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Yuma's Best 2012: Cracker Barrel
Best Breakfast, Best Chicken Fried Steak
If people ask for the breakfast menu in the afternoon, they're on different schedules than other folks, or they just really like breakfast.
Either way, Yuma's Cracker Barrel will accommodate them, says Lloyd Truax, the restaurant's general manager says.
“We serve breakfast all day long, so you can get breakfast at any hour,” he said.
That willingness to serve each customer's whims may be part of the reason respondents in Yuma's Best picked the Cracker Barrel as having the Best Breakfast in 2012.
But that's not all. The restaurant also serves the best Chicken Fried Steak, voters decided in the Yuma Sun's annual poll of its readers' favorite businesses.
Whether it's chicken-fried steak, eggs, bacon, sausage, biscuits or dumplings, the restaurant makes its country-style meals from scratch, using ingredients of the best available quality, Truax said.
Eggs are Grade AA, he said, while biscuits and dumplings are made using butter. The chicken-fried steak starts as a choice piece of beef that is then coated in a “specially seasoned” recipe that Truax keeps as a closely guarded secret.
The country-style cooking is then served with a touch of down-home hospitality, he added. 
“We try to take care of our guests like they were family.”
The Yuma restaurant may pride itself on its breakfasts, but it also offers daily lunch specials and serves dinner fare for those who want those meals, Truax said.
And like other restaurants in the Lebanon, Tenn.-based chain, the Yuma restaurant includes a store where customers can shop for souvenirs, candy, games and other items before or after they sit down to their meals.
The restaurant, located at 1780 S. Sunridge Drive, is open 6 a.m. to 10 p.m. on weekdays and 6 a.m. to 11 p.m. on weekends. It's phone number is 343-1988, and customers can learn more about the chain at www.crackerbarrel.com.
Cracker Barrel opened in Yuma in 1997. Truax has been overseeing the Yuma restaurant since 2001.
“Yuma's a great town,” he said. “That's why I haven't left.” §
