McClard’s Bar-B-Q of Hot Springs has been inducted into the Arkansas Food Hall of Fame and rates an entry in the Encyclopedia of Arkansas, but what really earns a restaurant icon status is when it becomes significant enough to be mentioned in obituaries — for example, this March 10, 2021, obit for Searcy McBurnett Jr., 87: “He liked a good B-B-Q, especially McClard’s in Hot Springs.”
Veteran restaurateur Lee Beasley, whose Beasley Properties bought McClard’s in 2020, is franchising the restaurant, seeking to leverage the McClard’s legend but to preserve the qualities that made it a landmark. Beasley plans “to expand it but slowly and do it correctly.”
“I feel like it’s an icon in Arkansas,” he said. “I’m not trying to go to Dallas or Shreveport or whatever. Just keep it in central Arkansas and make sure each one we do has the same standards in food that they did 50 and 60 years ago.”
That doesn’t mean, Beasley said, that McClard’s won’t add menu items, but the basic McClard’s offerings, including its tamales, will remain at the forefront.
Since Beasley Properties bought McClard’s, it has added a Little Rock location, at 9219 Stagecoach Road, which opened last summer and which, like the Hot Springs restaurant, is company-owned. And it has added a franchised store, at 2071 Oliver Lancaster Road in Rockport, just north of Malvern, which opened last month. The franchisee is Joey Godoy, perhaps best known as a founder of the Bleu Monkey Grill and owner of Capo’s Tacos, both in Hot Springs.
The Little Rock location opened as McClard’s & DownHome Catering, a collaboration that was envisioned as a way to bring McClard’s barbecue to Little Rock while also offering the catering services of DownHome. “I bought this from them and took in the catering business at that time and learned a lot from them,” Beasley said. “We wanted to test the waters. We wanted to see what catering was like.” But the goals of the two businesses diverged, and they parted ways amicably.
As far as expanding through franchising, licensing agreements are also on the table, Beasley said. “We reserve the right to come in, oversee it [the restaurant], see the quality of the food. We do that weekly. We train them. We do everything they need to make it because it’s an extension of us.”
“This,” meaning franchising, “is new to us,” he added, though he noted his extensive experience in opening and owning restaurants, as well as the restaurant expertise of Dean Jennings, CEO of Beasley Properties. Beasley owns JB ChopHouse in Hot Springs, formerly Bone’s Chophouse, and launched Fisherman’s Wharf in the Spa City. Beasley Properties also owns Rod’s Pizza Cellar.
As for his purchase of the original McClard’s in the spring of 2020, Beasley said, “I’d wanted it for years.” He paid less than $1 million for the restaurant, which had been shuttered by the COVID-19 pandemic. Last year, sales at the Hot Springs location were north of $1.5 million, with about 40% of that takeout.
Phillip McClard, 74, the third generation of the family that opened the restaurant in 1928, oversees the kitchen at the original location and will train staff at new locations, Jennings said.
“There are two things we care about the most as we expand, and that would be the consistency and quality of the family recipes and that people feel that McClard experience when they go inside the building,” Jennings said. “People drive to Hot Springs for an experience they felt with their grandpa, their dad, and that’s something we have to learn how to replicate at each of these places.”
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