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• Name of owner: Lawton Haygood• Restaurants owned or operated: Canyon Grill, which opened in 1995 in Rising Fawn, Georgia, about a mile from Cloudland Canyon State Park. Haygood sold it a few years ago to a couple who worked there for years. After that came the Boathouse Rotisserie & Raw Bar in 2002 and then Sugar’s Ribs in 2008 on the side of Missionary Ridge near Interstate 24, followed by another Sugar’s Ribs downtown in 2012 on Broad Street that closed in the fall of 2015.• When and how did you get started in the restaurant business: Haygood got started restaurant business since 1978 in coastal Texas, pretty much by accident.• Keys to success: Being good at math and accounting developing “a menu that’s going to please your market,” Haygood said, as well as training and paying staff well. Servers at the Boathouse have about seven weeks of training, and even a high school kid working his first job cleaning tables gets paid $10 an hour to start.Future plans: Haygood hopes to score again with a new restaurant tentatively named SideTrack that he plans to open in May or June at 3514 Hixson Pike near Lupton Drive at the site of a former Huddle House, where two other diner-style restaurants failed.
Lawton Haygood made his mark on the Chattanooga-area’s restaurant scene with three successful eateries: Canyon Grill, on the Georgia side of Lookout Mountain not far from Trenton, the Boathouse Rotisserie & Raw Bar on the Tennessee River and Sugar’s Ribs on the side of Missionary Ridge.
But Haygood’s entry to the restaurant business came pretty much by accident one day in 1978, after Haygood drank “way too many beers” at what he said was a little run-down restaurant on a channel next to the beach in Port Aransas, Texas, near Corpus Christi.
Haygood, who just turned 73, was in his early 30s then and worked in Dallas, Texas, in real estate and finance – which was tanking, since interest rates were soaring. So he’d gone to the beach with a companion to take off and clear his head.
The restaurant was empty, and Haygood wasn’t happy with the fried shrimp the waitress brought him.