One taste from the mouth-watering platter that’s just been served up to you at Ashley’s Turnaround Café in Spur and you’ll appreciate why: the home-style café has made the cut in a Texas Beef Council culinary passport that launched statewide last week.
Proprietor and cook Ashley Stelzer doesn’t know how her diner was selected for the program, she said, but we tried both the mesquite-grilled ribeye as well as the chicken fry that landed her on the “Panhandle Country Fried Steak Quest” list, and we’d go back for either one. After making room for the leftovers, that is.
Stelzer’s crispy, sizzling, gravy-smothered chicken fry is one of her signature selections, she said. It nearly dwarfs the dinner plate.
“One of my friends on Facebook just tagged me and said, hey, you’re on this,” said Stelzer as we settled into our seats to await steaks off the grill. Stelzer, no stranger to restaurant operations in her hometown, has had plenty of practice in the years since she first learned to cook at the Caprock Café in Dickens. These days, she and husband J.C. Stelzer, along with her teenagers Ethan and Emily, provide hospitality at their ranch and hunting lodge over the line in Kent County in addition to staffing the café seven days a week, three meals a day.
Saturday’s Steak Night, and J.C. is tending the wood-fired grill outside the converted service station, which was turned into a café decades ago under different owners. (The name derives from the former Spur railroad terminus but also from the cars and trucks cruising the main drag and making the Burlington Avenue “turnaround” at its southern end.)
On the grill next to J.C., Randy Trull keeps the steaks timed to perfection. Randy and his son Andrew help on the ranch, too, chopping the mesquite wood and bringing it in to split. As for seasoning, it’s salt and pepper and garlic, nothing more. Those who absolutely must have steak sauce will find A-1, Heinz 57, and Worcestershire available upon request, but it was nowhere in evidence on any table within our view. And ours didn’t need a drop.
The chicken fried steak entrée with a house salad, hand-cut fries, a homemade dinner roll, and dessert at Ashley’s costs $15. There’s also a mouth-watering hamburger-steakwith- brown-gravy selection. As for the ribeyes, they’re cooked to order Saturday nights with salad and all the trimmings, roll, and dessert for $45 per person (and as Ashley’s quick to mention, “One is more than enough for two people”).
The Turnaround sources all its beef cuts except ground beef at Jackson’s Meat Locker in Post. Stelzer described the selections as thick and well-marbled.
For Stelzer’s patrons, I asked her, how do most like their steak cooked?
“Medium rare,” she said without missing a beat. The well-done option seems to have mostly gone the way of earlier generations who might’ve also tended to thinner cuts.
Two couples seated next to us in the dining room had made the 140mile round trip from Lubbock just to try out the chicken fry.
We were burning with curiosity to know how Ashley’s Turnaround was chosen for the passport list. But that had to wait till the weekday, when we could reach out to those Beef Loving Texans down in Austin. I spoke with Adriana Mora in the Texas Beef Council’s marketing department.
The Ultimate Beef Trail encompasses between 150 and 200 eateries statewide, she explained. “They were all selected by research in Best of Texas lists; from recommendations; and from submissions by beef producers,” she said. The process took a couple of months.
And what do Beef Lovers like to see in their fried steak? I asked. I was quickly reminded that these folks have titled their passport the “Panhandle Country Fried Steak,” so as not to conjure up that other c-word, a direct competitor in the protein category.
