Dinner for under $12, ‘MaMa’s meat loaf’ and more at new cafe near downtown Fort Worth
A new home-cooking restaurant featuring a real “MaMa’s meat loaf” is open near downtown Fort Worth.
Just when the central city needed a new chicken-fried steak hangout, Blue Mound Cafe serves basic homestyle platters for $12 and less. It serves breakfast, lunch and dinner every day in a familiar East Belknap Street location 3 miles from downtown.
Yes, I know. A restaurant like this is old-fashioned. It’s the kind of place where your parents went, or their parents.
But with the Paris Coffee Shop under remodeling through January and the Dixie House Cafes all moved outside Loop 820, there are few old-time cafes left in Fort Worth and even fewer open nights or weekends.
Blue Mound Cafe’s new location at 3701 E. Belknap St. helps fill the need for an affordable family dining restaurant,
Amazingly, co-founder Dustin Baker is 28.
He grew up in Azle and always wanted to open a restaurant using his mom’s recipes, he said.
“Everything I serve is what I was raised on,” Baker said. “My mom cooked meat loaf. My mom cooked salmon patties. My mom cooked spaghetti.”
He and co-founder Craig Bunney opened their first Blue Mound Cafe last year in Saginaw, refurbishing a former Dixie House Cafe to serve breakfast and lunch daily at 5401 S. Blue Mound Road near Loop 820.
The Belknap location is their first all-day restaurant. It replaces another Dixie House Cafe that moved to 900 Airport Freeway in Hurst.
The cream-gravy shortage in Fort Worth has become acute. The Paris Coffee Shop’s weekday lunch customers have scattered to other small old-time restaurants such as Montgomery Street Cafe, the Ol’ South Pancake House, Vickery Cafe and West Side Cafe, or to bar-and-grills such as Rufus.
When Baker was growing up in Azle, going out to eat meant somewhere like the landmark Howell’s Western Cafe in Springtown, or small diners on Parker County farm roads.
Later, he went into real estate and became a regular at JR’s Cafe in Saginaw back when it went by “Junior’s.”
“Every Saturday morning, I’d be at JR’s,” he said. (It’s still open at 300 S. Saginaw Blvd.)
When the Blue Mound Road location came open, Baker and Bunney decided to go into the cafe business.
“This is a hard business, but it’s been a great business,” Baker said.
He asked Dixie House owners Dale and Theresa Simon about the Belknap location, he said.
The structure was built in 1987 and once operated as singer Annie Golightly’s country nightclub, known for frequent visits by songwriter Tom T. Hall.
Blue Mound Cafe is not the perfect home-cooking cafe, or even the best in town.
But it’s off to a decent start, with a choice of four daily specials and vegetables, plus basic burgers and salads. The “MaMa’s meat loaf” is flavored with a secret ingredient — “I would never tell anybody,” Baker said.
The Saginaw location is already-known for breakfast, including the “Frencher” French toast combo and other platters with both bacon and sausage.
Like Lone Star Cafe in Arlington, featured here earlier this week, Blue Mound is capitalizing on the increasing demand for breakfast and brunch items, particularly for weekend diners or weekday drivers on their way to work or the courthouse downtown.
Baker said he wants to open another cafe, this one in western Tarrant County, but not for a few years.
Blue Mound serves breakfast, lunch and dinner daily; 817-887-9366, facebook.com/bluemoundcafebelknap.
This story was originally published October 6, 2021 at 5:45 AM.
