This Old-School Texas Country Store Is a Cafe, Bakery, and Meat Market Under One Roof

Nobody tells you that the best breakfast in Central Texas is hiding behind a meat counter on a two-lane highway. I have a soft spot for the kind of country store that refuses to pick a lane.

The place that sells you a pound of sausage, a fruit kolache, and a plate of chicken fried steak before nine in the morning, and treats all three like the most normal thing in the world.

Ten miles east of Temple, in a speck of a Czech farming community called Zabcikville, there is a low building on Highway 53 that does exactly that. It is a cafe, a bakery, a meat market, and a deer processor, all working out of the same cinder-block roof.

Below, I will walk you through why people drive out of their way for it, what to order in each of its three lives, and the family story that has held it together since 1946.

A Cafe That Feeds You Like Family

Step through the door in the morning and the smell reaches you before the menu does. Smoke, buttered toast, and something frying in cast iron.

The dining room is honest about what it is. Ten tables, a row of vinyl-covered booths, and enough regulars that the waitress usually knows the order before it is spoken.

The country breakfast is the reason a lot of people set an alarm. Eggs, that famous house sausage, biscuits, and gravy land on the table fast and generous. Two people can eat well for around $21 before the tip, which beats a drive-through by a mile.

What you feel first is that nobody is in a hurry to turn your table. Coffee gets topped off, the conversation at the next booth is about crops and grandkids, and the pace is set by the kitchen rather than the clock.

When lunch rolls around, the chicken fried steak is the move. It comes under a ladle of peppery cream gravy, the kind that tastes like someone’s grandmother has been perfecting it for years.

If you want the dish that only makes sense here, order the kraut sausage burger. A grilled sausage patty piled with mustard, pickles, onions, and a tangle of sauerkraut, a burger that could only have been born in a Czech-German town.

The menu runs long past that. Fried catfish, spicy boudin balls, hamburger steaks, rib-eye sandwiches, beer-batter onion rings, and spicy fries all show up on it, more than forty items in all. Fridays and Saturdays add sauerkraut and sausage plates at lunch, and those go quick.

My honest advice for a first visit is to bring a friend and split. Order one plate off the grill and one sausage-forward dish, then trade halfway. You will still have room to feel guilty at the bakery case, which is exactly where you want to end up.

The Meat Counter Is the Main Event

Here is where the whole place started, and it is still the heart of it. The meat case runs long and cold, and the number that stops first-timers is the sausage count.

There are around thirty-one varieties made here. Classic German-style links, jalapeno cheese pork, summer sausage, dried sausage, and turkey sausage for the folks who want it a little leaner.

The sausage is not trucked in. It is ground and smoked on the premises from a Czech family recipe that has barely changed in three generations.

You can taste the difference between sausage made by a factory and sausage made by a family that has been doing it in the same building for decades. Order a link at the counter and a plate in the cafe, and you are eating the same thing two ways.

Around the links, the case fills out into a proper old-fashioned market. Six kinds of bacon, including a maple and a pepper cure. Around twenty cheeses. Boneless ham, Canadian-style bacon, breakfast smokies, and scrapple for the traditionalists.

You can order fresh-ground beef and custom cuts, and the folks behind the counter will walk you through any of it without making you feel rushed.

This is the part I love about an old meat market. You can actually ask questions.

Which link is best for a slow smoke, which one the kids will eat, how much you need for a dozen people. The answers come from someone who cut and cured the meat, not from a label.

Shelves of jams, jellies, and pickled goods round out the trip, so you can leave with a whole pantry’s worth of Texas country cooking. A jar of hot pickles and a ring of jalapeno cheese sausage will make you look like a genius at the next backyard cookout.

“We listen to people and offer the best product we can,” Charles Green, one of the brothers who runs the place, has put it. That is not marketing. It is the whole business model, worn smooth by seventy-some years of practice.

Kolaches, Pies, and a Bakery That Sells Out

You cannot walk out without stopping at the bakery case, and honestly, you should not try. Fresh fruit kolaches sit next to savory meat ones, and the sausage kolache here has been called the best in the country by people who have eaten a lot of them.

Get there early. The good ones do not last the morning.

