The newest dining venue in Brownwood is set to open Tuesday, May 20 as Wayne and Crystal Meadow of Blanket have purchased the former Bike Peddler, located at 1017 Austin Avenue, and turned it into The Station.
The Station will provide breakfast and lunch items between 7 a.m. and 3 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday, starting next week.
“We’re going to do some Benedicts and omelets, we’ll have a specialty Benedict where it’s a corn masa cake instead of an English muffin, and we’ll have our in house beef chorizo, with avocado, poached egg, salsa and hollandaise,” Crystal said. “It’s different, but it’s unique and we want to bring some of our classic brunch items but also a few new things to Brownwood. We’ll do two homemade soups a day and a few lunch items, like some chicken salad. We’ll also have some grab and go stuff where we’ll have some sandwiches prepped and some quinoa bowls. We hope our unique spin on things is what Brownwood needs and is hopefully looking for.”
Regarding the desire to open a location specifically for brunch, Wayne said, “All of our other breakfast places are great, we just don’t have that many, especially for an all day breakfast. We’ll have espresso and drip coffee, we want to offer a French press to the table so it’s interactive with our customers, too. We want them to feel like they can make their own coffee. Just little nuances that are found in larger cities, we’re trying to see how the small town of Brownwood likes it.”
Wayne is a Brownwood native, and Crystal grew up in Fredericksburg, where the couple lived most recently until moving to Brownwood in 2017, looking for a slower pace and the chance to enjoy life more.
“We lived in Austin for a stint, we lived in Fredericksburg for a stint, those areas have their own unique style and we wanted to mash the two of them up a little bit and bring that something here,” Wayne said. “We feel like that’s not something that’s really done here. We wanted to create a vibe, an Austin-esque kind of feel is what we were going for.”
It’s taken more than half a year for the Meadows to transform the former Bike Peddler shop into its current status as an eatery.
“We always talked about doing something like this down the road and we were in Colorado on vacation in August of last year and went to different coffee shops and it got us amped up to move farther into this sooner rather than later,” Wayne said. “We got online and looked for buildings for sale around here and found this, came and checked it out and knew right away this is what we wanted to do. We bought the building and the real work started, seven months of day in, day out, weekends and nights. We did some concrete work in the bike room where they used to service the bikes. We put some concrete in there to bring the floor up, there was a big wash drain in there before. We added the sidewalks, new glass almost everywhere as far as windows go. And there’s been a lot of painting and crack filling. We used a couple of local contractors for electrical and plumbing, other than that we also own a construction company so we did the majority of the work.”
Despite looking nothing like the former Bike Peddler shop, the Meadows wanted to keep the memory of the building’s past alive. Included inside are photos of Bike Peddler owners Lynn and Vonne Cornett, bicycles hanging from the walls, and Bike Peddler memorabilia to go along with some for The Station itself.
“That was one of the first questions I asked before we bought the building,” Wayne said. “I told them what we were wanting to do and asked them if it would be OK to carry on their legacy a little bit. I know for a lot of people in Brownwood growing up this was a staple for them. I’ve heard stories from hundreds of people in Brownwood about coming in here and getting their first bike so I knew this place was going to be sentimental for those in this area. I just thought about how special it would be to come in and still be able to feel a little bit of that.”
Crystal, who formerly worked at Diamond R Store and Cafe in Zephyr, thanked Cody and Nikki Rogers for their guidance in this journey, as did Wayne, who owns Double Diamond Iron and Woodworks, with Josh Hubbard and Craigan Tidwell, who assisted with construction.
Long-term plans for The Station, according to Crystal, are “Down the road I hope it turns into more, like having a sister restaurant, doing something totally different from this.”
