Brand Room steakhouse opens in Fort Worth amid legal tangle with ex-chef Grady Spears
Chicken-fried steak has returned to the 200 block of West Exchange Avenue.
But not at Horseshoe Hill Cafe.
The Brand Room, 212 W. Exchange Ave., is open and serving steaks, chicken-fried steak and specials in a cozy former private club that had been serving VIPs here making TV’s “1883,” a spinoff of the Paramount series “Yellowstone.”
The restaurant is run by staffers from the heralded Horseshoe Hill next door, which closed three months ago in an ownership dispute.
The Brand Room is a steakhouse. But it’s not different enough for former chef Grady Spears, who alleged in a suit filed Nov. 18 that business partners unfairly removed him from the restaurants.
So far, the Brand Room is open only for lunch Thursdays through Saturdays and for dinner Fridays and Saturdays.
The menu is limited to two or three simple specials. Chef and manager Joy Nowlin said she and owner Dawn Stubbs plan to add more days and a bigger menu.
“A lot of us had been working together [at Horseshoe Hill] and when it closed, we came up here to see what we could do,” Nowlin said.
“We changed up our recipes. We’ll have more steaks here — it’ll be a little more high-end. Mainly we just want to have good food for everybody in the Stockyards.”
The small club and bar area opens into a rustic dining room, and a second dining room will expand the seating to more than 100, she said.
Some of the set decor remains from “1883,” particularly the curtains and window lettering.
The Brand Room continues as a private club for mixed drinks but will sell beer and wine.
Last Saturday, the $15 lunch menu offered a choice of chicken-fried steak or rib-eye stew, with salad and deviled eggs.
For dinner, the Brand Room planned to serve prime rib or shrimp linguine, Nowlin said.
The dinner menu will usually include rib-eyes and tenderloins, she said.
The Brand Room chicken-fried steak isn’t exactly the same as Horseshoe Hill’s, but it’s familiar. (Spears also was the first chef at Reata, so all those chicken-fried steaks are similar with some difference in the breading and gravy.)
The star of a Saturday lunch was the rib-eye stew, like a chunky and warming beef stew with large slices of rib-eye.
The building is a former custom boot shop built in 1948 as a machine shop and later used as an awning company and as a Tejano club. It was the lounge for stars Faith Hill and Tim McGraw during work on “1883.”
The restaurant is open at 11 a.m. for lunch Thursdays through Saturdays, at 7 p.m. for dinner Fridays and Saturdays; facebook.com/thebrandroomftw.
This story was originally published November 28, 2021 at 5:45 AM.
