After a year-and-a-half-long hiatus, the smoker has been fired up again at beloved East Brainerd eatery Bones Smokehouse.
Now situated in a remodeled storefront that formerly housed Fanatics Sports Bar and Grill, Bones closed last February due to the widening of East Brainerd Road. With the community eagerly anticipating the reopening, based on the hundreds upon hundreds of “likes,” comments and shares on the business’s Facebook page, the owners have signed a 20-year lease on the new space.
“We’re going to try to focus on ‘smoke to plate,'” said general manager and partner Tim Bishop, explaining that the goal is to get pork, beef, chicken and turkey straight out of the hickory smoker and onto customers’ plates.
But 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 of the restaurant’s four partners.
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.
The Hennen family went on in 1993 to establish Big River Grille & Brewing Works, 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 near Big River, and in 2007 Tim and Stickley bought Greyfriar’s Coffee & Tea Co. just down on Market Street.
“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.
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,” said Stickley.
To learn more about Bones Smokehouse, visit facebook.com/BonesChattanooga or call 710-3382.
Email Tim Omarzu at tomarzu@timesfreepress.com.