Cream gravy alert: A famous small-town Texas cafe north of Fort Worth will reopen soon

Dark three years, the tiny cafe that inspired the late Larry McMurtry and hosted Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway is making a comeback.

Ranchman’s Ponder Steakhouse, a 75-year landmark and one of America’s most famous small-town cafes, will reopen in March, owner Dave Ross said last week.

“People are clamoring for us to reopen — calling, emailing, driving up here five or six times every day to ask,” said Ross, owner and now rescuer of the chicken-fried steak haven known to foodies from “FoodNation with Bobby Flay.”

Ranchman’s, 110 W. Bailey St., closed in 2020 with the onset of the COVID pandemic. Then repairs, remodeling and yet more repairs prolonged the break.

Ranchman’s will reopen with the same wood-paneled front dining room — a throwback to 1951 — and almost exactly the same menu, cobblers and pies.

“People don’t want to see too much change out here,” said Ross, the second owner after founders Grace “Pete” Jackson and her husband, R.L., opened the restaurant in what was then a dying Denton County farm town 30 miles north of Fort Worth.

Steaks range from about $20 to about $50.

But ever since the Food Network came to town, Ranchman’s has been better known for chicken-fried steaks ($14.50-$29.50) and burgers ($11.50).

This is old-time Texas country cooking. Steaks and chicken-fried steaks are cut in-house. Pies and cobblers are still made from 30-year cook Evelyn “Granny” Stack’s recipes.

Ranchman’s was never more small-town than on one busy Friday night in the 1970s, when an overwhelmed Stack strode into the middle of the dining room and waved her spatula until she commanded attention.

“Y’all!” she shouted. “Can’t y’all see I’m gonna have to have some help?”

Customers started pouring tea, clearing tables or baking rolls, and another Ranchman’s legend was born.

McMurtry, the quintessential Texas novelist, has told how he had just left the cafe in the early 1980s when he saw an old church bus marked “Lonesome Dove Baptist Church.”

“If ever I had an epiphany it was at that moment: I had, at last, found a title for the trail driving book” he was writing.

“Lonesome Dove” went on to be a TV classic.

That was 20 years after Beatty, Dunaway and other actors visited during the Denton-area filming of the movie “Bonnie and Clyde.”

Their photos still hang on the dining room wall, along with those of sports stars, race drivers and other celebrities who found their way to Ponder.

Ross said it took so long to reopen the cafe because remodeling was “one calamity after another.”

He wound up with a new kitchen and restrooms.

(Until the 1980s, Ranchman’s didn’t even have indoor restrooms — only an outhouse.)

Regulars have become more restless waiting for reopening, Ross said: “One guy today said, ‘I’m in town two weeks before I go back to Chicago, and I want to eat here before I go back.”

It wont be long now.