Vickery Cafe has been a Fort Worth breakfast fixture for two decades, and this year it made its first real move, relocating from its longtime spot on Vickery Boulevard to 2421 W 7th Street, Suite 109, in the West 7th district. Chef and owner Curtis James still runs the kitchen the same way he always has: old-school diner bones with a Texas-Cajun streak running through nearly everything on the menu. It’s open daily from 7 a.m. to 2 p.m., no separate weekday-versus-weekend split, which means brunch here isn’t a special occasion. It’s just what the place does every single day.
The dish nearly everyone orders first is the Breakfast Monte Cristo, brioche dipped in French toast batter and stuffed with bacon, tasso ham, fried eggs, and Swiss cheese, dusted in powdered sugar and served with a chipotle raspberry jam on the side. It shows up in review after review as the reason people keep coming back, sweet and savory pushed right up against each other in a way that shouldn’t work as well as it does. Right behind it is the chicken-fried steak, a full New York strip breaded and fried and topped with eggs, the kind of plate that explains why the parking lot fills up on weekend mornings.
The Cajun influence runs deeper than a garnish here. The Creole scramble takes three eggs through the Holy Trinity of Cajun cooking, onion, celery, and bell pepper, finished with Creole hollandaise and served alongside jalapeño corn cakes and grilled tasso ham. The Natchitoches poutine takes the idea even further, a lightly breaded and fried protein served over cheddar grits, topped with andouille gravy and Creole fried eggs, which is about as far from a standard diner breakfast as a diner breakfast can get while still counting as one.
For something closer to classic, the Bayou Eggs Benedict and a California Eggs Benedict, built with crab meat and avocado over bacon and hollandaise, both show up as regulars’ go-to orders.
Fresh-squeezed orange juice gets mentioned almost as often as the food itself, and the fluffy pancakes and Texas-shaped Belgian waffles round out anyone who wants something simpler than the Cajun-leaning specials. It’s a small, family-run operation, and it still runs like one even after the move, busy, a little loud, and staffed by people who know most of their regulars by name…