Hickory Hollow Restaurant and Catering — Restaurant in Jersey Village

Re: Owners response: Your reply was dripping with more flavor than your meat. And there most certainly wasn't half a pound of meat and the ribs were long with little meat but lots of grisel. The sides were three bites each at best (two really). "Very high quality" is in the eye of the beholder or in this case, customer. And like I say near the end of my review about tons of potential One-Time customers....and I really don't care about other people's opinion regarding their experience at your "restaurant", as it is my opinion about My experience and I have the right to share it. You should pay more attention to a cookbook than what is written on google. You're just lucky I can't rate your place a No-star. Cindy's curse was alive and well dining at this place. We would have been far better off driving out to a truck stop by Brownsville....What is it with me and "cosy" downhome cafe and restaurants? I don't do fast food so I guess I am just bound to a self-fulling destiny...or curse.....nuts! We were in the area to see the Waugh Bat colony and thought we would catch a bite and my friend wanted BBQ, so we googled locations. My curse of course wound us up at the Hickory Hollow. It is nothing more than a trailer park cafeteria complete with melamine plates, a "buzzer" to tell you to come get your food and all you can handle "we think we are being clever with our sarcastic signage but we are really just cheap as hell" ....signs. The salad bar looked ok but I generally stay away from them with my curse and all. A sign, of course, told you the salad was extra cost in some sort of non-clever verbiage. There was a lovely shelf with self serve condiments, napkins and cutlery area adjacent to the 4 foot area holding the female bathroom entrance, overloaded and gross "busboy" cart and kitchen entrance. Yet another clue I missed telling me to flee. And I regret not taking a picture of this area...I think I was in shock and forgot my duty to fellow humans. Our Sampler platter was extremely disappointing. (Warning: objects in food picture are smaller than they appear...) The serving size for $16 and tax was less than stellar and then there is the taste....or lack of. You can't serve up sausage (actually had a bit of a bite), a small portion of what I think was brisket and two measly meated ribs, smother them in BBQ which wasn't even Sweet Baby Rays worthy, and call it anything but a memorable meal, in a bad nightmarish way. The "southern green beans" were canned beans with small slices of onion cooked in the can water and butter and drained off (mostly) into the smallest of bowls. Rubbery and tasteless...or even less than tasteless (if that can be a thing). The fried Okra was indeed fried, and that is about as accurate as I can be with that. The staff are less than engaging, taking your order like we were interrupting a heavy CEO meeting. I should have taken the hint by the walk-in, cafeteria style system. But I have been to Pappa's which has a similar system but actually has food worth waiting for and portion sizes you could actually share and take home leftovers. But I digress. Hickory Hollow looks like it has been around for a long time which is why people think "well, it's been around forever so it must be doing something right..." but in truth with 7 million people plus visitors and repeat customers with no taste buds, this place could be around forever, God help us. Save your money, time and stomach and hit the next place on the google list, ask some locals or at the very least,...

My grilled chicken came raw and when we called to tell them they said they can't give a refund only store credit. I'm pregnant and eating raw chicken is very dangerous. The fact that they didn't even apologize and refused to give us our money back is poor customer service. Why would I want store credit after you put my pregnancy at risk. The girl then said well you'll have to call tomorrow when the manager is here. We called and the manager was also rude and said we need to bring the food back to see. That's fine because we saved it. She was shocked and then said well we need to receipt also. So that's when we had to put our foot down because everyone is saying a different thing because this place is too cheap to give customers back their money when they didn't provide the proper service. My husband went in the next day and the manager was mad we had the food saved to show her and gave us our money back. I can understand if someone is saying that they don't like the food because it's not to their tasting but you served us raw chicken. That's a problem and easily can be a lawsuit if I or another person that was pregnant had a miscarriage from eating your food or someone that is not pregnant died. The fact that they were not apologetic about serving us raw chicken and gave such a hard time about giving us our money back makes me feel that this place is...

The BEST Chicken Fried Steak. Lunch on 6/2/22. Arrived at 11:45 and the place was already packed.

Counter service. Order and pay at the counter. Get your drink glass and buzzer from cashier after payment. Fill your glass at the drink station and go look for a place to sit.

I had the "medium" size chicken fried steak, green beans and onion rings. Onion rings are not a "regular" side and cost $2.99 extra. Worth it. SEE PHOTO As soon as I received my pizza pan covered in food, I asked for a to go container. Immediately cut the CFS in half and placed it in the to go container. Only half of the "medium" CFS was plenty. Green beans were seasoned nicely. They appear to be typical from a can but you can taste the bacon and other seasonings they use in the beans. The onion rings were flaky, crispy and hot out of the fryer. I like ketchup with my onion rings. The CFS was covered in cream gravy. The meal was a great value for the price.

I sat near the serving window where you pick up your order. More than half of the plates coming out of the window today were CFS. Quite a few with BBQ and even a few with delicious looking chicken tenders. Maybe I'll try the tenders next time.

When I left at 12:30 PM, the lunch crowd was gone. The crowd was mostly local business folks on a quick lunch break.

I look forward to...