The Texas Tavern, Roanoke's Millionaire's Club

At one hundred fourteen West Church Avenue in downtown Roanoke, in a space roughly the size of a freight elevator, a white-tiled lunch counter has been serving the same menu to the same city since nineteen thirty. The Texas Tavern calls itself Roanoke's Millionaire's Club, which is a joke about the fact that it seats only ten people and that everyone is treated the same regardless of what they have in the bank. The joke has been on the menu almost as long as the chili.

Isaac Nick Bullington opened the Texas Tavern during the Depression, which was either very brave or very practical, depending on how you read the economics of feeding a working-class industrial city when times were hard. The menu has remained essentially unchanged: hamburgers, hotdogs, chili, a cheese omelet that is not quite an omelet in the way the word usually implies. The house specialty is the Cheesy Western with the Works, which requires some decoding from a counter staff that has been delivering it with deadpan efficiency to several generations of Roanokers.

The Texas Tavern has been open continuously, including through the night, which in a city of Roanoke's size at Roanoke's remove from major metropolitan areas represents a particular kind of civic service. It is where second-shift workers from what was left of the industrial economy went after midnight, and where bar patrons end up when the night has gone long, and where people who have been awake too many hours eat a bowl of chili and feel, briefly, that things are manageable. The tavern is still family-owned, still in the same building, still operating on the premise that ten seats, four items, and no pretension constitute a complete business model.

The Roanoke Times has written about it repeatedly over the decades. The city declared an official Texas Tavern Day. It is, by almost any measure, as close to a civic institution as a lunch counter can be.