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A close up of the pancakes, tender and sweet, which overlap the 9-inch plate a bit. Unless you are incredibly hungry for pancakes, don’t order a full stack. Half the pancakes went home to become a maple-blueberry breakfast bread pudding.
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The Mexican Omelet, a 3-egg bruiser filled with sausage, peppers, onions peppered with a little cayenne and jalapenos comes with a bit of pepper jack cheese tucked in and a generous topping of chili with beans. A nice amount of heat here.
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Potatoes O’Brien comes off the grill with peppers and onions mixed in.
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The patty melt follows the guidelines of the classic – burger, cheese, grilled onions and special sauce served on grilled rye with ridged potato chips.
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A close-up of the house-made chunky tuna salad on multi-grain, diner style, with lots of mayo-based dressing to love mixed in.
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The breakfast bowl stacks potatoes, your choice of meat, add in cheese or gravy and top with two eggs.
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Love meatloaf? This is your omelet. Plenty of meatloaf, three eggs, a little cheese and a generous pour of pepper gravy.
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Two pork chops, two eggs, two slices of multi-grain toast with butter and crispy potatoes O’Brien – so much food for such a sweet price. One and a half chops and half the potatoes went home to become a pork chop hash for dinner.
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Eggs done right.
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Biscuits made in house sit high on the plate are tender to the bite and flavorful as they can be.
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The coffee hot and black, portioned half and half, and sugar in a tall shaker with a dented top, lovingly polished. The diner experience in a nutshell for me.
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Pie varieties from Golden Boy, a fave supplier of tasty sweets, vary from week to week. We sampled the German chocolate pie because it was different. And yummy. They also have hand-dipped shakes for dessert.
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The counter and the sidewall of booths.
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Owner Rob Dawes, left, with head waitress Tammy Markos, center, and waitress Yohana Zereabruk, right.
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You can’t miss Billie’s Fine Foods/Diner for the multiple signs. Expect breakfast all day, lunch specials, home cooking and free Wi-Fi at the diner that re-opens at midnight on Saturday and Sunday (that’s for the late night crowds meandering the streets after Friday and Saturday night’s work or play.) Love the playful fence billboard for hamburgers, fries and a shake.
Don’t let the moniker fool you. Billie’s Fine Food is a Diner with a capital ‘D’ where the coffee comes ’round hot, the waitress might call you ‘hon,’ and the regulars? They think they own the joint. It’s all good in this down-home place where the day crowd yields to the late-night crowd on weekends.
Friday the diner shuts down at 2:30 p.m. to re-open at the stroke of midnight. The same thing happens on Saturday. Around 1:30 in the morning, there’s an uptick in the number of patrons.
“A lot of people who work in restaurants and bars come in, plus a lot of mellow people,” owner Rob Dawes says. “It’s not a rowdy crowd. We don’t tolerate rowdiness. The night of Mardi Gras, when everything shuts down, a group of fifteen or so from the Mardi Gras committee comes in.”
Dawes bought Billie’s two years ago in partnership with Jeff Kern. They changed the logo to a smiling chef, spruced up the building and added the burger and fries mural on the fence, but as long-time patrons of the iconic diner, they refrained from making wholesale changes to the menu or the atmosphere.
“My dad introduced us to the diner in the 21 years ago when we first bought in Soulard,” Dawes said. “He was a cameraman for Channel 4 back in the day of 2-person crews and big cameras, so we had been coming here a while when it came up for sale.”
Billie’s is known for good, cheap eats. There’s plenty on the plates. First-time visitors are often taken aback, as was this writer. “When late-night people who haven’t come in before see the size for the value, they’re surprised,” Dawes says.
I’m a sucker for tuna sandwiches at lunch counters and diners, and Billie’s doesn’t disappoint. The chips come snug in a little bag on the side of the plate, a nice diner touch.
Head waitress Tammy Markos, a veteran of seven years, stayed on with Dawes and Kern after the previous owners retired. “Many of the customers are from the neighborhood,” she says. “We’ve had customers from all over, some from as far away as Hawaii. They come here once when they visit family and end up stopping by every time they’re in town.”
Cook John Dotson, who has been at his job 12 years, bakes the tall, light biscuits the diner is known for several times a week. “Don’t even bother asking him how for the recipe,” Markos says. “He won’t even share it with the people who work here.”
The menu of classic diner favorites includes the mega-specials listed in a box at the top of the menu. The Heart Stopper, a breakfast buffet of a dish with country fried steak, bacon, grilled green peppers, onions, cheese and eggs with lettuce, tomatoes, and mayo on toast, served with potatoes of your choice ranks high with the late night crowd. Check out the breakfast bowl, the pork chop plate, the slinger and the omelets as well as the bigger-than-the-plate pancakes, too.
If breakfast isn’t your thing, try the sandwiches, like the patty melt, a righteous patty with onions and sauce served on buttery grilled rye.
Pies, of course, are de rigueur at a proper diner, but expect some surprises. The staff chooses different pies weekly, like the German chocolate cream pie we tried on one visit. There are hand-dipped shakes, too, but it’s so rare to have room after a Billie’s meal you’ll want to plan your dessert experience.
The diner’s location on South Broadway is a little off the beaten path. It sits between Soulard Market and the river on a sleepy street that was once a busy thoroughfare before the streets were reconfigured as the city grew.
Thirty relatives of the original Billie, the woman who owned the diner from the early 1980s until 1999, visited the diner over the holidays this past year. “They came to the diner every Christmas Billie owned it for their holiday meal,” Dawes says. “They had such good memories of Billie, and of the diner, they called ahead to see if they could come in one day. Of course, we made that happen.”
That’s how it is at Billie’s.
Billie’s Fine Food
1802 S. Broadway
314-621-0848
Hours: Mon – Fri: 5 a.m. - 2:30 p.m.
Sat – Sun: midnight to 1:30 p.m.
Featured in:
St. Louis Magazine, Cheap Eats (under Breakfast)
