This Old-World Texas Butcher Shop Has Been Making Handmade German Sausages and Schnitzel Since 1961

I will happily argue that the best German sausage in Texas is not waiting in the Hill Country beer halls. It is behind a deli counter in Dallas, and I have the receipts to prove it.

It hides in a Tudor storefront across the street from a university, where a family has been grinding, stuffing, and smoking the same recipes for longer than Texas has been a state.

I have a rule about butcher counters: if the person slicing your knackwurst can tell you which generation wrote the recipe, you order more than you planned to. This is a place built entirely for people like me.

Step inside and the air does the selling for you. It smells like smoke and spice, that warm cured-meat perfume you only get where the sausage is made in the back and not trucked in from anywhere.

Below, here is why this little market and restaurant has been a North Texas institution since 1961, and why you should point the car toward Snider Plaza the next time you are hungry.

A Counter Stacked Ten Generations Deep

The place is Kuby’s Sausage House, and it wears two hats at once. On one side is an old-world European market and butcher counter. On the other is a cozy restaurant with a lunch counter that has been feeding regulars for decades.

Walk the market side first. The glass cases run long, packed with more than eighty kinds of house-made sausage, cold cuts, and cheese, all made in-house the way the family has always made them.

There are German mustards, imported chocolates, jams, and pie fillings crowding the shelves. You came for a couple of bratwurst and you leave with a bag you did not plan on. That happens to everyone here.

The deli case does more than sausage, too. There are house-made chicken salads and pimento cheeses, cold cuts sliced to order, and a wall of European groceries you cannot find at the regular grocery store.

It is a proper old-world market, not a gift shop with a few links in a fridge.

The restaurant side is where you sit down and let someone else do the cooking. It is small, warm, and unfussy, the kind of room where the regulars have a usual and the staff already know it.

A Family Recipe Older Than the Alamo

Here is the part that stops people. The Kuby family has been making sausage since 1728, when a man named Friedrich Kuby opened a meat market in Kaiserslautern, Germany. That is nearly three hundred years ago, generations before there was a Texas to move to.

The recipes, the spice blends, and the meat-cutting techniques have been handed from father to son for more than ten generations. Not written in a cookbook and sold off. Handed down, one Kuby to the next.

Karl Kuby was the one who brought it across the ocean. He left Kaiserslautern in 1956 and landed in Texas, first taking a job making sausage down in San Juan, near the Rio Grande Valley, to sharpen the craft he had grown up around.

In 1961 he opened his own tiny market and restaurant in University Park, right across from Southern Methodist University. He had a hunch that North Texans would fall for the food of his homeland if he gave them a lunch counter to try it at. He was right.

That lunch counter was almost an afterthought, one row of seats bolted onto a butcher shop. It grew into the restaurant that draws a line out the door today.

Karl Sr. became a bit of a Dallas character in the process, the German sausage maker who taught a Texas college town to love spaetzle.

Today his son, Karl Kuby Jr., runs the operation. By the family’s count that makes him the fourteenth Kuby in a row to stand behind a meat counter with the family name over the door. Fourteen generations is not a marketing line. It is a job description.

Eighty Ways to Say Wurst

Sausage is the heart of the whole place. Over eighty varieties come out of that back kitchen, and the range runs from the textbook German classics to a few that could only have been born in Texas.

You will find bratwurst, the mild pork-and-veal sausage built for grilling. Knackwurst, shorter and garlicky, named for the snap it makes when you bite it.

There is weisswurst, the pale Bavarian breakfast sausage traditionally eaten before noon. And landjager, the flat, dry, snackable sausage that hunters and hikers have carried in their packs for centuries.

Then there is the one that gives the whole case a Texas accent. The best-selling sausage here is not any of the old-country standards.

It is a smoked jalapeno-cheddar link, German technique wrapped around a chile and a hunk of cheese. That single sausage tells you the whole story of this shop in one bite.

The weisswurst is a small lesson in German tradition on its own. In Bavaria the rule is that you eat it before the noon church bells ring.

The fresh veal sausage was made that morning and did not keep in the days before refrigeration, so it had to be gone by lunch. Ask about it and you will get the whole story.

The cold-cut and cheese selection is just as deep, and the deli will slice whatever you point at. Bring a cooler if you are driving in from out of town, because the market sausage travels home a lot better than your willpower does.

Food and Wine magazine, when it named Kuby’s one of the best butcher shops in the entire country in 2020, singled out the landjager and called it “echt Dallas.” Echt is German for genuine, the real thing. It is a good word for the whole operation.