The Czech pastry tradition runs deep in this part of Texas, and this bakery leans into it hard. Beyond the kolaches you will find breads, pies, cakes, and cookies made from scratch, including a coconut-pecan cookie that regulars stock up on.

It is the sort of case that turns a quick sausage run into a much larger bag on the way out. If there is a fresh fruit pie under the glass, get a whole one. A slice never feels like enough once you are back on the road.

If you have never had a proper Texas kolache, here is the short version. It is a soft, slightly sweet pillow of dough with fruit tucked inside. The savory cousin, sometimes called a klobasnek, wraps that same dough around sausage and cheese. Both are dangerous in a warm state.

Pro tip: buy the kolaches by the dozen and grab a loaf of bread and a jar of something pickled while you are there. A warm kolache in the passenger seat rarely survives the drive home, and you will be glad you have backup.

A Brief History of a Highway Institution

The story starts in 1946, when Jerome and Della Green, along with Jerry and Clara Beran, began running the cafe and store for a man named Frank Zabcik.

Once Jerome started making sausage from his Czech family recipe, word spread the way it does in farm country, one satisfied neighbor at a time.

The community itself is older than the store. Czech and German farmers settled this patch of Bell County around the time Texas became a state in 1845, and the little crossroads changed names several times as the general store changed hands.

It became Zabcikville in 1923, when Frank Zabcik bought the saloon and store and lent it his name. When the highway came through in 1932, he added a service station.

The Greens bought the business outright in 1960 and moved everything across the road to the building that stands today. Did you know the current spot was chosen partly for the new highway traffic? That bet paid off.

Travelers heading to and from the VA hospital in Temple still treat it as either their first good meal of a long trip or their last.

Today the brothers Charles and Marvin Green run it, with the third generation of the family working the counters and the kitchen. The recipes are the same ones Jerome used.

In a state that loves to tear down and rebuild, a business this old doing this many things at once, and doing them all well, is genuinely rare.

Part of what makes it feel like living history is that the surroundings barely changed. The community around it is still farmland, the building is still plain, and the sausage still comes from the same recipe card.

You are not visiting a re-creation of the past. You are walking into a place that never stopped.

More Than a Restaurant

Calling this place a restaurant undersells it. It is closer to a general store for the whole region, and a few of its services surprise people who wander in for breakfast and leave planning a party.

The kitchen builds meat and cheese trays sized for a crowd, the kind that feed fifteen to twenty-five people. That makes it a quiet secret for tailgates, family reunions, and holiday spreads.

If you are hosting, a call ahead is worth it, and it saves you the panic of a party platter from a chain grocery.

Come fall, it turns into one of the area’s busiest deer processors. Hunters drop off their harvest and pick it back up as custom sausage, jerky, and cuts, all handled with the same care as the market meat.

There is one rule worth remembering. Give at least an hour’s notice before closing for a deer drop-off or pickup, because the crew needs time to do it right.

People come from Temple, Waco, Killeen, and farther for the sausage alone, and plenty build a whole Saturday around the drive. It is the sort of errand that stops feeling like an errand somewhere around the first kolache.

All of this lives under a rating that would make a big-city restaurant jealous, a 4.8 across more than two thousand reviews. One longtime customer summed it up better than any menu could: “The food is real. The people are real. There are no phonies here.”

How to Get There

The store sits right on Highway 53, an easy detour off Interstate 35 if you are passing through Central Texas.

It is open Monday through Friday from 7 a.m. to 6 p.m. and Saturday from 7 a.m. to 5 p.m., and it is closed on Sundays, so plan your run for a weekday or a Saturday morning.

Where: 16483 State Highway 53, Temple, TX 76501

Hours and prices have a way of drifting at a place this busy, so a quick call to 254-985-2331 before a long drive never hurts, especially if you are after a specific kolache or a large tray.

Start Planning Your Highway 53 Detour

Some places are worth the drive because of the view. This one is worth it because of everything you can carry home.

Point the car toward Zabcikville, order the chicken fried steak, and load up on sausage and kolaches at the counter.

See for yourself why a country store on a two-lane highway has kept Central Texas coming back for nearly eighty years. Just do not blame me if the kolaches never make it to your driveway.

Featured image: Brandon’s Equipment Videos via Green’s Sausage House