My first visit to the legendary Cleburne Cafeteria

"I've had forty dollars worth of fun," I confessed to the friend sitting across from me at Cleburne Cafeteria earlier this week. She's a regular at the storied family-run establishment purchased by the late Nick Mickelis in 1952, when it operated in Midtown with 11 years of Houston history behind it. I was a complete newbie.

Before us lay the $80 ruins of an epic lunch: roast turkey with dressing, freshly carved slabs of roast beef, a flock of Southern-style vegetable sides, huge tumblers of iced tea, a hulking slice of German chocolate cake.

I've never been a cafeteria fan. The food, geared to the widest possible array of palates and built for steam-table endurance, usually isn't that good. Cleburne Cafeteria was supposed to be different. It was named America's number one cafeteria by Food & Wine magazine, it's been lionized on Good Morning America, its Houston fans are legion, people swear the higher-than-usual prices are worth it. It was time for me to find out for myself.

So I prepped madly, scrolling through hundreds of online photos, Googling obsessively, devouring obscure Reddit threads. As a world-class gawker, I experience cafeteria panic when going through the line. Confronted by so many choices, my brain freezes up, servers get ticked off, people behind me fret.

So I was prepared to zero in on my turkey slices with crumbly cornbread dressing, my candied yams, my vintage broccoli-rice-cheese casserole—a real blast from the past, since I had first encountered this Houston fave at a dinner cooked by the mom of my college freshman roommate. I remember inquiring after the recipe of this strangely delicious concoction, and being told that a key ingredient was Cheez Whiz.

I breezed through the line like a pro until I got to the ranks of house-baked pie and cake slices stacked high in plastic shell containers, so that they glinted under the lights. Then I dithered, distracted by the old-fashioned appeal of lemon chess pie, the billowy whipped cream excess of blueberry layer cake, a flash of red cherry filling. Finally my weakness for German chocolate cake kicked in and my fate was sealed.

I added a five-buck tip to my $40 tab, worrying that I should have instead left cash in the tip jar, or handed out paper money to the cheerful, uniformed servers who help the many oldsters with their trays, then circulate bearing iced tea refills, fetching to-go boxes and such.

Their assistance is welcome, because the present-day West U. edition of Cleburne is vast, its table and booth seating stretching out to a covered outdoor patio where we set up shop. A wind chime plinked. Early summer breezes cooled us. Only at the very end of our meal did the flies discover us, whereupon we inverted saucers to cover our leftovers.

The meal really did feel like culinary time travel to a disappearing America. The food quality ranged from pretty good to pretty decent to--in the case of inedibly tough slices of the rosy roast beef that had looked so enticing on the carving station —pretty bad. (We noted that the couple next to us on the porch had left their roast beef largely untouched, too. It wasn't just us.)

My roasted, sliced turkey breast was just fine, although the mild, crumbly dressing made me long for my mother's oniony bread stuffing; and the white gravy they ladle on from the fried-chicken station was innocuous enough that I was glad I had specified "just a little." I asked for an extra little tub of the housemade cranberry sauce and was glad I did—it put a nice finishing touch on the patented Cleburne "Thanksgiving every day" gestalt.

So did a high-topped roll that was fragrant with yeast, so moist it might have been pulled from the oven a minute early, and none the worse for it. That sucker was delicious. My candied yams were a little too watery for me (I longed for a denser, toasty texture). And my broccoli-rice casserole was amusingly sticky and stodgy—practically elastic!—threaded with melted strips of orange cheese oozing orange oil, and served in round scoops that held their shape. It really did the time-travel job.

"This corn and this spinach really taste like themselves," I told my friend as I filched bites from across the table. Yes, they were plain. But they were strangely comforting. A common complaint among Houston Redditors and Yelpers is that Cleburne's food is "unseasoned," as apt an index as any of the way the local palate has shifted in the decades I have lived here. When I arrived in the mid-60s, our collective tastes were far less, um, exuberant. Cleburne hearkens to that past city.

Want spice? Well, there are salt and pepper shakers on each table. And at the end of the serving line, there's the largest array of bottled sauces and condiments I've seen in an eating establishment, ready to customize your dishes.

My friend and Cleburne sherpa comes here precisely because of the food's calming, old-fashioned aspect. After a bimonthly therapy session down the street, she repairs to Cleburne for soothing and readjustment, where she won't know anybody and doesn't really have to think about what she's going to eat. I totally get that appeal.

Besides, the people-watching is great, from grizzled ancients to office bros and way, way beyond; and the setting replete with interesting details. I felt like I was visiting a museum of Houston folklife as I waited in the lobby with its vaulting ceiling, wall-high photographic mural of key moments in Cleburne history, and colorful paintings of Patmos, Greece done by the founder himself, complete with fascinating printed labels alongside each one. (I read the placard about the Angriest Shepherd on Patmos island with the dark appreciation I would accord a fantasy horror fable. It is riveting.)

Even the house ATM machine has its own charisma. It sits in a narrow shrinelike arch, surrounded by greenery. To the side appears another placard noting that its use is free.

Now that is customer service. Or would be, if the ATM were operational.

I had heard tales of massive holiday lines and expected a wait when I arrived at noon. The parking lots were pretty full. But I never saw a queue backed up, the line moved easily (filled as it was with seasoned regulars), and paying up is so easy I hardly noticed the sticker shock. Now I knew why one online critic had dinged Cleburne as "like an expensive Luby's."

Yep, I did have forty bucks worth of fun, though. I won't become a regular, but I'd return for a comfort fix, a wider sampling of those many, many fresh vegetables—or for that German chocolate cake alone. It had a darker chocolate crumb than the usual Dutch-cocoa-hued version, and plenty of appealingly smooth, stretchy, caramel-colored icing studded with pecans.

I could only eat half of the towering slice, with help from my friend, and took the rest home for supper.