A 74-year-old steakhouse in North Texas has been closed for 662 days — but owner promises comeback

Ranchman’s Cafe in Ponder has been serving chicken-fried steak since 1948. The building has been there since 1903. But for 662 days, it’s been closed, first because of COVID-19 and then because of construction delays.

Owner Dave Ross is confident his Ponder steakhouse will reopen. He won’t let it close, he says. But tell that to the impatient customers who reach out every week, wondering how much longer the wait will be.

“As a steward of a cultural heritage restaurant, my mission is survival,” he says.

Survival means finishing a construction project in the kitchen that’ll make the restaurant more efficient, then hoping that date dovetails with a decrease in COVID-19 cases, so he can bring customers back inside. Ross owns the building outright, so he doesn’t incur costs while the restaurant is closed.

Ranchman’s is an out-of-the-way spot about 35 miles north of downtown Fort Worth and 12 miles west of the Denton square. For decades, millionaires and regular folks have made the drive for steaks topped with melted butter, served with fries and fluffy sourdough rolls. Few could resist the pies.

Ranchman’s is one of the oldest restaurants in North Texas. It’s still hanging on during the pandemic while other long-timers aren’t, like Highland Park Cafeteria (closed after 95 years) and Mac’s Bar-B-Que (66 years).

While Ranchman’s is hidden, it’s never been a secret: Meatloaf filmed a music video there and chef Bobby Flay taped a Food Network show. Cindy Crawford dined with friends on a rainy Wednesday night a few decades back. And in the late ‘60s, Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway stopped in several times during movie shoots for Bonnie and Clyde in which they robbed the bank nearby.

Ross knows travelers and regulars want to get back to the restaurant that’s been written up in guide books for having the best chicken-fried steak in the state. Carrollton resident Ken Ehrsam says he regularly used to take out-of-towners to Ranchman’s for a true Texas experience.

“It is a fun afternoon drive. It is about an hour from Carrollton, and you end up in a country town,” he says.

Ross says he’s tired of being closed, too. But “fulfilling the short-term lust for chicken-fried steak at the expense of shuttering a business open since 1948 is too great a cost,” he says.

The long wait for steak

Ross closed the restaurant in mid-March 2020, when municipalities forced restaurants to shutter their dining rooms because of the coronavirus pandemic. Customers haven’t stepped foot inside Ranchman’s since then, though they might have eaten its food during a brief stint in summer 2020, when Ross learned the hard way that his out-of-town restaurant couldn’t pivot gracefully to takeout.

“It was a costly endeavor,” Ross says. He lost $40,000 in a month by paying for products customers didn’t buy, then paying workers who sat around waiting for orders.

Takeout and delivery sales often aren’t lucrative enough to keep a restaurant afloat anyhow, unless you’re selling pizza. It’s a reality scores of restaurateurs have shouted about since early 2020. Ranchman’s serves big platters of pork roast and fried chicken in a family-style setting. It doesn’t keep its allure when a generous spread is packaged and sent out in plastic bags.

“Chicken-fried steak doesn’t hold up in Styrofoam, and neither do French fries. Burgers fall apart. Steaks get overcooked,” Ross says.

“The customers just wanted to come in and sit down.” But Ross wouldn’t do it.

The 117-year-old building also needed work. So in December 2020, Ross gutted the kitchen and made plans to build a 460 square-foot addition for a walk-in freezer, dishwashing station and storage. Crews had to remove asbestos, which was added in a building renovation in the 1960s.

Ross hoped the construction would be a several-month process, but now he’s expecting the dining room to be closed for over two years.

“That is, if natural disasters don’t exhaust the supply of concrete, wood and labor,” he says.

Ranchman’s history

A woman named Pete started Ranchman’s in 1948.

She’s Grace “Pete” Jackson, but she hated the name Grace, so she gave herself a new name, Ross says. She started Ranchman’s for the unromantic reason that there was no place to eat in Ponder.

Soon, she saw “millionaires, bankers, railroad workers and rodeo cowboys rub elbows with the home folks to taste Pete’s 8- to 24-ounce sirloins and T-bones and rhapsodize over her homemade pies,” The News wrote in 1985.

Ross met her as a college student in the early ‘70s when he’d stop in for tea and pie halfway through his daily 20-mile bike ride.

Ross eventually got a job there as a cook, butcher and baker in 1974. He found himself back at Ranchman’s in 1978, when Pete needed help adding on the back room, and again in 1985 for another gig. Finally, Ross bought the restaurant from its matriarch in 1992.

Pete died in 1998, a tidy 50 years after she started the restaurant.

It’s now three-quarters of a century old, quiet but not completely closed. What’s another few months of waiting, for a place that’s seen so much?

Ross promises that the new Ranchman’s won’t lose “its cozy country tacky charm.” He looks forward to opening when the world is different. And when’s that?

Summer 2022, he says.

Probably. Maybe. Who knows.

We’ll wait.

Ranchman’s is at 110 W. Bailey St, Ponder. It remains temporarily closed until construction is finished.

Correction, Jan. 10 at 5:10 p.m.: An earlier version of this article had an incorrect description of the cafe’s age.

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