie and bushy eyebrows, was still up on the wall.

He died in 2020 at the age of 96 – so don’t ever let anyone tell you barbecue isn’t healthy.

An Army Air Corps Veteran, Jerry Mikeska was one of six brothers who all followed their Czech immigrant father’s footsteps into the barbecue business. A 1986 Texas Monthly article proclaimed them “The First Family of Texas Barbecue,” and their meat was served to at least five presidents.

Rudy Mikeska ran a barbecue place in Taylor, Mike in Smithville, Louis and Clem in Temple, Maurice in El Campo and of course Jerry in Columbus. Each brother supposedly had their own specialities and ways of doing things.

While some of those places are closed, some are still run by subsequent generations of the family.

The Mikeska barbecue tradition lives on – just not in Columbus anymore.

• Send us your story about a local restaurant that means something special to you and why – and we’d love to include it in a future edition of the newspaper. Email it to editor Jeff Wick at jeff@fayettecountyrecord. com