We serve a lot of chicken fried steaks - and on April 6, 2002, we served number 500,000 to a lucky customer. We had a little party, played Elvis singing 'The Eyes Of Texas' on the loudspeaker, and awarded the guy a free chicken fried steak a month for the rest of his life. You know what we did after that?

We went back to work and made some more.

Our chicken fried steak has been praised by more fine folks than we can count, which is saying a lot, since we can obviously count to a half a million. They're hammered with care, battered with love, and deep-fried to perfection. If you haven't had our chicken fried steak yet, you owe it to yourself to have one tonight. Half a million people can't be wrong.

CHICKEN FRIED ORIGINS!

Where did the chicken fried steak originate? One widely accepted legend has Ethel's Home Cooking restaurant in Lamesa, Texas, as the birthplace of the chicken fried steak. As the story goes, a short-order cook by the name of Jimmy Don Perkins - whose reading ability was not the best - mistakenly read an order for chicken, fried steak as chicken fried steak and set about cooking the steak like fried chicken. While many have professed this as an accuate accounting, turns out it's a tale, a tall tale indeed. The truth is, we don't know for sure where the chicken fried steak came from, only that ours is great. If you know the origin of the chicken fried steak (or at least have an entertaining theory), drop us a line a This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. and tell us all about it!

CHICKEN FRIED FACTS!

• 500,000 chicken fried steaks is a lot of beef - 212,000 lbs of beefsteaks! That's over 100 tons!
• If you took those chicken fried steaks and stacked them on top of each other, you'd be looking at a golden-fried tower 1,736 feet tall! That's almost 300 feet taller than the Sears Tower (1,450 ft) and over twice as tall as the Tower Of The Americas in San Antonio (750 ft)!
• If you laid those 500,000 chicken fried steaks end-to-end, you'd form a line a third of a million feet long - which comes out to a little over 63 miles, the distance between Terlingua and Presidio!
• What's a half million chicken fried steaks without gravy? It's taken over 30,000 gallons of milk to make our signature cream gravy that covers those chicken fried steaks!
• You can't have a chicken fried steak without mashed potatoes, and it's taken over 100 tons of spuds to make those 500,000 sides of our award-winning, homemade mashed potatoes!