STEPHENVILLE, Tex. — Jake and Dorothy’s Cafe opened in 1948, four decades before Art Briles came to town and helped change football with an offense that would, appropriately, spread from central Texas to the N.F.L.

He stopped in every Friday with his assistants and ordered the lunch special, chicken fried steak and waffle fries, or chicken fries for short. They always sat at the same long table, in the back, farthest from the smoking section.

Jake and Dorothy’s, with its $1 burger night on Tuesdays and buttermilk pie made from scratch, still feels transplanted from an earlier time. Back before ESPN became ubiquitous, back when high school football teams across America, but especially in Texas, ran the football straight ahead. That a disciple of the spread, an innovator of modern offense, spent a decade here, in the so-called Cowboy Capital of the World, is quite the contrast, but then again, that is Art Briles, down home and futuristic all at once.

“Oh, I miss those days,” Kerry Roach, the daughter of Jake and Dorothy, said this week of Briles’s time in Stephenville. “It was all about him and that offense.”