Biscuits and gravy has never needed a publicist. It shows up on the plate looking the same as it did fifty years ago, pale and peppery and a little messy, and nobody has ever sent it back for being plain.
The dish took shape in the American South in the years after the Revolutionary War, when food was scarce and money was scarcer. Breakfast had to carry a person through a long day of hard work, and it had to be cheap. A skillet of sausage drippings, a little flour and some milk could stretch a small amount of meat across a whole table, and a pan of biscuits did the rest.
You will still hear the gravy called sawmill gravy. Food lore ties the name to logging camps in Appalachia, where cooks fed crews of men on whatever kept and whatever filled them up. Whether that story is gospel or just a good one, it fits. This was working food long before it was brunch food.
Texas took to it naturally. Cream gravy is already the second language here, poured over chicken fried steak at every diner from Denison to Del Rio, so moving it to a split biscuit at 7 a.m. was a short trip. With National Biscuits and Gravy Day coming up on Monday, December 14, and the mornings finally turning cool, this is the right time of year to go looking for a good plate.
Here are seven worth the drive, five in Dallas and two in Fort Worth.
Jonathon’s Diner and Jonathon’s Forestwood
Start with the Gravy King. Jonathon Erdeljac and his wife, Christine, opened their first restaurant on Beckley Avenue in Oak Cliff in 2011, and the gravy has been the thread running through everything they have done since. Both of them came up at Bread Winners, where Jonathon was corporate chef, and they know exactly what a breakfast crowd wants.
The biscuits and gravy come on pepper biscuits under the house peppered cream gravy, and the pepper is the whole personality of the plate. It is assertive enough to wake you up and smooth enough that you will be dragging the last biscuit corner through what is left. That same gravy lands on the chicken and waffles and the chicken fried steak, and regulars order extra on the side without thinking twice.
Oak Cliff gets the original feel at Jonathon’s Diner, 1619 N. Beckley Ave., open daily from 8 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. North Dallas has Jonathon’s Forestwood at 5337 Forest Lane in the old Kel’s space, open 7 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. weekdays and 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. on weekends.
Deep Ellum’s front porch. The cafe Mike Snider built has been feeding musicians, neighbors and the occasional hungover drummer for decades, and the breakfast menu still reads like a road trip through Central Texas. The biscuits and gravy are a straightforward order, big biscuits and a peppery cream gravy, and you can get a single biscuit with gravy on the side of anything else you are eating, which is the move with the pancakes. Back in 2011, when we asked readers to name their favorite breakfast, one of them picked pancakes at AllGood with a side of biscuits and gravy and called it a contender for his last meal on earth.
Anyone at the table who would rather skip the gravy has the Borracho Biscuit, a split cream biscuit with a sausage patty and an over-easy egg on each half, all of it covered in queso. AllGood is at 2934 Main St., serving from 8 a.m. daily, with breakfast and lunch until 3 p.m. Sunday through Wednesday and the doors open until 9 p.m. Thursday through Saturday, when the music starts.
Norma Manis opened her first cafe in 1958, and her family has been cooking her way ever since. The Design District diner still bakes like it means it. Breakfast runs open to close. The order for this list is the Mama’s Granddaughters Special, two biscuits under sausage gravy, which is also one of the better-named breakfasts in town.
Hungrier mornings call for the Texas Size Breakfast, where biscuits and gravy ride alongside eggs and a chicken fried steak. Save room for a slice of coconut cream pie. Mama’s Daughters’ Diner is at 2014 Irving Blvd., open 6 a.m. to 2 p.m. weekdays, 7 a.m. to 2 p.m. Saturday and 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. Sunday.
Bubba’s opened in 1981, and generations of SMU students have learned the breakfast routine here before they learned the campus map. The checkerboard floor and red booths on Hillcrest Avenue haven’t changed much, and neither has the gravy, which is silky, milky white and heavy on black pepper. It goes over fresh biscuits on the morning plates, with eggs and bacon or sausage if you want them.
The building started life as a Texaco service station, and the drive-thru it kept makes Bubba’s the best emergency biscuits and gravy in the Park Cities. Grab a cinnamon roll for the road. Bubba’s is at 6617 Hillcrest Ave. and opens at 6:30 a.m. every day, with breakfast served until 11 a.m.
The little sister to Goodfriend Beer Garden and Burger House sits across Peavy Road and does most of its work by hand. The order here is the House-Made Beer Biscuit & Gravy, a beer biscuit baked in-house under sausage gravy made from house-made sausage. It lands a little thick, the way it should.
East Dallas regulars like to add a Farm Egg Biscuit Sandwich on the side, which sounds excessive until you try it. Goodfriend Package is at 1155 Peavy Road, open 7 a.m. to 3 p.m. daily.
Fort Worth’s breakfast room of record. Vic Paris opened the place in 1926, the Smith family ran it for most of the century that followed, and Mike Smith turned it into an institution after taking over from his father in 1965. In the mid-1970s the shop moved a block over to the corner of Magnolia and Hemphill, into an old Safeway building, and it has been there ever since.
Lou Lambert, Chris Reale and Mark Harris bought it in 2020 and reopened it in May 2022 after a careful restoration that leaned on old photographs of the room. The biscuits and gravy stayed on the menu through all of it, and they are still the reason half the counter is full at 7 a.m. The other half came for pie. Paris Coffee Shop is at 704 W. Magnolia Ave., open 7 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. Monday through Saturday and 8 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. Sunday.
Everything around this little cafe has changed since it opened in the late 1940s. Dickies Arena went up across the street and the Cultural District kept growing, but Montgomery Street Cafe still has its counter, its neon arrow and its coffee that keeps coming. A lot of Fort Worth will tell you these are the best biscuits in the city, and they will say it with a straight face.
Most breakfast plates come with two eggs, hash browns or grits, and your choice of toast or biscuits and gravy. Take the biscuits. They are big and fluffy and the gravy is peppered cream, nothing fancy, nothing missing. Montgomery Street Cafe is at 2000 Montgomery St., open 6 a.m. to 2 p.m. weekdays and 7 a.m. to noon Saturday. It is closed Sunday, so plan accordingly.
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