Jesse Roach had already lived about three careers before he ever sold a steak. He grew up in Mount Pleasant, studied pharmacy in Little Rock and ran a drugstore in Austin. Then he passed the bar, practiced law and went to the Texas House for two terms representing Hunt County. When he landed in Fort Worth in the 1940s, he was selling insurance to truckers.
In 1947 he and his wife, Mozelle, opened a restaurant in the same North Main Street building as the insurance office. They named it Cattlemen’s. Their early newspaper ads pushed “refrigerated air,” Sunday “Dollar Dinners” and calf and lamb fries, which tells you a fair amount about what Fort Worth wanted after the war.
Cattlemen’s Steak House is still at 2458 N. Main St. in the Stockyards. Ask around town about the best chicken fried steak and it is going to come up early in the conversation.
The Roaches eventually had several restaurants going in Fort Worth, Arlington and Dallas, Farmer’s Daughter on University Drive among them. Jesse also served on the Fort Worth City Council from 1955 to 1959. The other locations are long gone. The one on North Main kept going.
Marti Taylor and Larry Heppe owned it for years and were careful with it. They added fish, desserts and a better wine list and left the rest alone. In 2025 Taylor Sheridan, the rancher and writer behind Yellowstone and Landman, bought in with his producing partners David Glasser and Dan Schryer. Taylor and Heppe kept a stake.
The new group spent millions on the building. The dining rooms got new chandeliers and polished wood. A patio and a music stage went in outside, and a private members club opened in the basement. They did not touch the charcoal grill in the main dining room, where the cooks still sear the Heart o’ Texas Rib-Eye where everyone can watch.
Executive chef Theodore Tom runs the kitchen now. He came from SW Steakhouse at the Wynn in Las Vegas and rebuilt the menu around Wagyu and Black Angus beef from Sheridan’s Four Sixes and Bosque ranches. He also added things the old Cattlemen’s crowd would not have recognized, like Steak Tartare with serrano chiles and Wagyu Meatballs on smoky polenta.
The Chicken Fried Steak stayed.
It is still the size of the plate, or close to it. What changed is the gravy. Tom tops it with Wagyu sausage gravy now, and on a steak that big, the extra weight in the gravy makes sense.
Get the hand-battered onion rings for the table while you are at it. And if someone at the table has never had calf fries, this is as good a place as any to change that.
Texas Chicken Fried Steak Day is Sunday, October 26. Cattlemen’s has been frying them on North Main since Harry Truman was president.
For more on the restaurant’s history and the Sheridan renovation, see CraveDFW’s earlier piece, Cattlemen’s Steakhouse: Fort Worth’s Past Meets Its Bold New Future.
Cattlemen’s Steak House opens at 11 a.m. Monday through Saturday and at noon Sunday. 2458 N. Main St., Fort Worth. 817-624-3945.
