Word came down last week that another home-town business is closing. Dozier’s Barbecue in Fulshear shut and locked its doors this week.
Ed Dozier opened the barbecue and meat market in 1957, and the place was a staple for college students and families heading to College Station from Richmond and Rosenberg.
In 1985, the Evans brothers bought the restaurant, but they kept Ed’s name as tribute to this long-respected pit master. New owners came along a couple of years ago, but with Covid and other economic challenges, the restaurant decided to close.
In a blow that affected most of Fort Bend County, The Swinging Door, a long-time favorite barbecue restaurant, closed after 50 years in the same location. Most of us had sopped their famous sauce and jalapeno bread at those red-checked tablecloths, snacked on the dill pickles and held our end-of-season baseball parties and wedding showers at the cozy place on FM 359.
When my son went back to Taiwan a few years ago, he promised his friends he’d bring back genuine Texas barbecue. He took a couple of pounds of The Swinging Door’s right-off-the-grill brisket on that long flight overseas.
He was the most popular guy on the plane.
Every small city has more than its share of chain restaurants. They’re reliable, and the foods taste the same whether you order a burger and fries in Philadelphia, San Francisco or Dallas.
But what sets places like home-grown restaurants apart from the chain is their individuality, their quirkiness, and their ability to set their own menu and prices. They make their own decisions about what to serve, just like so many of our remaining mom-and-pop restaurants.
Many of the fast food places employ our teens and young adults as they work their way through school, but nothing beats having the family that employs you attend your high school graduation. These owners understand when you need to take the night off because your little sister’s having a play at the elementary school.
Maybe we don’t patronize these family-owned and home-town places as we should. But let’s face it, we don’t visit elderly relatives like we should either.
We have fond memories of our grandparents, aunts and uncles, know we owe them for forming us into who we are, and yet we stay home, order fast food and believe the families who run establishments we take for granted will go on forever.
The truth is, they’re disappearing faster than ever. In their place will be some bland chain restaurant, a high-priced convenience store or, horrors of horrors, a parking lot.
Gone will be the scuffed wooden table and chairs we sat on as kids and our children squirmed in until their dinner came. No longer will we order what we want without looking at the menu because the same food’s been on the menu for the past 20 years.
My mom made a great meatloaf, but it wasn’t exactly the same each and every time. That’s what made it great. It’s the same with family-owned places. The dishes and meals are almost the same, but we know that mom or dad in the back fussed with the details a little to make their meals a little bit better, just as our parents did back in the day.
Chains follow the recipes down to the same amount of salt. I’ll take the variety a local place offers every single time.
While we still have family-owned restaurants here in Fort Bend County, give them your business. Bypass the drive-throughs and sit down on a patched vinyl-covered bench and order food the way it’s been cooked for years.
Do your part to make sure we don’t lose any more eateries that make Fort Bend County our own special home.
This column was originally published in The Fort Bend Herald.