Round Top 2026--Debs' Pictorial Essay

DEBORAH CROMBIE: Last week I made what has, since 2017 (and excepting 2020,) become my annual trip (which I've written about several times!) with my daughter to the Spring Antiques Show in Round Top, Texas. What is more fun than a road trip with one of your favorite people!! (Just for a little brush up on Texas geography, Round Top is in central Texas, about halfway between Austin and Houston and a good ways south of Dallas. The drive takes us about four hours.) 

"Round Top" is actually a collection of venues scattered around the tiny town, but the jewel--and one of the few ticketed venues--is Marburger Farm. But golly has Marburger changed in the last decade! The March issue of D Magazine led with "The Dallasification of Round Top," meaning it is now considerably less about antiques and more about designers and fashion. Here we are in our Round Top duds.

I'm barely scratching the surface in my hat (absolute necessity because of the sun) and bandana, while Kayti is totally rocking it, squash blossom necklace and all.

In 2021, a Dallas real estate developer bought Marburger Farm, and the spring show was the soft launch of some of their changes. They've moved existing buildings, installed more permanent tents, put in walkways and landscaping and a new permanent covered food area--that last one is a big improvement! We liked most of the changes, but some of our favorite vendors were missing. 

A view of the new "square."

Inside a new tent, which are now three aisles instead of two.

Now if they would just put in giant fans! It was so hot.

Here's something I would have bought if I'd had money (a lot!) or space.

These panels were original artwork, not photos. I especially loved them as Rick and I have been watching the Beatles Anthology and had just seen the boys wearing those gorgeous Sergeant Pepper's costumes.

And something I could have bought and regret NOT buying:

This was a vendor's personal collection of much-loved Jan Karon novels, which I adored but hadn't thought of in years. The vendor only wanted $40 for the entire set, but I was worried about space in the car--and space at home, so after looking at them twice, I passed them up.

Here are some things I would NOT have taken for any amount of money.

I mean, seriously, who would want that? And it was a couple of thousand bucks!

Ditto this one.

And this one, although if you were going for kitsch...

Not for sale--the local law enforcement.

Last year there was a theft and a chase!

Day 2 we visited The Compound, a new venue that we absolutely love. Check out the website! It is so charming, with great vendors and a beautiful setting.

Also, Blue Hills, one of long-time Round Top faves. We also managed something on our Round Top bucket list: Champagne from the vending machine in The Compound! Here's Kayti with the Champagne machine last year.

And in the little area seating nook, this year. We visited with some nice ladies from Dallas while we sipped from our plastic cups.

There was no Feast in the Field at Rancho Pillow this year, but we were happy to hang out at some of our favorite restaurants in Round Top. Here's the patio at Prost, which has a huge outdoor wood-fired pizza oven. The evenings were gorgeous, and the sky was so bright, away from our big city light pollution.

We missed a couple of other venues we like, and Junk Gypsy, but we ran out of time. We really needed three days!

My big finds were not antique-y--a couple of Peruvian alpaca pillow covers for our living room sofa, a kantha, and some plants. Oh, and a very pricey tomato, cucumber, and sage candle!

But who knows what next year might have in store?

Dear Reds and readers, are there any road trips in your future? And do you like antiquing--or "junking" as some folks are more likely to call it?

Rancho Pillow--Round Top, Round 2

DEBORAH CROMBIE: When my daughter and friend and I went to Round Top for the first time back in 2017, I was just getting stuck in writing A BITTER FEAST, Kincaid/James #18, and it was only by accident that we did something that would end up playing a big part in the book.  It so happened that we'd bought tickets to a dinner at a place called Rancho Pillow, a ranch property now run as a very quirky motel a few miles outside of the tiny town of Round Top. Here's the view looking over the fields from the ranch. So peaceful!

The guest chef for that 2017 dinner, Robert Lyford, was actually local to us here at home in McKinney, so we were very excited to see what Robert had in store for us.

