Author Archives: Steven Doyle

The saddles at the counter are real. Somebody wore that leather smooth a long time before you sat down, and the stools at the Old Spanish Trail in Bandera have been holding up ranch hands, bikers, dude ranch guests and road-trippers for the better part of a century. Order the chicken fried steak. Everybody does.

Locals just call it the OST. It opened in 1921 on Main Street, in a building that went up in the 1870s as a general store and later spent the 1930s and ’40s as a dance hall. The name comes from the Old Spanish Trail highway, an early coast-to-coast route meant to run from St. Augustine, Florida, to San Diego, with a stretch that carried motorists through the Hill Country. Interstate 10 eventually took the traffic. The restaurant stayed put, and today it calls itself the oldest continuously operating restaurant in Bandera County. You’ll also hear it described as the second oldest in Texas.