Bones reopens Monday
When Bones Smokehouse in East Brainerd opens Monday, the goal will be to get pork, beef, chicken and turkey straight out of the hickory smoker and onto customers’ plates.
“We’re going to try to focus on ‘smoke to plate,’” said Tim Bishop, general manager and one of four partners in the restaurant that will open in a remodeled space at 7601 E. Brainerd Road. Located in a strip mall behind Zaxby’s restaurant, the storefront formerly housed Fanatics Sports Bar and Grill.
Meanwhile, Bones Smokehouse won’t hurry the smoking process. Pork will spend 14 hours inside the smoker, for example, and ribs will smoke for about five hours.
“We’re known for great barbecue, but it’s really a smokehouse — smoking it in a slow and deliberate manner,” said Rob Stickley, another partner in the restaurant.
The menu includes some fresh takes on smokehouse food, Bishop said, including smoked chicken enchilada and smoked chicken potpie.
There’s a lot of Chattanooga restaurant history behind Bones Smokehouse and its partners, who’ve worked together for years. The two other partners with Bishop and Stickley are Tim Hennen and Teresa Hennen.
She’s the widow of Johnny Hennen, who opened Bones Smokehouse in the summer of 1999 inside a wood-sided building at 9012 E. Brainerd Road about 2 miles east of the new location. He died on March 17 after a long illness.
Tim, Johnny and Denny Hennen are the three brothers who owned and operated Yesterday’s, one of the city’s most popular restaurants and nightclubs in the 1970s, ’80s and early ’90s. It was downtown at Patten Parkway and Georgia Avenue on the first floor of the four-story Ross Hotel, a 128-year-old brick building that’s being converted into “micro apartments” and
renamed the Tomorrow Building.
When Yesterday’s launched in 1973, it was the second restaurant to serve drinks by the glass in Chattanooga, Tim Hennen said, which had just been made legal. Yesterday’s opened one week after the Brass Register, he said, which was the first Chattanooga establishment to serve liquor.
The Hennen family went on in 1993 to establish Big River Grille & Brewing Works, a popular downtown destination at 222 Broad St. near the Tennessee Aquarium that was the genesis for CraftWorks Restaurants & Breweries Inc., a business headquartered in Chattanooga and in Broomfield, Colo., that operates close to 200 restaurants, brewery restaurants and entertainment venues.
In 2005 , Members of the Hennen family launched Hennen’s, an upscale downtown eatery at 193 Chestnut St., and in 2007 Tim and Stickley bought Greyfriar’s Coffee & Tea Co. at 321 Market St.
“I’ve been in this business 43 years,” Tim Hennen said. “We’ve been fairly successful over the years. We know what we’re doing.”
Among the roughly 50 employees at Bones Smokehouse are Andrew Hennen and Jeffrey Hennen, two of Johnny and Teresa Hennen’s four children. The brothers are managers at Bones.
Bones Smokehouse’s new location pays homage to the Hennen family’s restaurant history.
A pair of carved, wooden Indians at the entrance are from Yesterday’s. Some of the wood that decorates the new building’s interior is from the old Bones Smokehouse, which was forced to close in 2015 because of road-widening work.
Bones Smokehouse signed a 20-year lease on the new 4,500-square-foot space, which the business partners had remodeled by Chazler Inc. It has seating for 175 diners, with 32 seats outside and 134 inside.
Historical photos of Chattanooga decorate the new space, along with posters that promote consumption of smoked meat, including one that says, “You didn’t fight your way to the top of the food chain to eat veggies.”
“The East Brainerd community has been great to us,” Stickley said. Learn more about Bones Smokehouse online at www. facebook.com/BonesChattanooga or call 423-710-3382.
Contact staff writer Tim Omarzu at tomarzu @timesfreepress.com or www.facebook.com/ MeetsForBusiness or twitter.com/meetfor business or 423-757-6651.