Four States Buffet sits on New Boston Road, and on any given Sunday around noon, the parking lot tells you everything you need to know about its standing in the community.
What draws people here? The short answer is volume — not just of food, but of variety done without pretense. This is a Southern buffet in the truest sense: steam tables lined with fried chicken, catfish, turnip greens, purple hull peas, mac and cheese, candied yams, and cornbread that arrives hot enough to steam when broken open. The rotation shifts across the week, with weekday lunch crowds hitting the line around 11:30 and Sunday afternoons packing every table in the main dining room.
The room itself is big, plain, and practical. Fluorescent lighting, booths along the walls, tables in the center, and a soft hum of conversation that never quite settles into quiet. Families spread across four or five seats, plates stacked differently at every place. A grandmother loads up on greens and fried okra while a teenager circles back for a third piece of chicken. That contrast — multigenerational, unhurried, unapologetic — defines the room on a busy afternoon.
The catfish deserves particular attention. It comes out of the fryer in long fillets, lightly cornmeal-breaded, and holds up reasonably well under the heat lamp if the turnover is good. When the crowd is there and the trays are cycling fast, it’s genuinely good fried catfish, the kind that sits alongside hush puppies and coleslaw like it was always meant to. Slower stretches on a weekday afternoon are the wrong time to test it.
Dessert runs toward banana pudding, peach cobbler, and a rotating cast of cakes. The banana pudding, made with vanilla wafers that have softened properly into the custard, is the one to reach for first. It disappears fast on weekends.
Pricing holds steady in a range that makes it one of the more accessible sit-down meals in town. Lunch runs around eight to ten dollars per person, dinner a dollar or two more. Sweet tea comes in tall glasses and gets refilled without asking. That part, at least, is non-negotiable in this zip code.
The staff has a rotation of regulars — people who’ve worked the floor long enough to recognize faces and remember that the table in the back corner prefers to be left alone once they’ve got their food. That kind of quiet institutional memory is rarer than it should be in a buffet-style operation, and it smooths out the experience in ways that are hard to quantify but easy to feel.
Four States Buffet isn’t going to show up in anyone’s food magazine, and it isn’t trying to. It is, without apology, a place that feeds a lot of Texarkana regularly, reliably, and without drama. That’s not a small thing. For the people who pull into that parking lot every Sunday, it may be the whole point.
