Roadfood_ Revised Edition - Jane Stern [229]
310 Fourth St.
830–833–4416
Blanco, TX
BLD | $
The Blanco Bowling Club Café is a real bowling alley where the nine-pin league gathers at night. The rest of the day the alleys are curtained off, although customers in the back dining room do enjoy such décor as bowling trophies, racks of balls, and ball bags piled atop league members’ lockers. Accommodations are basic: wood-grain Formica tables set with utensils wrapped in paper napkins. There is a short counter in the front room with a view of the pass-through to the kitchen and one big table where locals come and go for coffee, cinnamon buns, and glazed donuts all morning.
The lunchtime menu includes hamburgers and hot beef sandwiches and an array of tacos, chalupas, and enchiladas. Pies are spectacular, with meringue tops that rise three times as high as the delicious fillings. Coconut pie has an indescribably creamy flavor, accented by little bits of toasty coconut scattered across the top of the meringue. Fudge pie is dense, rich, and super-chocolaty. If you are a pie fancier, put this bowling alley on your must-eat list. Meringue pies get no better.
Blue Bonnet Café
211 Hwy. 281
830–693–2344
Marble Falls, TX
BLD | $
The Blue Bonnet Café menu has something for everyone, from salads and sandwiches to big beautiful hot plates of chicken-fried steak, pot roast, and rib-eye steaks accompanied by a choice of three vegetables from a long and inviting list. Our favorites are fragile-crusted fried okra, pork-rich pinto beans, and butter-sopped leaf spinach.
Lunch and supper begin with a basket of excellent rolls, including four-by-four-inch yeast rolls with a bakery sweetness that perfumes the whole table as soon as you tear one apart. With the rolls are coarse-grain corn-bread muffins. At breakfast, eggs are accompanied by hash-brown potatoes or grits and your choice of thin toast, biscuits, or double-thick Texas toast.
The only problem about eating breakfast at the Blue Bonnet Café is that the pies may not be ready to serve until after 11:00 A.M., and in this place it behooves diners to heed the sign posted on the wall that implores “Try Some Pie”! Eight or ten are available each day, plain or à la mode; and while we enjoy the apple pie and pecan pie, the one we’ll come back for is peanut butter cream. Smooth and devilishly rich, topped with a thick ribbon of whipped cream, it is accompanied by a small paper cup full of chocolate sauce to either pour on or use as a dip for each forkful: an inspired condiment!
Bohannon’s Brietzke Station
9015 Fm 775
830–914–3288
Seguin, TX
BLD | $
A while back Cheryl Speakman wrote to tell us about a place we had to visit on our next trip to Texas. “If you think you have already experienced pie bliss, you haven’t yet experienced one of Mutsie’s pies.” What a great tip! Although the official address of the café is Seguin, in fact it is in New Berlin, a Guadalupe County mini-municipality so small it doesn’t have its own zip code. To say Brietzke Station is an inconspicuous eatery hardly does justice to its humble looks. Driving past, you might think it was just a gas station, but a small sign on the wall outside says “Café.”
Opened in 1977 by John and Mutsie Bohannon, it is a treasured town gathering place where citizens come for coffee and homemade biscuits every morning, and for meals of chicken and dumplings, steak and gravy, and fish specials every Wednesday and Friday night. Half the pleasure of eating here is getting to know Big John and Mutsie. Mutsie, who was recognized as New Berlin’s Citizen of the Year in 2005, is known to regular patrons as the “town mom.”
Her cream pies are modest but masterful. The one that made us swoon was chocolate: not spectacular to look at and not at all sinfully fudgy, but totally satisfying in an old-fashioned milk-chocolate way.
Bryce’s Cafeteria
2021 Mall Dr. (Interstate 30, Exit 222)
903–792–1611
Texarkana, TX
LD | $
There are few more appetizing preludes to a meal than waiting in line at Bryce’s Cafeteria. Before you reach the food, you