From Round Top, comfort food with love

Twice a year, when antique shoppers descend on Round Top — population about 90 — the wee town bursts at the seams and shines as arguably the most endearing place in Texas.

Those visitors to the biannual antiques-hunting weeks along Texas 237, numbering in the tens of thousands (some estimates put it at 100,000), are all searching for vintage treasures and a heaping slice of authentic Americana.

And they’ll find that in food form at Royers Round Top Café, a 10-table, 40-seat café that has been open since 1946 and under the ownership of the Royer family since 1987. It was the Royers — led by Bud Royer and Karen Royer — who brought the cafe to its distinction of being one the most delightful smalltown restaurants in Texas and must-do dining for travelers coming in from throughout the country for antiques shopping, including the biggie, the Original Round Top Antiques Fair that kicks off Monday.

This year’s spring shows coincide neatly with the publication of a new Royers cookbook, “Cooking With JB & Jamie: Royers Round Top Café.” Written by Jonathan (known as JB, one of Bud and Karen’s four children) and his wife, JamieLen, who now run the cafe, the cookbook is a loving look at the Royers’ upscale comfort food legacy built without any formal culinary training by Bud, Karen (who passed away last year) and their children.

The easy, approachable recipes offer homespun bistro fare: Sunday fried chicken, braised short ribs, pork tenderloin, mushroom sauce-smothered steaks, blackened snapper, indulgent creamy pastas and, of course, pies (Royers’ famous pies are sold at the cafe and around the corner at Royers Pie Haven run by Tara Royer Steele and her husband, Rick).

The new cookbook’s recipes come from signature Royers dishes and from cooking classes that JB and Jamie led at the cafe. The restaurant’s first cookbook, “Royers’ Round Top Café: A Relational Odyssey,” written by Bud and Karen in 1995, has long been out of print. It was time, JB and Jamie agreed, for a new collection of recipes and recollections.

“People have been asking for a cookbook for years. We had talked about reprinting the old one, but we decided we want to tell our own story and make something on our own,” Jamie said.

JB said the recipes reflect both the Royer style of elevated but unfussy fare as well as the Cajun-inspired influences from Louisiana-reared Jamie.

“It’s food that touches the soul,” JB said. “I think that’s what the cafe has done for 35 years. That’s what it’s all about.”

Soul for certain. The book begins with a recipe for pumpkin pie, the favorite of Karen. It ends with another from Bud, known as “the pie man”: Bud’s Chocolate Chip Pie, the cafe’s most popular dessert.

In between are more than

100 recipes, many with familial reminiscences, that define the folksy, full-flavored fare that has made Royers an institution.

“It’s eclectic, simple good food,” JB said. “More importantly, there’s a family aspect to it.”