Austin’s Salt Lick BBQ Founder Will Recreate His Grandmother’s Home-Cooking at Nostalgic New Restaurant

After more than 50 years of running the lauded Salt Lick BBQ in the Austin area, Scott Roberts is finally ready to open an entirely new restaurant — one that takes inspiration from his grandmother.

Known to most people in their Driftwood community as Miss Roxie, Roberts’s “Gaga” Roxanna earned a reputation for cooking family-style meals filled with fried chicken and heaping mounds of mashed potatoes and green beans. “My job was to pull the feathers,” Roberts says. “For a while, I couldn’t eat fried chicken, but hers was so good, it brought me back to the table.”

Now, Roberts is allowing others to experience his grandmother’s family-loved recipes. Located at 308 Main Street in the historic Buda Mill & Grain Co. in Buda, Texas, Roxie will offer family-style platters of char-grilled steaks and chicken-fried steaks fried in beef tallow, as well as unlimited bowls of mashed potatoes, green beans, creamed corn, and freshly baked rolls. The restaurant will also have a full bar.

Alie Jackson

Like Salt Lick, where recipes have been passed down through generations in Roberts’s family, everything will be homemade and steeped in history. “My grandmother was known for these kinds of meals,” Roberts says. “They’re indelibly stamped into my mind. After church on Sunday, you wanted to be invited over to her house to eat, and that’s where this is all coming from.”

Roxie’s will also serve other dishes, including deviled eggs topped with fried chicken bites and pimento cheese crocks, plus a selection of pies made with his grandmother’s recipe, which notably featured lard in its crusts. Only during lunch will diners be able to secure individual meals, including smoked turkey and chopped beef sandwiches and a rendition of a burger once made by Roberts’s father, Thurman. Though Roxie didn’t drink — Roberts adds if she did, it would be at this restaurant’s bar — bartenders will pour up margaritas and frozen peach bellinis inspired by the peaches she used to grow and bake in her cobblers.

Roberts says he’s long dreamed of opening a restaurant centered around his grandmother but gave it more serious thought in the last decade. After seeing a “for lease” sign on the Buda Mill & Grain Co.’s space during an impromptu trip back to the Hays County town, Roberts says he was excited about the possibility of giving life to the restaurant in a place where his family has a lot of history. Roxie’s is slated to inhabit the space that Austin barbecue joint Valentina’s previously occupied before closing in August.

The Salt Lick BBQ

The Salt Lick BBQ

Roberts’s family, which has been in Texas since the 1870s, has deep roots in the area. Roberts attended school in Buda from first to eighth grade, and his father, once on the school board, insisted that the school integrate. “I remember sleeping in the back seat of the car until 2 or 3 a.m. while [people on the board] argued,” he says. The family also used to shop at the Buda Mill for livestock feed. In 1967, Roberts, his father, and his brother opened their first restaurant, the original Salt Lick BBQ, on the side of the road in Driftwood on Hill Country property they’ve owned for over a century. Since then, Salt Lick has become a barbecue giant in the Austin area, with another location in Round Rock and outposts in the Dallas and Austin airports.

Roberts also owns the winery, Salt Lick Cellars, which he opened in 2006 next door to the Salt Lick BBQ in Driftwood; another location of the barbecue restaurant in Driftwood is in the works.

Now, Roberts’ newest family restaurant will open in the spring, a moment that feels like fate to him. He says he intends to maintain the tradition and respect his grandmother Roxie had for her cooking. “We’re going to have the best fried chicken around,” he says.