He added a cafeteria line to serve a simple menu of smoked chicken, pork ribs, sausage, and the signature barbecue beef steak. In 1950, their son Morris branched out over two hundred miles away in Lubbock with an Underwood’s Bar-B-Q of his own. (It was across Commerce Street from the present-day Underwood’s, which moved in 1951.) After World War II, the couple moved to Brownwood, about 45 miles northeast of Brady, and opened Underwood’s Pit Bar-B-Q in a shack with covered outdoor seating. The family lore is that he and his wife, Frances Pearl “Mama” Underwood, sold barbecue door-to-door in the Central Texas town in the late 1930s. Back in Brownwood, at the original, the youngest brother, Leonard Underwood, helped his parents run the restaurant that started it all.įounder Millard Elmo “M. Morris Underwood was holding things down in Lubbock, while Warren Underwood managed the westernmost outpost in Albuquerque. Jimmy Underwood was thriving in Abilene and the Dallas–Fort Worth area. Millard Underwood had just added Denton to his thirteen other locations in North Texas and southern Oklahoma. Several Underwood brothers opened regional pods of restaurants, and each pod operated independently from the others. It was a high point in the expansion of the family name, but calling the outlets a chain would have been a stretch. “Today marks the opening of Underwood’s Cafeteria number 36 in the Underwood family,” the Denton Chronicle wrote in March 1966.
This location, now run by the third generation of Underwoods, is the only one remaining of dozens of Underwood’s barbecue restaurants that spanned much of Texas and two other states. His name is Elmo, and he has beckoned diners into Underwood’s Cafeteria for decades, though the restaurant’s 1946 founding predates him by several years. An image of a cowboy in a white apron ringing a dinner bell towers high above Commerce Street in Brownwood.
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