It was a fabulous dinner, and Robert's menu was a huge inspiration for chef Viv Holland's charity lunch menu in A BITTER FEAST.

Here's a little snippet from the book describing some of the food:

Even with the quirky presentation, the food, Gemma had to admit, had been divine. From the creamy, smoky trout spread, to the delicate salad with roasted pears, caramel, and a local blue cheese, to the meltingly tender lamb and white beans served in camping tins, it had been of absolute star quality. What, Gemma had to wonder, was a chef so talented doing in this tiny village?

She nibbled at the last bit of her pudding. The little jam jar she’d chosen had held a mixed berry crumble with a tangy layer of crème fraiche—a dessert she suspected she’d find herself dreaming about. All around her, spoons were being laid down and empty jars examined in hopes of finding a smidgen more.

So this year, when Kayti and I had a chance to book tickets for the Rancho Pillow Feast in the Field again, we jumped at it.

Here we are pre-dinner, toasting our trip. 

And resting our poor feet after a day of shopping at Marburger Farm.

(I should probably interject here to say that half the fun of the whole Round Top event is playing dress up. It's cowboy boots (my vintage Wranglers!), hats, denim, and skirts or dresses. And lots of turquoise jewelry. Believe me, it's a thing, and we did it up properly.)

Kayti demonstrates!

The Feast in the Field dinners have grown considerably since our first one, when there was only one long table. Now there are three!

So festive, with eclectic table settings that I borrowed for the book from the previous dinner as well. (The yurt is part of the motel accomodation!)

This year the chef was a woman, Karla Subera-Pittol, from the LA restaurant Chainsaw, and all the food was smoked or cooked over open fires. 

Here's Karla cooking.

And some mystery ingredient we never identified.

What do you suppose that was? Below are pinapples and cabbages smoking, and the big smoker where the meat was cooked.

It was all delicious, and we had a great time, the best part of which was the communal dining and making new friends. We don't sit down with strangers often enough in our everyday lives. It turned out the husband of the couple who sat across from us graduated from Austin College, my tiny north Texas university whose enrollment tops out at about 1200 students, the same year I did! Alas, we didn't know each other back then. He was psychology and I was biology and our paths didn't cross, but it was a lovely coincidence that evening.

As Ellen Crosby mentioned earlier this week, writers have to do more than write. It's getting out in the world and experiencing things that gives us grist for the mill. I don't know that this dinner will play a specific part in a book (unless that mysterious ingredient comes into one somewhere...) but you never know. I am open for it!

REDs and writer friends, have chance adventures become major parts of books? And readers, have you had memorable communal meals?

 

Deborah Crombie's A Bitter Feast is here!

LUCY BURDETTE: Today our dear Deborah Crombie's book A BITTER FEAST is on sale everywhere! We couldn't be more excited! Rather than wax on about how much we loved this book and this author, I'll get right to questions for Deb:

I know well how hard writing is and especially writing a complicated police procedural with long running characters. But I kept thinking about how much fun you must have had with the background of the story – inventing the food and the gardens and the dogs and describing Melody’s parents’ country home. And at the lunch, the table settings, the local produce, the gin cocktails…

Do you mind starting with the lunch menu? That special luncheon was so divine! I really hoped that the murder wouldn’t ruin the meal before the guests got a chance to enjoy it. Roasted lamb with white beans and fennel, local smoked trout pate, pickled veggies with seeded flat bread—you had me absolutely drooling. Even the salad was stunning with pears, blue cheese and a drizzle of caramel. 

 But now inquiring minds need to know, did you actually cook this menu? And how did you choose it?

DEBORAH CROMBIE: I wish I had cooked all of those things! I’m hungry just reading your list.

I’ve made leg of lamb, although not in a smoker, and fennel and white beans, although not together with the lamb. And I’ve experimented quite a bit with the fermented veggies. (As for the gin cocktails, I think I can claim to be an expert!)

