Barbecue arrived for the first time at Marshall Steakhouse on May 13th.
It’s available at lunch between 11 a.m. and 2 p.m. on Wednesdays, Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays at the restaurant in Holly Springs, Mississippi, says owner Randall Swaney.
They also will cater barbecue, Swaney says. “We’re going to be doing a lot of catering,” he says.
Swaney decided to begin selling barbecue after Clancy’s Cafe in nearby Red Banks, Mississippi closed. He once told the restaurant’s owner, Tyler Clancy, that he wouldn’t sell barbecue at Marshall Steakhouse because Clancy’s was selling it. “We’re friends, so I said, ‘OK. I’m not going to get in your business.’”
Swaney is now selling smoked dry ribs and pulled or chopped shoulders and butts with various barbecue sauces. He also is featuring boneless chicken thighs wrapped in bacon and served on a bed of macaroni and cheese.
Photo: Courtesy Ben Burt
Sides include baked beans, slaw, mac and cheese, green beans, squash, French fries, and okra. “And we’ll probably be adding fried catfish here in the next couple of weeks. People are going to love it,” he says.
Swaney hired veteran barbecuer Ben Burt from Tupelo, Mississippi to do the barbecuing. But whether it’s eating it or cooking it, Swaney himself is no stranger to barbecue. “I love barbecue,” he says. “I could eat it every day.”
For four years or so, he was on the Naegele Swign (a play on ‘Swine’) Co. barbecue team in the Memphis in May World Championship Barbecue Cooking Contest. “I was down there every day,” he says. Swaney was one of the team’s cooks. “I’ve got a smoker on my farm. I’ve smoked my own stuff for years.”
He’s bought a Hendrix smoker for his new barbecue endeavor. “It belonged to one of the world champion barbecuers at one point. The company that made it is a very famous company that makes vent hoods and stuff. I bought it from another guy who had a restaurant in DeSoto County. He said it was too big for him. (It’s) eight feet long, probably five-feet tall, and three-feet deep.”
Opening a restaurant “was an accident,” Swaney says. “I had never been in the restaurant business. I had never worked in a restaurant.”
Born in Memphis, Swaney grew up in Holly Springs. After graduating from the University of Mississippi at Oxford, Swaney went to work for Naegele Outdoor Advertising Inc. for 10 years. He then was one of the founders of Trans Ad, which produced the back-lit ads at Memphis bus stops. After that company was sold, Swaney remained with the company as president for another year before opening his own billboard business, Swaney Outdoor Advertising.
Marshall Steakhouse originally was supposed to be a sawmill. Swaney built it with 35-foot tall red iron pieces from the old Batesville Convention Center “that blew over about 20 years ago.” While that convention center was 200-feet wide, Swaney’s building is 60-feet wide and the height of a three-and-a-half story building. “These are massive steel beams,” he says. “Five feet wide and a half inch thick.”
His building ended up looking “like a gymnasium.” Swaney thought. “This would be a waste of space to use for a sawmill once a month whenever I wanted to cut something. I decided to make it a feed store.” But he was told he would only make 50 cents from each bag of feed he sold. So, Swaney decided to add a gun store to the feed store.
He then got the idea to add a 10-foot-by-10-foot screened-in porch, “and have a Weber grill and come in and cook hamburgers at lunch,” he says. “Everybody thought that was a good idea.” Then someone said, “Maybe you ought to have steaks one night a week.”
“That’s where the idea came from. So I completely switched gears from sawmill to feed store to feed store/gun store to steakhouse that sold prime steaks.”
When he told his wife he was going to open a steakhouse she said,“You’ve got to be kidding. You’ve lost your mind.” Friends said the same thing: “That’s the worst idea ever, to build a steakhouse in Marshall County in the middle of nowhere.”
To which Swaney responded: “Well, if they like prime meat cooked on a charcoal grill they will come.” And, he says, “Being in the billboard business, I knew all about demographics.” He also knew about traffic patterns. Marshall Steakhouse can be seen from Interstate 22, “where there’s 55,000 people a day,” he says.
Swaney cut all the wood used for the restaurant. The inside is pine and oak. “Some of the boards are oak. And all the trees holding up the mezzanine level are 150-to-200-year-old cedar trees.” He also built the slab tables from “a stand of what was probably the largest white oak trees in the state of Tennessee. Those were 200 to 250 years old.”
Swaney opened Marshall Steakhouse in July 2017. The restaurant seats about 320 people inside. And they have about 20 picnic tables outside. “We have a place for bands. We’ve had a lot of events here, and we’re getting ready to start doing a lot more outdoor events.”
He’s currently building a Marshall Steakhouse in Oxford, Mississippi, slated to open this fall. And Swaney will be selling barbecue there, too.
