Blue Bonnet Café

The Blue Bonnet Café is where locals have been coming to eat three meals a day since 1929. Today it is a modern place with multiple dining rooms and clientele that includes food-focused travelers, but it retains its old-fashioned, downhome feel, and it is staffed by a team of friendly, unflappable waitresses.

At breakfast, eggs are accompanied by hash brown potatoes or grits and your choice of thin toast, biscuits, or double-thick Texas toast. 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 rugged-textured cornbread muffins.

The menu has something for everyone: relatively healthful salads, sandwiches large and small, and big, beautiful hot plates of chicken fried steak, pot roast, or rib-eye steak accompanied by a choice of three vegetables from a long and inviting list. Our favorites are fried okra, pinto beans, and butter-sopped leaf spinach.

Pay attention to the sign above the dining room that reads TRY SOME PIE. It’s the main reason the Blue Bonnet has become a Roadfood landmark. About eight or ten different kinds are available every day, plain or a la mode; and while we enjoy the apple pie and pecan pie, the one we’ll come back for is the peanut butter cream. Smooth and devilishly rich, topped with a thick layer of white cream, it is brilliantly complemented by a ribbon of dark chocolate sauce: an inspired combination.