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Come for the schnitzel and kolaches and stay for a two-step at this vintage Texas dance hall.
If you haven’t made it to Schulenburg, you’re probably like a lot of people. Tucked off of Interstate 10, midway between San Antonio and Houston (about an hour and a quarter from either), this small South Texas town is flavored by its German and Czechoslovakian ancestry. The surnames will twist your tongue, while the food will certainly tantalize it. And one of the best places to sample it all — from sausage to schnitzel, holubki to kolaches — is Sengelmann Hall, a 19th-century dance hall-cum-bakery-cum-family restaurant.
Sengelmann Hall is what you need it to be: a saloon, a biergarten, a wedding venue, a date spot for dinner and dancing, and, now, a preferable alternative to the corner doughnut shop, with a new and improved bakery offering true Czech kolaches.
Let’s go back to the Old Country for a minute. In many areas of the Czech Republic, kolaches are still large, flat pastries made from a sweet yeast dough and topped with jamlike fruit fillings (the word kolache comes from the Czech word for “wheel” or “round”). To make a traditional velke kolache, a supersized round of dough is flattened like a pizza, topped with fruit — maybe pitted prunes that have been simmered in water with sugar and ground poppy seeds — then finished with sweetened cream cheese, baked, and served in slices. These large 12-inch velke kolaches were designed out of convenience for feeding large families. Also popular are the smaller 8-inch pie-sized Old World-style kolaches, still a far cry from the two-bite, pig-in-a-blanket-style klobasneks referred to as kolaches in certain parts of Texas today.
It is the Old World bigger-is-better tradition that is held fast by Hana Hillerova Harper, Sengelmann Hall co-owner (with husband Dana) and native of Prague. In tandem with baker Sharon Burns, the crew at Sengelmann Hall is bringing old family recipes to the forefront of the menu, which has recently been revamped to add an extraordinary selection of homemade delicacies.
For dinner, start with the seasonal Berry Berry Bleu Salad, which is topped with fresh berries, bleu cheese crumbles, and sweet pecans. Follow it up with one of the most unusual and delicious soups you’ll ever have: homemade cream of cilantro spiced up with a dash of red pepper oil. For the main, there’s no contest. Schnitzer’s Chicken Schnitzel is based on Harper’s family recipe and features a chicken cutlet that is beaten, breaded, fried, then dipped in lemon butter. In the Czech Republic, they call this smazený rízek.
Sides include lightly sautéed fresh spinach and garlic mashed potatoes, but be sure to leave room for the apple strudel, Dark Rum Cake, or an O’Kelley cupcake (a Baileys Irish Cream confection designed by Pat and Doug O’Kelley, and the winner of the restaurant’s Name Your Own Cupcake contest). Stomach full, you’ll have to pick out your kolaches at the bakery and have them boxed up for breakfast.
What makes the experience at Sengelmann Hall so memorable is that everything screams homemade, as if your own Old Country grandmother has cooked a button-busting feast just for you. As for your Old Country grandfather, you’ll feel his presence at the saloon with its pre-Prohibition cocktail list. Order The Schulen-bocker, a twist on the classic Knickerbocker, and watch the bartender break a sweat pounding ice — this old-fashioned bar doesn’t even have a blender. Better still, order the Old Old-Fashioned (the doubling is theirs) for two reasons: one, just to watch the barkeep crack some more ice, and two, there’s something appropriate about drinking an Old-Fashioned while hearing a train pass by. And if you find yourself still sitting at the end of the dark bar in the late afternoon, sunlight cutting through the motes just as the stomps of the dancing upstairs begin, the Sengelmann Hall Mint Julep is your drink.
“Did you know this place is haunted?” asks Heather Taylor, director of operations and all-purpose employee (I saw her giving tours, expediting food, mixing drinks, directing traffic, and gabbing with locals — I’m sure she dances, too). She recounts how two people were murdered here in the late 1800s: one a sheriff — wrong place, wrong time, stray bullet; the other a man who stabbed another patron for trying to dance with his mother. I guess they take their dancing seriously in these parts.
A haunting seems fitting, though, for the entire place feels rooted in days long past. The simple fact that Sengelmann Hall is a dance hall makes it a relic. There’s a sign in the bakery that reads, “Texas dance halls are on the list of the 10 most endangered historical places in the state! Support Texas dance hall preservation.” But it’s funny: As you hear the steps of dancers upstairs, you don’t mind waiting longer for a cocktail, because you’re not in a hurry. You come here, halfway to everywhere, for Oma’s meatloaf, not because you can’t get meatloaf elsewhere, but because you can taste the legacy of generations of research and development as soon as it hits your mouth.
You’re here to have a drink, grab a bite to eat, catch some live music, and cut a rug. Maybe the endangered threat is not the dance hall, but rather patience, the ability to hold out for something better. It may be the Old Old-Fashioned talking, but looking around the place, everyone is happy to be here. And in a town of two square miles, that’s no easy feat.
