Wagon Wheel Restaurant — Greenbrier, Arkansas

I found out about this place on Roadfood.com. It’s supposed to have excellent pies, and I love pie. We stopped in for lunch on our way back from Mount Magazine on the final day of our vacation.

It didn’t look like much from the outside, but the lot was packed. We parked in the very last available spot, way in the back next to the dumpsters.

We walked across the dining room to the pie display. A waitress came over and asked if she could help us. I told her we were there for the pie, and she directed us to a nearby table. The previous diners were slobs. There were crumbs all over the place. No problem — the waitress came over with a rag, made a wide sweep across the surface and brushed the entire pile onto my lap.

If I had been there for fine dining, it would have ticked me off. But since I was there for a blog post, it just made me laugh. As you can see from this photo taken shortly after, she didn’t do a very good job on the table either.

Here’s the waitress. Her name was Trish. I thought it odd how the “regular” customers felt free to wander into the food preparation area and help themselves to refills on coffee.

Table-wiping skills notwithstanding, Trish was actually a very good waitress. She asked us where we were from. I’m not sure how she knew we didn’t live in the area.  We split a chicken-fried steak sandwich for lunch. It wasn’t bad, but it had enough grease to fry a turkey.

Trish had told us when we came in that “the pies don’t look very good today.” I ordered coconut cream, my wife ordered chocolate cream. They were sorta runny looking, but they did taste good.

We had fun, although I don’t think I’d make a special trip to visit again. If you happen to find yourself driving through central Arkansas and are in the mood for a bit of local color and some pretty good pie …

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