The building at 110 W. Bailey Street in Ponder has been standing since 1903, and for most of the past 78 years it has smelled like fried chicken and hot grease. That smell is back. Ranchman’s, the small-town steakhouse that once pulled Hollywood and literary royalty off the highway, reopened the first week of July under new ownership, and the people running it went out of their way not to mess with what made it famous in the first place.
Grace “Pete” Jackson opened the original Ranchman’s on Thanksgiving Day 1948, building it off the popularity of the lunch counter at the grocery store she ran next door. Word got around fast. Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway ate there during the filming of Bonnie and Clyde in 1967, and Larry McMurtry has said a visit to Ranchman’s is where he landed on the title for Lonesome Dove. For a restaurant sitting on a back road in a town most people drive through without noticing, that is a lot of history to carry.
Dave Ross took over in 1992, but he wasn’t new to the place. He’d started there in 1973 as a teenage grill cook, butcher, and baker. Ranchman’s closed for renovations early in the pandemic and stayed shut for close to three years while the kitchen got rebuilt, reopened briefly in March 2023, and then closed for good that October when Ross decided to retire.
Denton County restaurateur Marty Bryan bought the building instead, along with seven adjoining lots. Bryan got his start as a line cook at Outback Steakhouse back in 1990 and worked his way up to managing partner before branching out on his own. He’s since opened close to 70 restaurants around the country, including other Outback locations, Cotton Patch Cafe locations, and his own Marty B’s concepts, which now include Marty B’s in Bartonville, Rustico, 1845, Branded Bowls, Cactus Canyon, and a handful of Marty B’s ice cream and coffee shops around southern Denton County. He’s said the pull toward Ponder was personal. He grew up in a small town himself, and this felt like a chance to do right by one.
The dining room and the wall of memorabilia are still there, mostly untouched. What’s new is a saloon-style bar with its own separate entrance, and an outdoor patio with a second bar and kitchen big enough to hold up to 500 people. Live music runs the patio on Friday and Saturday nights.
The menu is where Bryan has been most careful. “We’re basically cooking the food the way they always cooked it,” he told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram after opening weekend, and the reporting on the ground backs that up. The chicken-fried steak is still the headline dish, described by early visitors as oversized in the same way the old Ranchman’s always ran it, and it comes standard the way chicken-fried steak should: hand-breaded, pan-fried, and buried in cream gravy. Alongside it are fried and grilled quail and the T-bone and porterhouse steaks that built the place’s reputation with the Hollywood crowd decades ago.
The additions sit around the edges rather than the center. Hand-packed burgers are still on there, now next to wings, steak nachos, fried pork chops, and bacon-wrapped meatloaf. A rotation of salads covers anyone looking for something lighter, though lighter has never really been the point of a trip to Ranchman’s. Dessert is still cobbler and pie, and Bryan folded in his own mother’s pie recipes alongside the diner’s originals, plus a scoop of Marty B’s house ice cream if a slice alone doesn’t finish the job.
Ranchman’s is closed Monday and Tuesday, open Wednesday and Thursday from 3 to 9 p.m., Friday and Saturday from 3 to 10:30 p.m., and Sunday from 3 to 9 p.m. No reservations. The number is 940-255-4769, and the current menu is posted at ranchman.com.
Ponder is close enough to Denton that it doesn’t need to be a whole day trip. It just needs an appetite and no plans for reservations.
