New LG Meat Market Taking Shape With a Little Help from the Prauses

When Prause Meat Market closed last summer and the family sold the business and the building – it ended four generations of Prause meat and barbeque in downtown La Grange.

Or so it seemed.

But last Friday morning – while renovation work was going on at the corner of Travis and Main St. to remake Prause Meat Market into the new Texas Prime Smokehouse and Meat Market – there was Gary Prause in the midst of it all.

The members of the Angelo Hinojosa family, which bought the business, knew the Prause family expertise in the meat and barbeque business was too valuable to let slip away.

“I’ve stayed around to an swer questions, help out where I can,” Gary said.

“Mr. Prause has been instrumental in our efforts,” said Tony Hinojosa, who has been overseeing the building renovations for his brother Angelo.

The Prause and Hinojosa families, it seems, have created quite the friendship – forged over the love of great food.

“I’ve tried some of their recipes and they are amazing,” Gary said, “We were the fourth generation (of the family business), we feel like they are the fifth generation.”

Tony said some of the recipes and the ways the Prauses did things will be incorporated into the new market.

But the Hinojosas have a lot of new and grand ideas too.

The market will be open for breakfast, lunch and dinner with greatly expanded seating area. There will be a new smokehouse built behind the current building and a large six-foot by four-foot open grill is planned for inside the market. People can pick out their steak, and then have it grilled right in front of them.

They will also offer seafood, and ship some of their offerings via mail order.

Tony also said they plan to offer lunchtime delivery service in the downtown courthouse area.

Right now the building looks like a construction zone. The canopy over the sidewalk was being worked on Friday.

Inside, many of the interior walls have been torn down, revealing the black, smoke covered areas where the barbeque pits (the brick of which has now been dismantled and hauled off) once stood.

“Now we’re working on structural aspects of the building, waiting on permit approval before we can do more,” Tony said.

But after lots of COVID-related delays last year, the Hinojosas are moving quickly now, and plan to have the new market and restaurant open by the end of May.