Don’t hit Cracker Barrel for your fix: head to Depew for first-rate Texas diner
Lovers of chicken-fried steak, I bring you tidings of great joy.
You don’t have to settle for Cracker Barrel any more.
At Southern Belle Diner, a tiny Depew restaurant, house-battered beef gets a dip and a fry and cream gravy speckled with black pepper. It’s the real McCoy.
With fried okra, and green chile cheese grits, it’s $15.95. Huevos rancheros ($10.95) posits two salsa-dipped corn tortillas topped with queso, two eggs your style, with a salsa of properly charred tomatoes and chiles, and two bacon strips.
Southern Belle Dinner is a Texas-style diner with excellent DNA. Owner Cody Hix grew up in a Texas diner family and spent six months in Mexico cooking with abuelas. Now he’s a veteran running Southern Belle Diner with family members, in a town otherwise utterly devoid of green chile cheese grits.
Since Hix also makes barbecue, you can opt for smoked brisket instead of bacon for breakfast. Two eggs, choice of toast, biscuit, or pancake, and choice of hashbrowns, homefries, or grits, and brisket, smoked sausage, chicken fried steak, pork chop or ribs: $11.95.
The hashbrowns are another craveable item scarce in town, crunchy golden shoestrings bronzed on the flattop. Chilaquiles ($10.95) is fried tortilla chips soaked in salsa and covered in queso, with two eggs, bacon, guacamole and beans.
Dinner is two nights a week. Friday is all-you-can-eat Southern fried fish and fixings. Monday is all-you-can-eat barbecue 5 p.m.-8 p.m. The rest of the week is 7 a.m.-3 p.m. Barbacoa, beef braised in ancho chile, comes in a taco trio ($12.95), with rice and beans.
Chicken fried steak and huevos rancheros and barbacoa means that if you want a real Texas-style breakfast in this neck of the woods, point your GPS at Southern Belle Diner, and head for Depew.
3575 Walden Ave., Lancaster, 716-393-3033
Hours: 7 a.m.-3 p.m. daily, dinner Monday and Friday 5 p.m.-8 p.m.
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