Israel “Pennie” Ochoa and his wife Connie opened Pennie’s Meat Market in Galveston in 1978 at 1713 37th Street. The building had housed a meat market as far back as least 1913, when a butcher named Franke Henry listed his business there in the Galveston directory. The Ochoas sold raw meat, but their specialties were Israel’s barbacoa and Connie’s tamales. “My mother-in-law started to make tamales, and it took off, so my father-in-law started to make barbacoa,” Ochoa’s son-in-law, Louis Moreno, remembers. After Israel passed away in 2003, Connie continued to run the market. The decline in Galveston’s population immediately after Hurricane Ike was too much to weather, and without an heir interested in running the market, she was forced to close Pennie’s in early 2009.…View Original PostThe post Pennie’s Tex Mex Take Out Brings New Life to a Galveston Institution appeared first on Texas Monthly.