Remembering the Kolache King: Jim Weikel
Jim Weikel passed away June 13 at the age of 80. His funeral was last Wednesday.
He was one of La Grange’s most iconic businessmen, and made La Grange a must-stop location for anyone seeking his family’s amazing kolaches.
Jim appeared in the pages of The Fayette County Record a lot over the years.
To honor his legacy we’d like to re-print a portion of a feature we did on him for the cover of the 2017 Visitor’s Guide:
Weikel’s Store and Bakery, has become a landmark for travelers on Texas State Highway 71 in search of an authentic taste of Fayette County.
The key to Weikel’s success was been a combination of an old family kolache recipe and the sharp business acumen of Jim and his son Philip Weikel.
Weikel’s Bakery is actually the second business success story for the Weikel Family. Back in 1929, Jim Weikel’s father and brother, Alvin and Pop Weikel, opened a little cafe a half block away from courthouse square in La Grange. They called it the Bon Ton. The cafe quickly became known for its pies and fresh homemade bread.
Jim Weikel entered the business in 1969.
“Being a pretty aggressive young person, I decided to conduct a survey to see how many customers came off of Highway 71 and how many were local,” Jim said. “It became obvious that 71 was carrying the day.”
So Jim built a bigger, modern restaurant on Highway 71, which at that time ran through town on Travis Street. Then in the early 1980s, Texas Department of Transportation announced plans to build a bypass for Highway 71 around La Grange.
“I kind of got burned out of the restaurant business and sold it in 1985.” said Jim Weikel.
Bon Ton closed a few years later under different management, but to this day folks in Fayette County still wane nostalgically about the restaurant’s homemade bread and pies.
“Around that time Department of Transportation held a meeting about the bypass they were going to build,” Jim said. “I got the idea to buy this piece of property that was close to where the bypass was going to hook back up with 71.”
Jim juggled a few different ideas for the property before settling on building a convenience store. He was working with a representative from the Humble Oil Company, now Exxon, to build the station. The Humble rep offered Weikel some sage advice.
“He said, ‘Jim, It’s going to be tough out there where you’re at. You’ve got to get people to stop, just like you’ve been getting them to stop at that restaurant all these years,’” Jim said. “That’s the best advice I’ve gotten.”
The Weikels decided to include a bakery inside his convenience store, thinking that morning travelers might stop at his gas station for some breakfast while they fill up.
“But I didn’t know anything about the bakery business,” Jim said.
He approached an established local bakery about handling the food side of the new convenience store.
“They weren’t interested,” he said with a grin. “But those were different days. So I said I’ll do my own bakery.”
Jim’s wife, Jo Ann, shared with him her family’s kolache recipe that was brought to America by her grandmother, Annie Kulhanek, when she migrated to the US as a young child. Jo Ann’s mother, Nolie Schobel, perfected the recipe. Jo Ann worked up the recipe for a commercial bakery. She created old fashioned Czech fillings from scratch such as cottage cheese, prune, apricot and poppy seed.
These are the same authentic recipes being used to this today and set the bakery apart. To have a wider offering, she took her love of baking into cakes, cookies and many other treats as well.
The recipe is a closely guarded secret. Jim’s son Philip said the secret lies not only with the ingredients, but more importantly, in the process of making the dough.
“My mom scaled it up to use in the bakery, but those secret things are very much a part of what we do in the bakery.” Philip said. “It’s a combination of my dad’s entrepreneurship and my mom’s authentic Czech recipe passed down the generations that makes us such a success.”
That process and set of ingredients results in the fluffy, sweet, pillowy kolaches for which they are famous.
The family razed the old gas station and bakery in 2011 and built a sprawling new kolache mecca on the site.
Today the bakery usually makes enough dough for about 4,000 kolaches daily, but on its busiest days the bakery can sell 15,000 with 20 different varieties of fruit and cream filling.