LUCILLE'S STORY & PEOPLE

Lucille’s is a tribute to a legacy of culinary excellence started almost a century ago. A locally-owned restaurant in the heart of Houston’s Museum District, we specialize in well-refined Southern cuisine with infusions of international techniques and flavors. Co-founded in August 2012 by brothers Chris and Ben Williams, the restaurant is a tribute to the culinary tradition begun by their great-grandmother, Lucille B. Smith, who was an educator, culinary innovator and successful entrepreneur who founded her own food corporation. Today, Executive Chef Chris Williams and Chef de Cuisine Khang Hoang continue to pay homage to her by replicating some of her most famous recipes while embellishing others to create innovative takes on Southern food classics.

Lucille Elizabeth Bishop Smith, African-American entrepreneur, chef, educator, inventor, and food corporation founder and president, daughter of Mary (Jackson) Bishop and Jesse Bishop, was born in Crockett, Texas, on September 5, 1892.

At various times, Smith attended Wiley College, Prairie View A&M College, and Colorado State College. She graduated from Samuel Huston College (now Huston-Tillotson University) in Austin. In about 1912 she married Ulysses Samuel Smith and moved to Tarrant County. They had three children: two sons and a daughter.

Lucille Smith worked for several years as a seamstress and also as a cook for various private clients. In 1927 she became the teacher-coordinator of the Fort Worth Public School District’s vocational education program for black students. The program trained students for domestic service jobs.

A dinner that Smith catered in Fort Worth led to an opportunity to manage the cooking at an exclusive girls’ summer camp near Kerrville—Camp Waldemar. Lucille’s husband, Ulysses, himself a renowned chef, was widely known as the “Barbecue King of the Southwest” and catered for William Thomas Johnson’s traveling rodeo. The Waldemar Cookbook stated, “Except for two years in the early 1930s, either U.S. or Lucille or both were responsible for Waldemar’s food from 1928 until the summer of 1973.”

In 1937 Lucille Smith was recruited to initiate a domestic service training program for professors and instructors at Prairie View A&M College. In that job, she developed the first college-level Commercial Foods and Technology Department that incorporated an apprentice-training program; she also created five service training manuals. In 1941 Smith wrote a cookbook in the form of a card file box of recipes. The cookbook, entitled Lucille’s Treasure Chest of Fine Foods, went through multiple editions and was a rare collectors’ item by the twenty-first century.

While recovering from a serious illness in the 1940s, Smith invented Lucille’s All Purpose Hot Roll Mix as a fundraiser for her church, St. Andrews United Methodist Church of Fort Worth. Within thirty days, she was able to donate the profit of $800 to the church. Orders continued to pour in. It was the first hot roll mix to be marketed in the United States. A 2004 article in the Cleburne Times-Review reported: “Grocery stores began placing orders for cases of the mix. By April of ’48, the orders were for more than 200 cases per week of the 14-ounce boxes. Twenty-one different products [recipes] could be made from the base. The product paved the way for the convenience cooking we know today.”