Half barbecue, half Jewish deli. All delicious. Austin spot is a USA Today best restaurant
Matthew OdamAs you approach Mum Foods Smokehouse & Delicatessen, you note the romantic scent of post oak wafting from 1,000-gallon smokers.
Inside the simple, corrugated steel building, you find concrete floors, wooden booths and metal stools filling the clean space. Everything about the scene says “Central Texas barbecue.”
But step closer to the counter and catch a glimpse of the deli case lined with towering cheesecake, and the record skips. Then on to the menu, where matzo ball soup and corned beef and egg salad sandwiches are interspersed with beef sausage, brisket and ribs. The record scratches to a halt.
What’s going on here?
This ain’t no traditional Texas barbecue joint. Well, half of it is. But the other half is a Jewish deli that would make a New Yorker smile. Mum’s, as regulars call it, blends two traditions that have more in common than their geographic provenance would suggest.
Mum’s pastrami, all coriander and black pepper buzz, along with the less aggressive but equally tender corned beef, which is steamed but not smoked, served on housemade sourdough rye; matso ball soup that tastes like time and love; and fresh housemade sides make Mum the best deli in the city. The snap-casing beef sausage, hefty but pliant salt-and-pepper-rubbed brisket and lacquered pork ribs from a program overseen by pitmaster Travis Crawford (a veteran of LeRoy and Lewis and Valentina's Tex Mex BBQ) make it one of the city’s best bets for barbecue.
The combined excellence of the two-track restaurant makes it one of 47 restaurants selected for the USA TODAY Restaurants of the year 2024 list.
"It’s a great honor to be recognized for our efforts. Anytime there is meaningful achievement, there are many individuals whose hard work, dedication, and passion made it possible," said owner Geoff Ellis, who opened the restaurant in December 2022. "They are too many to name here, but they certainly do deserve all the credit."
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What makes Mum so special?
Ellis, a graduate of Westlake High School in Austin and Texas State University, originally started the Mum’s brand with his then-girlfriend Mattie Bills in 2014. They served sourdough bread (the name Mum nods to the bread’s starter, or mother) and pickles at the Cedar Park and Mueller farmers markets. But it was their briskets that really drew crowds. After running the farmers market circuit for a few years, Ellis and Bills took a hiatus to live in Hawaii.
When they returned, Ellis decided to try his hand at cooking pastrami. The meat is similar to the famed brisket of Central Texas. Same cut of meat, same smoking process. The difference is a brine in pickling spices (allspice, nutmeg, bay leaf, cloves) that gives the pastrami its tenderness and pink hue, and a rub that is half black pepper, half coriander, imbuing the meat with piquant florality.
The self-taught cook had never made a pastrami, but he was intrigued, in part because of the meat’s importance to Jewish Americans. Ellis’ mother is a Queens-raised Jew whose grandparents immigrated to New York from Poland in the early part of the 20th century. Ellis was not raised in a Jewish household or in close community with many Jews, but he spent the summers of his adolescence with his maternal grandparents in his mother’s childhood home.
“That was the first foray into connecting with my New York City side, with my Jewish side,” Ellis said.
His exploration of the traditional Jewish-American food changed Ellis' and Mum’s trajectory. Some glowing press about the pastrami from Texas Monthly led to longer lines at the farmers markets, and made Ellis realize that while native Texans may not crave pastrami, the many Chicago, New York and Los Angeles transplants in Austin did.
“When you tell Austinites it’s brisket, it blows their minds,” Ellis said.
Ellis and Bills made a brief run at a deli in the small building on the Este property that is now home to Bar Toti before the pandemic and an end of their partnership interrupted things. (Bills now operates the Three Six General butcher shop in San Marcos.) But Ellis was determined to bring a Jewish deli and barbecue joint hybrid to Austin. Its popularity and the community it has fostered has enriched Ellis personally in a way he did not expect.
“Through exploring this cuisine here, that’s really how I’ve re-connected with my ancestry in a way. I always tell people the deli is really my synagogue. We’ve started to develop a community here that is something I never could have seen coming,” Ellis said.
The restaurant serves a monthly Shabat dinner and hosted a large Hanukkah party with rabbis in attendance to offer blessings.
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“Those are experiences I didn’t have growing up that I’m really enjoying. By putting this out in the world, we’ve kind of attracted a little bit of that community to us, and that’s been nice,” Ellis said.
But Ellis is not satisfied. He says he wants to expand the baking program and continue to dial up the barbecue operation. The hope, though, is not to just be a restaurant known for its great food.
“The reason I opened this place over here is I really don’t have a huge interest in being on the barbecue lists — if that stuff comes, great — but I thought it would be really neat if we developed something that became a generational habit,” Ellis said of the restaurant near his home in far East Austin where Manor Road terminates at US 183.
“We’ve got families coming in and hopefully we can last long enough that those kids, maybe they grow up and bring their kids here. The goal for any restaurant is obviously to last and stay in business, but I feel we’re looking way out into the future with hopes of becoming an institution like that. We move forward with immense gratitude and awe, with a goal of delighting guests and creating an extended family for many years to come.”
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What to order at Mum Foods Smokehouse & Delicatessen
Pastrami sandwich. If you like brisket, you're probably going to love pastrami. As long as you're OK with a big blast of coriander.
Corned beef sandwich. The smoke-free sibling of pastrami, the meat is steamed by a liquid brimming with warming spices.
Brisket. As good as the pastrami, but without the floral zing.
Matso ball soup. The depth of clean flavors taste like it took days to make the soup.
Beef sausage. You like pure beef flavor and a casing that snaps like a 1960s jazz club, this is it.
Cucumber and tomato salad. Much more than the simple name suggests. The tabbouleh-like crunchy and juicy salad is dressed in barrel-aged red wine vinaigrette made with Texas olive oil and tossed with dried oregano and fresh parsley.
Details: Mum Foods Smokehouse & Delicatessen, 5811 Manor Road, Austin, Texas; (512) 270-8021, mumfoodsatx.com.