‘Old-fashioned home-cooking’: How this fried chicken place won Readers’ Choice bracket
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Best fried chicken in Fort Worth
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Paul Vinyard says he’ll never forget the first time someone cried at his Roanoke fried chicken restaurant.
He walked into the dining room to find a woman bawling at her table and he was unsure how to help. He thought: Is the food that bad? Did someone say something to hurt her feelings? Finally, he asked her what he could do.
“I’m sorry. Your fried chicken tastes just like my mother’s,” Paul recalls her saying. She had died six months before, the customer told him.
This wasn’t the last time a customer had a visceral reaction eating at Babe’s Chicken Dinner House, remembering home-cooked meals. Even the owners had that experience eating at Babe’s. For Paul’s daughter, Tiffany Vinyard Wheeless, it was at the Garland Babe’s with her two daughters. Eating the chocolate pie her late mother used to make during holidays, Sunday lunches and football games, Tiffany cried thinking about her and the memories they shared.
“A lot of our love, our good experiences with family occurs around food,” Paul said.
Babe’s serves family-style chicken dinners at 10 locations. Now, it’s been announced as the winner of the Star-Telegram’s Readers’ Choice poll for the best fried chicken.
Roanoke was the first location the family opened in 1993, and the latest was North Richland Hills in 2018. Other locations are in Garland, Sanger, Carrollton, Burleson, Granbury, Frisco, Cedar Hill and Arlington.
Paul named Babe’s after his late wife, Mary Beth “Babe” Vinyard, who developed the recipes. Before Babe’s, there was Bubba’s (after Paul’s nickname “Bubba”), which has been serving casual Texas country cooking in Dallas since 1981. Next door to Babe’s in North Richland Hills, there’s Sweetie Pie’s Ribeyes, serving rib-eye steaks, filet mignon, chicken-fried rib-eye, fried catfish and hamburgers.
Before landing on fried chicken, Paul thought about opening a Mexican food or pizza joint. But there were already lots of pizza places and Mexican wasn’t ideal for taking home, he said, so fried chicken it was. Paul said he modeled his restaurant in a lot of ways after the famed Leslie’s Chicken Shack in Waco, where families flocked during trips.
“At that time, nobody was really going out to a dinner for fried chicken. It was new to people to go into a sit-down restaurant and eat fried chicken,” Paul said. “It took people a while to understand what we did. The whole style and everything’s new enough that it kind of threw people for a curve.”
When the family restaurant first opened, there was one menu item: fried chicken. It was served with a side of vegetables and biscuits. Writing about Babe’s opening in the Star-Telegram in 1993, Bud Kennedy called it “old-fashioned home-cooking.”
Paul spent his childhood on a farm in Turkey, a tiny town in the southeastern Texas Panhandle. The fried chicken recipe was passed down from Paul’s mother, who would make it at home for her five kids.
“My mother fixed fried chicken and she fixed very good fried chicken. We basically follow her recipe,” Paul said.
When you visit, each Babe’s restaurant is unique. They’re old buildings that were remodeled and restored by the owners while kept as historic as possible. The Roanoke location is at a landmark building built in 1908, originally a hardware store called Bourland & Son Hardware. And North Richland Hills, the busiest Babe’s location and the only one on the freeway, is at an old manufacturing building from 1915.
The menu now includes fried catfish, hickory-smoked chicken, fried chicken tenders and chicken-fried steak. Fixings are corn, mashed potatoes, green beans and buttermilk biscuits. Waiters still don’t hand out menus because it’s so simple.
Babe’s isn’t the place for a quiet romantic meal with your spouse, Paul said. Instead, they focus on creating a communal experience. The food comes out in bowls that you pass around like you’re at home.
“If you were to walk around right now, you would see families primarily and they’re all getting together and they’re talking and they’re passing the food,” Paul said. “Eating as a group is kind of a celebration.”
What makes Babe’s the best fried chicken restaurant? Consistently good food, Paul says, prepared as you would at home. Paul and his kids, Tiffany and Joel, are in the restaurants all the time.
“We spend our time in the restaurants, checking the food, checking the service, checking the cleanliness, because that’s really where the business is,” Paul said.
There’s not a lot of bells and whistles; the recipe has always been the same. The chicken is trimmed, marinated for 24 hours and cooked in batter, all while being kept as fresh as possible.
“It’s all good quality, simple cooking. It’s not real complicated recipes,” Joel said. “But we’re very strict on them being done correctly and having the right ingredients.”
Joel and Tiffany grew up in the family business, along with their parents, aunt and uncle. Now, their eight children want to be a part of that legacy too. Soon, the Vinyard fried chicken empire will be even bigger, as they plan to open more restaurants for Texans to enjoy.
This story was originally published April 21, 2022 at 1:00 PM.
