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Dave’s Place Marks 25 Years In Heart of Little Rock

4 min read

Restaurateur David Williams has seen a lot of change in downtown Little Rock since he opened Dave’s Place on Dec. 20, 1993. The biggest? All the condos and hotels.

“Hotels don’t bring me much business because I’m just daytime,” he said. “But condos have actually brought — I’m open on Friday nights, the one night a week — and I get business from the condos.”

The completion of the Robinson Center remodel has been helpful as well.

“A lot of restaurants have come and gone,” he said. And yet in the notoriously difficult restaurant business, Dave’s Place has reached its 25th anniversary. How? “One day at a time,” said the low-key Williams.

Dave’s, at 210 Center St., is, like its owner, low-key. It’s a mostly lunch place that attracts a crowd of regulars (full disclosure: I’m one of them) who come for the sandwiches — some of them named for friends of Williams — the lunch specials and the tomato bisque. That tomato bisque, Williams said, is a perennially popular offering, particularly at charitable events like Soup Sunday, the annual fundraiser for Arkansas Advocates for Children & Families at which he has appeared every year since it began almost 40 years ago.

Williams got his start in the restaurant business in 1981 at the legendary Restaurant Jacques & Suzanne, working there till its close in 1986. He went on to work at other famous spots, the Terrace, Maison Louis. And he also cut grass and painted houses. “Two kids, two car payments,” Williams said by way of explanation.

Then his wife, Vicki, saw a restaurant-for-sale sign at 416 W. Seventh St. “I think she was trying to have me home every night.” So the couple first opened Dave’s Place on West Seventh, moving five years later to its current spot, a former Schlotzky’s just a block from the Pulaski County Courthouse, which provides a lot of the restaurant’s customers: judges, lawyers, clerks, administrative workers and the like.

The couple’s grown children, David II and Laura, grew up in the business and still work there. And David II regularly plays jazz saxophone with other musicians on Friday nights, when Dave’s Place serves a more elaborate menu.

The walls feature finely executed cartoon caricatures by George Fisher, the longtime political cartoonist for the Arkansas Gazette until its closing in 1991, after which he went to work for the Arkansas Times, drawing for that publication until his death in 2003 — at his drawing board in his Little Rock home.

The caricatures are of Williams’ mother, the late liberal activist Mamie Ruth Williams, who, unlike her son, was not low-key. She was, in fact, a larger-than-life, force-of-nature personality. Her friend political columnist Cragg Hines, writing in the Houston Chronicle in 2003 after Mamie Ruth’s death, called her a “quintessential PWLL” — “pushy white liberal lady.” Her son, David Williams, says that’s about right. It is, after all, a compliment.

It’s worth quoting Hines at length for his insight into Mamie Ruth:

“She was 76, and for well more than half of her life she fought the good fights — first and foremost for racial desegregation, then for progressive candidates and causes dedicated to the downfall of Orval E. Faubus and his old Democratic political machine and more recently for election reform, government responsiveness and consumer protection.

“Like many PWLLs, Mamie Ruth was a member of an old, respected family. To the segregationists, this made her and her political work all the more disgusting and inexplicable. (Relishing a fight was genetic; her hard-charging maternal grandmother had been one of H.L. Hunt’s first partners in the great El Dorado oil boom in southern Arkansas during the early 1920s.)”

“All mom’s friends were attorneys and judges,” David Williams said, “so I never really advertised much at all.”

A lot of Dave’s Place customers remember George Fisher and Mamie Ruth Williams. They’re worth remembering. But these days probably more folks come for the hefty sandwiches — I can vouch for the Andrewwood, a Dagwood-style creation named for, if I followed the story correctly, Andrew Russell, at the time a law clerk for state Supreme Court Justice Tom Glaze, a crusader for fair elections who died in 2012. The generous portions and the fair prices are also a draw.

And the history. Yes, definitely the history.

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