Royers Round Top Cafe

Town Square, Round Top, TX - (877) 866-7437

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Posted By Michael Stern on November 5, 2009 9:06 AM

Royers is a vintage café on the square in the small town of Round Top (population 81). Bud Royer has described his menu as “sophisticated comfort food.” In fact, no one category of cuisine begins to describe this kitchen’s boundlessly creative bent. Some of the choice things to eat are grilled pork tenderloin topped with peach and pepper glaze, crabmeat-and-shrimp-stuffed jalapeno peppers, a huge BLT sandwich made with grilled shrimp, and a boneless quail stuffed with grilled shrimp and wrapped in bacon. Entrees come with a choice of downhome vegetables that include black-eyed peas, mashed potato casserole, and creamed corn … or, for a few dollars more, one of Round Top’s creamy pasta dishes. Among the available seafood meals is "OMG!" grilled Gulf snapper crowned with sauteed shrimp or sided by pasta. (OMG is the menu's shorthand for "Oh, My God!" to indicate the best dishes in the house.)

If you know Royers Round Top, then you know that we haven’t yet mentioned the single item that has made it a beacon for food pilgrims from coast to coast: pie. Bud (who goes by the moniker Bud the Pieman) offers big country-style classics with ribbons of baked fruit oozing out over the edge of knobby crusts as well as several pies of his own design. We believe the pecan pie, made with giant halves of Texas-grown nuts, is the best anywhere – a perfect balance of toasty nut flavor and syrupy sweetness. And the chocolate chip pie, loaded with pecans and super-chocolaty -- really more a huge, thick cookie than a pie -- is nothing short of devastating. Royers is so deeply into pies that the menu threatens to charge customers fifty cents extra if they do not get it a la mode. "It is so wrong to not top your pie with Amy's ice cream!" If you are a group of people (i.e. two or more), consider a pie sampler for dessert, which is a choice of FOUR kinds of pie with ice cream. If you are not able to come to Round Top, the café is set up to mail-order pies anywhere in the U.S.; and if you really, really like pie you might consider enrolling in the cafe's Pie-of-the-Month plan, which ranges from six pies delivered every other month for a year to Pie-of-the-Month-For-Life!

Serious as the cooking is, Royers is a brash and silly sort of place. There was a time when the walls were available as a writing surface to be covered with graffiti from staff and customers, i.e. “Please don’t tell my mother I’m a lawyer. She thinks I play piano at a local bordello” and “Practice safe eating: use condiments.” The walls have been retired, and now customers are invited to add their bons mots or doodles to the Napkin Art Gallery.

Note: although reservations are NOT accepted, if you call ahead the day you plan to eat at Royers Round Top, your name will be put on a wait list for priority seating.

Overall Rating

BLT

Pork Tenderloin

Pecan Pie a la Mode

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Posted By John K. Long on March 8, 2005 8:45 PM

Royer's Round Top Cafe is a wonderful destination all by itself. Sitting on the square of an old Texas town, Round Top, there is not a better dining experience for a hundred miles around. Royer's Round Top Cafe is a destination worth driving there, eating and then driving home. One's only regret would be the lack of a hammock to sleep in after such a good meal on the front porch.

The menu is varied and not at all what one would expect in a very small and sleepy Texas town. In this very small and quaint cafe food is served with taste that one would only expect in the big city restaraunts. The experience starts when you enter through the old screen door and sit at a small wooden table so close to the next table you often do not need to see a menu to know what you are hungry for. If reading small print is a problem, are there those out there that this is not a problem, then there are drug store reading glasses sitting on the table in a wine glass for you to use. The service is quick considering how busy they normally are and the food is delivered to the table pretty quick as well. Save room for fresh pie in too many flavors to list and do not fret about the extra calories with the ice cream on top of the pie that just seems to belong there.

On a busy day or a day that draws a lot of people to the area, like during the Round Top Antique festival, expect a long wait and do not even think of a reservation. On other days feel joyful to just walk in and have a great dining experience. While there, you just may think of taking a pie home for a gift to someone or just for selfish reasons.

I have lots of friends that I have sent a long way to get to Royer's and I have never had a complaint yet. Find the place on a map and plan to make a trip there. Make sure you call before you go to make sure the place is open and the family is not away at a UT game.

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