If you’re craving chicken-fried comfort food served family style — with just a little bit of kitsch and a whole lot of fun — then Babe’s Chicken Dinner House is the place for you.
The Vinyard family has been welcoming folks to their restaurants for over 35 years with meals prepared from scratch daily in each restaurant.
The family recipes are straight out of West Texas, refined over the years by Mary Beth ‘Babe’ Vinyard, the restaurant’s namesake, and her husband Paul. Sadly, Mary Beth passed away in 2008, but her memory lives on each time a customer “mmms” over her classic sweet corn or chocolate meringue pie. In fact, most folks will tell you the food served at Babe’s reminds them of their own mother or grandmother.
Chicken is the main attraction at Babe’s, but other menu items include fried catfish with specially canned green tomato relish, a chicken fried steak that’s bigger than your plate and house vegetables served with buttermilk biscuits that are to die for. Even the kids will eat these green beans.
And did we mention the Hokey Pokey? In another Babe’s tradition, diners and waitstaff alike dance to the popular folk song that has its roots all the way back in the 17th century. Between bites of chicken, put your right leg in and shake it all about.
There are nine Babe’s locations across the DFW Metroplex, but if you’re thinking off-the-freeway chain restaurant, think again. Each one is unique, owing to the family’s passion for rehabilitating old buildings. There’s an 1898 hardware and tractor store in Sanger, an old lumber yard in historic downtown Carrollton from the early 1900s and a mid-century building in Arlington that features a nine-foot neon café sign with a cowboy on a horse, twirling a lariat, that stood above the Corral Café in the panhandle town of Dumas during the ’40s and ’50s.
The individual restaurants are, in fact, so unique that many customers set out to eat at all of them, just to see how different and entertaining they’ve each become.
Visit Babe’s in Cedar Hill or one of their other North Texas locations — in Arlington, Burleson, Carrollton, Frisco, Garland, Granbury, Roanoke or Sanger.
Fair warning: you won’t be able to go just once.
