Scott Roberts has spent decades tending pits, crowds and tradition at the Salt Lick BBQ outside Driftwood. Now the Hill Country restaurateur is preparing a different kind of gathering place—one built around the meals that once pulled friends and family to his grandmother’s table.

In spring 2025, Roberts plans to open Roxie’s at 308 Main Street in Buda, inside the historic Buda Mill & Grain Co. building. The restaurant is billed as a family-style spot anchored by classic, home-cooked Texas comfort food: fried chicken, chicken-fried steak, platters meant for sharing, and a steady parade of sides.

A dining room built around the Sunday table

Roberts has described the restaurant’s aim in plain terms. “The goal is for Roxie’s to feel like coming over for Sunday dinner after church.” My San Antonio

That idea—food as an invitation—threads through Roxie’s menu. The restaurant is named for Roberts’s grandmother Roxanna, known around Driftwood as Miss Roxie, whose cooking helped shape his sense of hospitality and whose recipes, he has said, never really left him.

“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.” WhatNow Austin

What’s on the menu: family-style platters, unlimited sides, pies from a grandmother’s recipe

Roxie’s is expected to lean into big-plate comfort food with a few specific signatures that point back to those family meals. The menu highlights include:

  • Family-style platters built around char-grilled steaks and chicken-fried steak fried in beef tallow
  • Unlimited bowls of mashed potatoes, green beans, creamed corn, and freshly baked rolls
  • Starters and small plates such as deviled eggs topped with fried chicken bites and pimento cheese crocks
  • Pies made with his grandmother’s recipe, a nod to old-school baking and the kind of dessert that finishes a meal meant to linger

Roxie’s will also include a full bar, with specialty drinks that draw from family memory—particularly peaches, inspired by the fruit Miss Roxie grew and baked into cobblers. The bar program is expected to include margaritas and peach-driven frozen drinks.

Why Buda, and why the old mill building matters

The location is not incidental. Roxie’s will open in the Buda Mill & Grain Co. building on Main Street—an address that places it in the middle of a fast-growing corridor south of Austin, but also in a structure that has long been part of Buda’s working history.

The town itself has become a magnet for families looking for space and proximity to the region’s job centers. According to US Census Bureau QuickFacts, Buda’s population is about 16,090 based on 2024 estimates, with a median age of 36.1. The city’s median household income is about $111,179, and more than three-quarters of homes are owner-occupied, a snapshot that helps explain why family-oriented, sit-down concepts keep showing up along the Main Street strip.

For Roberts, there’s also a direct personal tie: the Roberts family once bought livestock feed at the mill decades ago, turning the building into more than a convenient shell for a new restaurant. Roxie’s is also slated to take over the space most recently occupied by Valentina’s, the barbecue restaurant that previously operated there.

A new chapter in a long Hill Country family story

Roxie’s arrives with the weight of a name that’s already deeply familiar to Central Texas diners. The Salt Lick BBQ began in 1967 in Driftwood, where it grew from a roadside restaurant into an institution that draws visitors from across the state. Over time, the brand expanded beyond its original Hill Country footprint, adding a Round Rock location and outposts at regional airports.

That expansion has always rested on the family narrative: recipes passed down, land held for generations, and a style of service that treats crowds like company. The opening of Roxie’s extends that lineage while shifting the spotlight from smoke and pitmaster lore to skillet-fried comfort and the kind of sides that keep getting refilled.

The Roberts family’s roots in Texas date back to the 1870s, and Roberts himself spent part of his childhood in Buda—details that give the new restaurant a distinct sense of place. Roxie’s, in that light, reads less like a departure than a return: to a town on the edge of Austin’s sprawl, and to a menu shaped by a grandmother’s kitchen and the routines of Sundays.

When Roxie’s opens in spring 2025, diners can expect a restaurant designed for groups—tables built for passing platters, ordering seconds, and staying long enough for pie. For Buda, it’s another sign that Main Street’s historic bones can still hold new stories, especially when those stories come with mashed potatoes, rolls, and a founder who’s spent a lifetime feeding Central Texas.

Read the press release on austin.eater.com.

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