The main inspiration for Viv’s menu was a dinner given by a local McKinney chef, Robert Lyford.  It was my first trip to the Round Top Antiques week down in Brenham, Texas, and Robert was the featured chef for an outdoor dinner at a place called Rancho Pillow.  The guests were seated at one long table, set much like the tables in the book. We were served pickled vegetables and spicy pimento cheese with crispbread, then Robert’s main course was “pork and beans” served in camping tins.  And the deserts were in little jars, as are Viv’s in the book. All the food was amazing. So that part of the menu is totally down to Rob, except that I switched pork to lamb because the Cotswolds is sheep country. The pears and blue cheese were based on a recipe in our local foodie magazine, Edible. Yum! The smoked trout I just threw in because I love smoked trout spread, and if fit with the local foods.

LUCY: You had wonderful descriptions of your character Viv deciding she’d be a chef and then what it was like in the world of the kitchen, the sexism, the hard work, the pressure of seeking a Michelin star—even the tattoos the chefs got to celebrate. Here’s a snippet from p. 270: “It was so tenuous and indefinable, the synergy of the kitchen. When everything worked, it was an almost liquid thing—one station flowed smoothly into another and the communication on the line was seamless.” (Of course, everything is not working!)

Tell us about the research you did to get this right?

DEB: I had lots of help and advice, not just from Rob Lyford, but from my chef friend in Phoenix, Sean Currid, and chef Nik Chappell at the Slaughters Manor House in Lower Slaughter. Both Sean and Nik gave me restaurant kitchen tours and answered lots of questions. And then I read and read and read. Chefs’ bios and memoirs, books about professional cooking and about the restaurant world. I also ate a lot! Research was my excuse to go to a lot of restaurants in London and the Cotswolds that I would normally have considered out of my budget. Now I have to figure out a way to justify those meals on the next trip.

LUCY: I’ve been thinking a lot about your chef characters and remembered an interview I did on the blog with psychologist Scott Haas about his book, THE BACK OF THE HOUSE. I asked him if he ever felt like a psychologist to the chefs, and he said:

“There is a profound superficiality to the way some chefs regard the depth of their emotional lives--an avoidance, a calcification, part of why they cook instead of developing intimacy.  Cooking is much easier than working on relationships.  Certainly the chef told me extremely personal things, but this is not an introspective profession. On the contrary.”

Did you find this to be true as you were talking with chefs? I can imagine this description fitting at least one of your characters…

DEB: The chefs I spoke to seemed to make a great effort to lead balanced lives, and they guard their days off ferociously. But, yes, I think you can safely say that the chefs in my book have a hard time maintaining a work/life balance. Otherwise, we wouldn’t have much of a story!

LUCY: You make a wonderful comparison between the work of a gardener and a chef—how in both professions, people work so hard to achieve something that is fleeting, such as a wonderful meal or a perfectly weeded garden. And that brings us to gardens. We can picture the roses and the hedges and can imagine the landscape architect at work. Will you tell us about your interest in this and how your gardens compare?

DEB: This book let me indulge both my passions. I am an enthusiastic if not particularly good gardener (the same could probably be said of my cooking…) and I have an obsession with English roses. I’ve also been fascinated for as long as I can remember with English gardens, and with Arts and Crafts gardens in particular.  A wonderful book on the restoration of the Gertrude Jekyll garden at a Surrey house called Upton Grey inspired the gardens at Beck House.  I even drew diagrams of all the beds and plantings.  Although my own garden is tiny in scale compared to something like Beck House, I do use a lot of native perennials in a natural way—a very Arts and Crafts design template.

LUCY: You were spinning so many plates with your plots and subplots and it surely must’ve been difficult to decide which characters to bring forward and which new ones to introduce. With a series that has run to 18 books, can you tell us more about that process?

