In recent weeks I’ve droned on and on about some of our city’s “theme” restaurants — namely the Polynesian-themed Luau and the tropical-motif Tropical Freeze. Well, using a grant from the Lauderdale Foundation, I recently purchased an old menu from another eatery in town with a rather unique theme — the Ohman Ranch House, which modeled itself after the Old West, even to the point of having an old six-shooter as a front door handle.
William L. Ohman opened his first restaurant in the mid-1940s at 1358 Madison, just east of Cleveland. It was a pretty ordinary place, really, more like a drive-in, so in 1948, Ohman went all-out, building a rustic lodge behind the original restaurant. The menus proclaimed it was “a bit of Texas in Tennessee,” and patrons found themselves in a rustic saloon, with rough-hewn walls, fake kerosene lanterns, and brands burned into the beams. The menu I purchased came from 1951, and it offered all sorts of “Wild West” concoctions, including Texas Shrimp (“big like Texas”), Chuck Wagon Chicken (“Pecos Bill went wild for this!”), Beef Tenderloin Steak (“It ain’t bull, it’s tender”), and a barbecue plate that used “only lazy, contented pigs.”
(Something tells me those pigs weren’t too contented about being slaughtered, but I digress.)
The cover of the menu (above) is especially interesting because it shows how Cleveland and Madison looked half a century ago. Look carefully, and on the north side of Madison you can see that a Doughty-Robinson Drug Store stood on the corner, and next to that was the Star Bowling Alley. You can see the original Ohman House #1, and behind it the Ranch House, complete with outdoor patio and a parking lot entrance adorned with a wagon wheel and the folksy message, “Y’all come back.”
Across Madison, on the south side, was the Howard Graham Furniture Company, Johnnie’s Shoe Repair, a beauty parlor, and Jenkin’s Cafe, which apparently had a huge sign advertising Goldcrest 51 beer mounted on its roof. And across Cleveland was, then and now, Stewart Brothers Hardware.