Plenty of people who live in Frisco have never walked its Main Street. The city spread north and west so fast that the original townsite, the handful of blocks around the railroad tracks now known as the Frisco Rail District, can feel like something only the old-timers know about.
A lot of those old-timers eat at The Depot Cafe.
It sits at 6733 Main Street, at the corner of Third and Main, just east of the tracks and behind the Exxon Quick Check. The cafe’s own contact page admits it can be a little hard to find the first time. Nobody seems to have trouble finding it the second time.
The story starts with groceries. Henry Francis opened Henry’s Grocery in downtown Frisco in 1959. By 1960 he had built a bigger store, Henry’s Supermarket, on the lots where the cafe stands today, and for close to three decades it was where Frisco bought its meat and groceries.
When the chain stores moved in, Henry changed with the times. In 1987 he turned the supermarket into a convenience store with a small deli counter selling sandwiches and soda pop. People came from all over town for those sandwiches. The trouble was that they had nowhere to sit.
Henry died in 1996, and his son Dennis took over the property. Customers kept asking for tables, so Dennis and his wife, Debbie, remodeled the empty back half of the old store, built out a real kitchen, and opened The Depot Cafe in July 1999. Debbie came up with the name. The original Frisco depot stood about a block away, and the town itself is named for the St. Louis–San Francisco Railway, the line everybody called the Frisco.
Count back to Henry’s first grocery and the Francis family has been doing business on this corner for more than six decades. That is a long run anywhere. In a city that seems to add a new subdivision every weekend, it is close to a miracle.
The dining room shows its age with pride. The walls are covered in train memorabilia, old railroad signage and historic photos of Frisco from before the tollway. The website says stories about the good old days are always welcome, and in this room it is easy to believe the regulars take that invitation seriously.
The cooking is Texas country food, made the way a family makes it. The dish the Francis family hangs its reputation on is the hand-breaded catfish, dredged in a cornmeal seasoning blend that has stayed in the family for generations and has never been written down for anyone outside it. The chicken fried steak has its own loyal following, and the old-fashioned burgers are built big. Order the fried okra on the side and nobody at the table will argue.
Breakfast is served all day, which matters more than it sounds like it should when a bacon-and-eggs craving hits at 1 p.m. On Saturday and Sunday mornings the weekend breakfast crowd fills the room early.
Save room for dessert. The bread pudding, peach cobbler and chocolate pie are all homemade, and they are a big part of why people keep coming back.
One detail tends to surprise first-timers. A family-run country cafe in old Frisco also keeps a lineup of vegan dishes on the menu. The push for those came from inside the family, from Francis kids who eat that way and wanted their dad’s restaurant to feed them too. Meat eaters order off that side of the menu more often than you might guess.
Friday night is the one dinner service of the week, and it has been part of the Depot since the beginning. Back then, the way the family tells it, Frisco’s older residents wanted a place in town for Friday supper instead of driving out to Preston Road after dark. The town grew up around them, and the Friday crowd never stopped coming. The catfish is the Friday order, same as it was in 1999.
The Depot Cafe is closed Mondays. It is open for breakfast and lunch Tuesday through Friday from 6:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m., for Friday dinner from 5 to 8 p.m., and Saturday and Sunday from 7:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. The address is 6733 Main Street in Frisco, and the phone number is 972-377-0707. For daily specials, follow along on Facebook and Instagram.