DEB: I’m usually thinking a book ahead about what characters will lead the next story. In A Bitter Feast, I knew I wanted all four of my main characters, Doug and Melody as well as Duncan and Gemma, to be working the same case in the same place, and the setting followed from that. But because there is such a big cast of continuing characters in the series, my biggest problem in planning a book is deciding who to leave out, rather than who to put in.  And sometimes the characters don’t cooperate.

LUCY: You’ve mentioned that you go to England most years to do research for your books. What did you do and see while planning A BITTER FEAST? (Now we’re all dying to visit the Cotswolds.) Do you know what you’re looking for before you go? And where are we headed next?

DEB: I visited the Cotswolds on my very first trip to England with my parents, in the late seventies, and I had never been back, although I had for a long time thought the area would make a great setting for a novel. I made three trips for this book. The first was sort of a fact-finding mission, trying to find the perfect village (or villages) for the story. On that visit, I decided on the Slaughters, which I’d seen all those years ago with my folks. I’m sure we even stayed at Lords of the Manor in Upper Slaughter, when it had just opened as a country house hotel.

On the second and third trips I stayed in both Lower and Upper Slaughter, and I do think I could work for the Slaughters tourist bureau! The landscape and the villages in this part of England are just breathtakingly beautiful.  I’m quite downcast now at not having an excuse to go back—but maybe I will think of one. Beck House and the Lamb are, after all, still there.

The next book, however, is set in London, in Bloomsbury and Soho, and I’ll be off for three weeks writing and researching in London right after Bouchercon! And as usual, I can’t wait!

LUCY: Readers, do you know that all 7 of the Jungle Reds will be at Bouchercon in Dallas in a couple of weeks? Two of our Reds are Guests of Honor--Debs and Hank! Don't miss the annual Jungle Red game show on Thursday the 31st at 2:30. 

And I have the honor of interviewing Debs on Thursday morning at 9:30. What questions would you like me to ask???

And most important, you can buy A BITTER FEAST wherever books are sold...

Girls Go Antiquing

DEBORAH CROMBIE: What could be better than a road trip on a gorgeous spring day? How about a GIRLS road trip! 

And, even better, how about a girls' antiquing road trip?

That's what I'm doing tomorrow, with my daughter and my BFF, who has driven down yesterday from Kansas City for the adventure. (And when I say BFF, I really mean BFF. We have been best friends since we were in THIRD GRADE!)

So, the three of us are setting out at 5AM tomorrow morning for Round Top, Texas, for the huge twice yearly antiques fair that turns a spot in the road (population 90) into a destination. Round Top is iconic, and I can't believe I've never done this before.

Here's one of the big tents:

 And some of the stuff in the Americana tent:

I am little more inclined towards the Continental Tent--except for the quilts in the Americana tent.

And anyone who knows me will testify that I have weakness for quilts. Do I need more quilts? No, but that's not really the point, is it? It's the outing, and the adventure of it.

It will take us (fingers crossed) about four hours for the drive. (Round Top is about halfway in between Austin and Houston.) It's going to be a gorgeous day, and--fingers crossed again--the Texas bluebonnets will be blooming.

Once we have spent the day walking and shopping, we have dinner tickets at this really cool venue called Rancho Pillow,

where dinner is being catered by our very own favorite place right here in McKinney, Patina Green and chef Robert Lyford.  After that, assuming we are still are our feet, we are going to enjoy staying at a fab self-catering cottage in the Texas Hill Country, with a hot tub (which I expect we will need) and an amazing breakfast.
On the way back to Dallas on Tuesday, we plan to stop at the Antique Rose Emporium in Brenham, Texas (swoon... and that should be a whole other post) 

and then at the Magnolia Market at the Silos in Waco. For anyone who has ever watched Fixer Upper, this needs no explanation. 

I have no doubt that guy road trips are just as special (I've heard enough camping stories from the hub.) So REDS and readers of either gender, what's your most fun road trip?

Or road trip fantasy?

And what would you look for if you were going to Round Top???