Babe's Chicken Dinner House — Restaurant in Roanoke

I have been ta two Babes locations but was encouraged to visit this, the original, location. It is nestled in the heart of Roanoke and is surrounded by several other restaurants on the ‘main’ street leading directly to City Hall. It is a quaint yet growing area.

The decor is pretty cool and reminiscent of an open country barn with exposed rafters and all. In fact the space above houses quite a bit of history as it is used to commemorate employees with long tenures. At the five year mark, you get a placard with your name and years of service. They are placed on rafters facing the door. The rafter spaces with names facing away from the door are for employees with more than ten years of service. It’s pretty cool and our server Michelle had her own mentioning five years, and she is even a year past that now. It’s really nice to see a place that people want to work and stay, and where owners recognize the loyalty. The walls have playful sketches and the support posts are covered with old time intersection direction signs.

The menu here is simple: fried chicken or chicken fried steak. Other locations have expanded their menu somewhat but here it is straight up simple. It is worth mentioning they do not even do the green beans here. No worries!

We ordered both. The chicken fried steak was pretty good. The fried chicken batch I got seemed a little dry, especially the white meat. I hope this was just a slight over cook and won’t stop me from returning. The intro salad was ultra simple and appropriate so as to not overstuff you. The mashed potatoes were excellent and corn was just fine (plain coated with butter). We even went in for one refill of the mash!

The service was great, Michelle was wonderful and informative, and everyone we encountered was extremely friendly.

I do make it a point to notice bathrooms if I end up using it, and this place is on the high end of clean, giving you a positive feeling about the kitchen.

Overall I’m glad I came to this location to see it, and enjoyed the dinner. I will continue to frequent their locations when...

Great service till the end and I ended up paying double what I was expecting. I went in with 2 friends at 7 pm on a Saturday night, wait wasn’t to bad just wish they took phone number so we could go wait in the car since it was so cold and one big group was surrounding the 1 heater. But we get inside they sit us down and since it was one of my friends first time she explained the menu then told us how since we were a group of 3 we could get a veggie plate for the 3rd person if we wanted more food. Knowing one of our friends mainly joined along for company we ordered one fried chicken meal.($20) and few extra biscuits ($5 or so) and all got waters then at the end we noticed a charge for 2 veggie plates and we didn’t even get one…. 2 of us shared the fried chicken plate and the other friend had a biscuit and a water. We got no extra side or chicken so imagine my surprise when the bill is $47. This is not my first time going in with a party of 3 and only ordering one fried chicken plate, I’ve never had a problem. We called over the waiter and after having great service she gets a very nasty tone with me and my friend and claimed to have mention that how we have to order it and she said it at the beginning and while I understand people try and skip out of bills that’s not what we were trying to do she was rude about the whole situation and I ended up just paying it rather then fighting the waitress on this as it was a busy night and not wanting to be talked poorly to, I did still tip cuz our service while we were eating was great. Just the end, there is a way to nicely handle a disagreement between you and a costumer doesn’t matter age, race, nothing you need to be polite...

Ok, so this place has been talked up by my American hosts but my Oz work colleague was less enthusiastic about it so my expectations weren’t that high, but when in Texas, along with beef, you gotta try fried chicken I guess. First thing is, genuinely friendly staff who know their stuff and appear proud of their workplace - it shows and goes a long way. It was busy but people took time to explain things to a ‘noob’ like me. I tried the 4 piece fried chicken and then the bowls of accompaniments arrived. It would feed 2-3 people back home but I guess it’s a Texas thing. The chicken was tender and juicy. The ‘biscuits’ (kinda like scones for any Aussie/Kiwis/Poms reading this) seem weird surrounded by everything else so think of it as your dessert, even though they bring them out early. The hero of the biscuit is the really smooth local honey and the sorghum ‘syrup’ that is in seperate pourers on the table. My advice is save room for dessert, it’s worth it. This particular restaurant is the original one so I believe it’s smaller than the other couple but I reckon it’s worth the drive plus the Main Street of Raonoke is nicer than a concrete car park. Thanks guys for a great experience. One last thing, I bought a hat and it’s the least expensive hat I’ve seen in Dallas,...