Schnitzel, Spaetzle, and Oma’s Potato Pancakes

Now sit down on the restaurant side, because the kitchen turns those same meats into a plate of proper German comfort food.

The most-ordered dish is the Wurst Teller, a sausage plate that lets you pick your links and piles them next to homemade sauerkraut, hot German potato salad, and sweet-tangy red cabbage. It is the tasting flight for anyone who cannot choose just one sausage, which is everyone.

The schnitzel is the other reason people drive here. A thin pork cutlet, pounded flat, breaded, and fried golden and crisp.

Order it as Wiener Schnitzel a la Holstein and it arrives crowned with two fried eggs and a side of country potatoes, which is exactly as good as it sounds.

The Reuben is worth a mention of its own. The corned beef is cured in-house, which is the difference between a sandwich you remember and one you forget by dinner.

When the butcher counter is in the same building, the deli sandwiches have no excuse to be ordinary, and these are not.

Look for the German words on the menu and order the ones you cannot pronounce. Spaetzle, the soft little egg noodles that are Germany’s answer to mac and cheese. Rouladen, thin beef rolled around pickle and onion and braised until it gives.

Then there is Oma’s Potato Pancakes, crisp-edged and named, as everything good is, after somebody’s grandmother.

The soups change daily and are made in-house, so ask what is on that morning. Save room for a slice of Apple Strudel, because leaving without dessert here is a rookie mistake.

Did you know? The restaurant is built in the Ratskeller style, the cozy cellar-tavern setup you find under old German town halls. The name literally means “council cellar,” where townsfolk have eaten and argued over beer for centuries.

Bring Your Own Buck

Here is the corner of Kuby’s that surprises out-of-towners. The family runs a wild game processing operation that is close to legendary among Texas hunters.

Bring in your deer, and they will turn it into sausage, bacon, and jerky using the same recipes that fill the deli case. For a lot of Texas families, dropping off the season’s buck at Kuby’s is as much a fall tradition as the hunt itself.

The processing plant runs out of a separate location across town on Sovereign Row, not the Snider Plaza market, so call ahead before you show up with a cooler in the truck bed. It is a genuinely old family trade, kept alive for the modern Texas deer camp.

A Neighborhood Landmark With the Awards to Match

Some places coast on nostalgia. Kuby’s keeps earning the love. The Food and Wine recognition in 2020 put it on a national stage as one of the country’s finest butcher shops, no small thing for a family counter in a Dallas plaza.

Then in 2024 the shop took home a Preservation Dallas Achievement Award, a nod to how long it has anchored its corner of Snider Plaza and how carefully the family has kept the old German Tudor storefront looking the part.

That building is half the charm. The steep roofline and timbered front look like they were airlifted out of a small German town and set down beside the SMU campus. It has been fooling visitors into thinking they crossed an ocean since 1961.

What keeps people coming back, though, is not the awards or the architecture. It is that the sausage tastes the same as it did decades ago, because it is made by the same family from the same recipes. Consistency like that is rarer than any medal.

How to Get There

Kuby’s sits in Snider Plaza in University Park, the walkable little shopping district tucked just north of the SMU campus in North Texas. It is easy to fold into a day of poking around the Park Cities.

Where: 6601 Snider Plaza, Dallas, TX 75205

The market is open Monday through Saturday from 7 a.m. to 6 p.m., and the restaurant serves from 7 a.m. until 2:30 p.m. those same days. Both are closed on Sundays, so plan your sausage run for earlier in the week.

Feeding a crowd? The family caters too, with packages that start around $14 a head and come loaded with sausages, sides, mustards, buns, and apple strudel. It is a painless way to throw a backyard Oktoberfest without learning to make sausage yourself.

Pro tip: go for an early lunch, eat your schnitzel on the restaurant side, then walk ten steps over to the market counter and load a cooler with sausage to take home. One trip, two meals, and dinner is already sorted.

Plan Your German Sausage Run to Dallas

You do not need a plane ticket to Bavaria to eat like you took one. You need a drive to a Tudor storefront in Snider Plaza and an appetite you are not too proud of.

Order the Wurst Teller, argue happily over which sausage was best, grab a strudel for the road, and fill a cooler on your way out the door.

Some traditions are worth the drive, and a family that has been getting this right for three hundred years is about as sure a bet as Texas has.

Featured image: Joshua McCauley via Kuby’s Sausage House