Nestled halfway between Fort Worth and Abilene, the North Texas town of Strawn often serves as a pit stop for travelers heading to nearby Possum Kingdom Lake or journeying between Dallas and Lubbock. However, people come from all over for the town’s star attraction—a golden, battered, Texas-size delicacy: the chicken-fried steak at Mary’s Cafe.
The dish is so popular, in fact, that owner Mary Tretter purchases more steaks for her restaurant than there are Strawn residents: 700 pounds every week. As if that already didn’t seem like a lot, she says before the pandemic, “We used to order double that.”
Chicken-fried steak maintains an iconic reputation in Southwest country cooking. While its origins are contested, scholars speculate that the schnitzel-like dish was brought to Texas by German immigrants who settled in the Hill Country in the 19th century. A dish primarily eaten by the working class, it favored tough, inexpensive cuts of beef.
Another theory about the creation of chicken-fried steak comes from the small West Texas town of Lamesa. In 1976, an Austin American-Statesman columnist wrote a satirical story claiming the dish was accidentally invented in 1911 at a diner called Ethel’s Home Cooking. According to the tale, cook Jimmy Don Perkins mistook a waitress’s order for “chicken, fried steak” as a single dish, and fried a steak like he would chicken. Despite the writer’s reminders that the story was fictional, it gained significant media traction and was widely accepted as true. Because of this, Lamesa was officially cemented as the birthplace of the chicken-fried steak via a 2011 state resolution, and the town continues to hold a festival in honor of the dish every April.
To make chicken-fried steak by traditional methods, round steak is tenderized, dredged in a seasoned flour mixture, dipped into buttermilk, tossed back into the flour, and then hucked into a deep fryer. The golden brown meat is then adorned with pepper-speckled cream gravy, and usually accompanied by a generous scoop of buttery mashed potatoes and other hearty sides.
While the classic dish remains king throughout the state, some Texas chefs are diverting from the conventional by putting unique takes on the dish. Here are three places to eat chicken-fried steak with a twist.
Cabernet Grill
Located in Fredericksburg, Cabernet Grill serves reinvented Hill Country fare with a focus on local ingredients, accompanied by the largest Texas wine list in the nation. Their chicken-fried steak comes in the form of a lobster-topped, saltine-crusted, and green chile gravy-smothered ribeye.
After being featured on The Texas Bucket List in 2021, Executive Chef Ross Burtwell says the team dished out upward of 150 chicken-fried steaks per night, accounting for over 60% of what guests were ordering. But chicken-fried steak wasn’t always on the menu. Burtwell, who develops the restaurant’s menu, jokes they added the dish while he was “kicking and screaming.” Customers kept requesting the fried meal and he had to give in.
Burtwell set out to revamp the dish. Instead of a lower quality cut of meat traditionally used for chicken-fried steak, he leveled up to rib-eye steak. A flour mixture combined with crushed saltine crackers added a pleasant flavor and crunch. He tossed in some green chiles for spice. After multiple trials, he ultimately decided his recipe merited something elegant—butter-poached lobster tail.
Teddy’s Barbecue
Teddy’s Barbecue in Weslaco in the Rio Grande Valley offers chicken-fried steak as a special Thursday through Sunday. After noticing The Wagon Wheel’s viral success selling giant chicken-fried steaks alongside barbecue in Eagle Pass, Teddy’s decided to test their luck in 2023. And it paid off. An effective gimmick to draw in customers, Texas-size dishes add an element of fun to dining. The first night they offered the one-pound chicken-fried steak special, co-owner Joel Garcia says they had a line out the door like people had never heard of chicken-fried steak in their life.
Though chicken-fried chicken is twice as popular at Teddy’s than the steak, Garcia says these meals support the business. “It’s helped us keep relevant because it’s something else people can come and try,” he says. “We get people that come that don’t want barbecue, so keeping that option on our menu helps us capture those different customers.”
After a year of serving chicken-fried steak as a special, the dish stands as its own attraction. “Some people don’t even come for the barbecue anymore,” Garcia says, “they just come for the chicken-fried steak.”
Evangeline Cafe
At Austin’s Evangeline Cafe, diners can choose from three options for “chicken-fried stuff:” steak, chicken and gator. Owner Curtis Clarke, a Louisiana native, infuses Acadian flavors into the dish, topping the battered meat with his scratch-made Cajun cream gravy and serving it alongside a choice of rice or fries. He describes the flavor of gator as similar to scallops or shark meat, offering diners a chance to explore a new take on the Southern favorite.
Clarke’s passion for chicken-fried steak runs deep. “There was a time when chicken-fried steak was the only thing I wanted to eat—if I went to any restaurant and they had chicken-fried steak, I was ready to order,” he says. “[It] is something I’ve liked for a long time, so I made sure that if it’s on my menu, we’re going to do it right and we’re going to do it good.”
