For more than 60 years, North Texas restaurateur Bill Smith stood at a hot stove cooking eggs and pancakes at Bill Smith’s Cafe in McKinney. Today, that historic restaurant is gone — flattened to make way for new construction — and Smith has left the town he watched grow up.
But 83-year-old Smith is not finished cooking. After his 66-year-old breakfast and lunch cafe closed in 2022, Smith opened Bill Smith’s Buffet on Lake Fork. By fall 2023, he plans to open Bill Smith’s Cafe in a different Texas town, Van Alstyne. It’s 15 miles north of the original in McKinney, a short drive from small towns like Melissa and Anna.
“I think he saw a little bit of what McKinney used to be, in Van Alstyne,” says Rodney Williams, executive director of Van Alstyne Community and Economic Development.
Indeed, when Smith’s dad opened the cafe in 1956, it was a diner in a sleepy town. Ranchers and farmers would stop in, sometimes before sunrise, for coffee, breakfast and small talk. Williams was born and raised in McKinney and says he has eaten sunny-side-up eggs, sausage and bacon at Bill Smith’s more times than he can count. His family would stop in after Saturday morning soccer games when he was a kid.
Williams and economic development executive administrator Tiffany Chartier ate at the restaurant on its last day in 2022. At the time, they didn’t know Smith would be interested in relocating his cafe.
Smith simply said he was ready for a break after working 12- to 14-hour days. “I thought, well, this’ll be nice. I can go fishing,” Smith says.
“But it didn’t take me long to realize I like working more than I like fishing.”
Williams and Chartier showed him Van Alstyne’s one-and-a-half square-block downtown where $5.3 million in city bonds were spent to build a concert venue and $8.2 million more is earmarked for fixing the roads. Construction on a barbecue joint named Tender Smokehouse is expected to start in early 2024.
Williams’ goal is to “change the trajectory of downtown,” and he’s been at it for six years. Plenty of storefronts are vacant or need work, but Williams believes Van Alstyne can be a charming destination.
And in no uncertain terms, bringing Bill Smith’s Cafe to Van Alstyne could be the difference maker, Williams believes.
Smith is like the Reba McEntire of Van Alstyne, you could say: Reba opened a restaurant in her small town of Atoka, Okla., with the simple hope to be a catalyst for change.
Smith’s restaurant will open at 233 E. Jefferson St., in the heart of downtown Van Alstyne. The shop was most recently a cleaners, but in the early 1900s, it was L.P. Welker Harness and Buggy Shop, a wagon wheel repair business. Building owner Billy Turner has kept the original brick walls, which lend character to the long, narrow space that will soon become a restaurant. Smith and Turner plan to build a patio on the east side, where the small Aztec movie theater used to show Billy The Kid. The Aztec theater burned down in the late 1950s, a historian told Williams; the lot has been vacant since.
Turner, Smith’s landlord, has lived in Van Alstyne all his life. He is buying buildings downtown with intentions to “keep them as original as we can,” he says.
Smith kept the classic neon sign that hung outside the McKinney restaurant for decades. Williams and Chartier plan to work with the city to get the right permits to hang it.
That old sign is important to some Bill Smith’s Cafe regulars: “Some people have said, ‘The food just wouldn’t taste the same without the sign,’” Chartier says.
She wrote a touching tribute to Bill Smith’s Cafe on Facebook. “Bill Smith’s Cafe sold more than just eggs and bacon. Much more,” it reads. “The cafe offered a nostalgic feeling, a time when people were more important than cellphones. And the sign directs attention to a place where all are welcome and connections are made, from handshake deals to pats on the back.”
As eager as Chartier and Williams are to bring a legacy name to their downtown district, Smith seems just as ready to cook hashbrowns, pancakes and chicken fried steak for the North Texans he fed for decades.
Soon, he’ll be getting up at 3 a.m. again so he can open the restaurant by 4 or 5 a.m.
“I’ve got to get the gravy going,” he says matter-of-factly. “I’ve got to get the biscuits going.”
Bill Smith’s Cafe will be at 233 E. Jefferson St., Van Alstyne. The owner hopes to open the restaurant by fall 2023.
