"How in the heck did you do it?"
That's what Scott Roberts asked out loud, alone, standing in the old stone house near FM 1826 and FM 969 where his grandmother Roxanne Roberts used to live. He was trying to reverse-engineer her chicken fried steak, three months into a project he didn't need to take on. Roberts already owns the Salt Lick, one of the most recognized barbecue names in Texas. He could have opened his next restaurant anywhere. He put it in Buda.
A few weeks and one biscuit-breading breakthrough later, he had his answer, and Roxie's opened at the end of January inside the historic Buda Mill & Grain building on Main Street. Around the same time, a few storefronts up the block, Matti Bills was opening Astra, her own bet on a stretch of Main Street she didn't have to choose either. Bills had already built and sold Mum Foods, founded a working butcher shop in San Marcos, and landed a sandwich concept inside San Antonio's Pearl Food Hall. Neither she nor Roberts was chasing a first shot. Both had already proven their concepts elsewhere. They picked Buda anyway, and if you live here, that choice is worth understanding, because it says something about what Main Street has quietly become.
Two names that had already made it
Roxie's isn't a spinoff of the Salt Lick. It's Roberts honoring his grandmother's Sunday suppers, right down to a round wooden table in the dining room built to match hers. He'd carried the idea for about 25 years before deciding the timing and the place were finally right, and he chose a building with a view of active train tracks over a location closer to his existing restaurant in Driftwood. The menu leans into fried chicken, chicken fried steak under white gravy, mashed potatoes, deviled eggs, and homestyle sides, the kind of food that reads as comfort but was built through months of testing to get exactly right.
Astra runs on a different register. Bills built her career on local sourcing, from early farmers market stalls stretching across Cedar Park, Buda, San Marcos, and New Braunfels, to a butcher shop and, eventually, an urban farm in San Antonio that still supplies her kitchens. Astra's menu is wood-fired pizza on heirloom flour crust from Barton Springs Mill, handmade pastas, crudo, and house-cured meats that come straight from her own butcher operation rather than a supplier. Lauren Beckman, previously cocktail director at Mixtli, runs the bar program. None of this reads like a restaurant testing whether Buda could support it. It reads like operators who'd already answered that question about themselves and decided Main Street was the right stage anyway.
The building that explains part of it
Roxie's sits inside Buda Mill & Grain, and the building carries more history than a passing glance suggests. The site was a working cotton gin dating to 1914, later a grain elevator, and it sat mostly dormant for years before a redevelopment turned it into more than 27,000 square feet of retail, restaurant, and community space spread across five structures. The largest, a steel equipment barn nicknamed Big'un, had its front bay opened into a covered porch facing Main Street, with the original grain auger and four vintage silos kept in place as part of the design rather than demolished. It's the kind of adaptive reuse that gives Roxie's a dining room with a genuine backstory instead of a builder-grade shell.
The complex was already home to businesses locals had been visiting for a while, among them Wine to Water and Dos Olivos Market, before Roxie's became its newest tenant. That matters for how you read the opening. Roxie's didn't arrive to anchor an empty building. It arrived to join a cluster of businesses that had already proven Main Street could hold foot traffic on a weeknight, which is a different kind of bet than opening cold.
What's actually worth ordering, seven months in
Both restaurants have had enough time now to settle into what they do best, which matters more to someone who already lives here than an opening-week writeup ever could.
| Astra | Roxie's | |
|---|---|---|
| Address | 404 N. Main St. | 308 Main St., inside Buda Mill & Grain |
| Known for | Wood-fired oyster mushroom pizza, turkey raclette sandwich, cornbread | Chicken fried steak with biscuit-crumb breading, fried chicken, deviled eggs |
| Bar program | Lauren Beckman (ex-Mixtli), craft cocktails, natural wine, espresso and matcha | Not a bar-forward concept, focused on scratch Southern cooking |
| Setting | Former Budaful Tavern space, large patio, on-site garden | Historic cotton gin complex, near active train tracks |
At Astra, the wood-fired oyster mushroom pizza and the turkey raclette sandwich on seeded sourdough are the two dishes that keep coming up among regulars, alongside a cornbread that's become a default shared-plate order. According to the Buda Economic Development Corporation's original announcement, Astra planned to grow into seven-day service with happy hour and Sunday brunch by summer, so if you tried it in February and found it closed on a Tuesday, it's worth another look now.
Roxie's plays it more straightforward. The chicken fried steak, built on a biscuit-crumb breading Roberts and his executive chef spent months perfecting, is the dish the restaurant is built around, alongside a fried chicken plate and homestyle sides that don't try to reinvent anything, just execute it well.
The free nights you might have skipped
While the restaurant news was landing on Main Street, the Buda Amphitheater on San Antonio Street was quietly running its own summer program. The Summer Concert Series brought free, family-friendly live music to the Great Lawn on select weekends, including a June 6 show from Austin Nines that drew the kind of blanket-and-lawn-chair crowd the venue was built for. It's a low-key habit for a lot of Buda households, the kind of thing you don't think to mention until someone new to the area asks what there is to do on a Friday night that doesn't involve a drive up I-35.
What carries into fall
As the summer concert calendar winds down, the pattern in Buda doesn't stop, it just shifts. The Budaful Farmers Market keeps running every Sunday from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. at Buda City Park, rain or shine. A few other things worth putting on the calendar as the weather turns:
- Arts in the Park continues its run of outdoor music, theater, and movie nights into the fall season
- Downtown Buda's ticketed wine walk events return in the cooler months, letting visitors sample pours and restaurant bites across a dozen or more Main Street shops in one evening
- Halloween brings trick-or-treating to Downtown Buda, with the Buda Public Library adding spooky stories and crafts for younger kids
None of this required a master plan from the city. It's what happens when two established Texas food names decide a small Hill Country Main Street is worth building on, and a public amphitheater program fills in the nights around them. Buda's downtown didn't get louder this year. It got more finished.
If you're already living here, none of this changes your address. But it's worth knowing your Main Street now holds two kitchens run by people who'd already made it somewhere else and chose to bet on this block anyway. That's not the same story as a neighborhood hoping to be discovered. It's a neighborhood a couple of people with other options already decided was worth the investment.
For more on what's changing across Buda and the rest of the Austin metro, or if you're weighing a move of your own, the team at Four22 Realty Group knows this stretch of Main Street as well as anyone. Start Your Move Today.
