Wimberley Café

Pancakes all day, chicken-fried steak, and a kitchen built to feed the whole town in a crisis

If you've got grandparents, a toddler and a teenager to feed at once in Wimberley, Wimberley Café on the Square is the easy answer. It opens at 7 a.m., serves pancakes and waffles all day, and runs the kind of country-café menu nobody at the table has to think too hard about.

Why it's this week's craving. Some weeks you don't want a new place. You want the one where the coffee keeps coming, the kids' order is never a problem, and the chicken-fried steak is the same as last time. That's this café. On a Saturday morning the line tells you everything — so come early, or come for a late lunch when it's calmer.

The story. Chef Jay Bachman and his wife Jen took over the café on the Square in fall 2018, buying it from Mac and Robin McCullough, who had owned it since 2003. The Bachmans had been running The Back Porch in Woodcreek; they closed it to put everything into the café and brought the whole Back Porch crew with them. They've since added Marco's Italian Restaurant to the family, too.

Jay is a self-taught career restaurant guy, and he's said the goal is food that reminds you of "what your grandmother cooked for you in 1979." He means it literally — he spent a day perfecting his biscuits and gravy with his own grandmother after his first try didn't pass her test.

The bigger news is out back. In November 2025 the café finished an 850-square-foot kitchen addition — a three-year, roughly $1.3 million project that Jay summed up as "one year in the planning, one year rewriting the fire code, and one year to build." Jay volunteers with the disaster-relief group Mercy Chefs (which donated two of the new ovens), and the expanded kitchen is built so the café can turn out up to 20,000 meals a day for the area when disaster hits. On a normal day it's closer to a thousand.

Watch the board for daily specials, too — regulars mention comfort plates like pot roast and King Ranch chicken.

Good to know. The café is closed Wednesdays. Sundays it's breakfast-and-lunch only, wrapping up at 3. It's right on the Square, so plan to park and walk, and expect a wait on weekend mornings — especially during Market Days.

Local Eats covers every new opening, closing and coming-soon spot around Dripping Springs, Driftwood and Wimberley — free, every Thursday. Subscribe at https://www.localeats.news/austin-hillcountry.