Clewiston, Florida: Old South BBQ Ranch (Gone)

My family moved to Clewiston in 1960 from Alabama, and lived there for 8 years (through 6th grade). I still have friends there and see them a few times a year. As a child I loved to eat at the Ranch. The Q at the Ranch was the best I have ever had. Remembering back to the times when every BBQ place you went into smelled of cooking meats. It's the main ingredient that's left out of BBQ joints today; you never smell the cooking that's going on. This place had all of that plus an outside ambience beyond description. The roadside signs started 50 miles north of Clewiston on HWY 27. I knew that we were almost home when we started seeing the signs.

My friends say the Clewiston Inn does not even come close to the old place. What a shame.

The Clewiston Inn obtained the recipes, and now serves it on their menu. I couldn't bring myself to eat BBQ in their fancy dining room, though.

"Old South BBQ Ranch--Where Eatin's Real Fun!" Another famous attraction of the US Route 27 gateway to south Florida is gone forever. Signage along Route 27 once extended for hundreds of miles northward in the days before interstate freeways, full of homespun sayings with all the charm of the long-gone Burma Shave signs. The attraction itself was a simple BBQ restaurant, but done up with a wild west theme -- curious enough for the Florida locale at the southern edge of Lake Okeechobee.

The outside was full of fiberglass 'old west' characters, wagon wheels, and punny signs adorning the building and parking lot. The inside was full of old west decor and bric-a-brac, and the waitresses wore Dale Evans-style cowgirl costumes with toy holsters.

I discovered the place on my first visit to Florida in 1974, and always made sure to stop by for a meal whenever business would take me back every few years. The food was usually pretty good enough and I last sampled it in the summer of 1998. Then I came back through Clewiston in July 2001 and -- horrors! -- it was all gone. The cop who stopped to ask what I was looking for said that it had been gone a couple years. Only the familiar but nondescript shape of the building remained to guide me -- all traces of the wild west decor outside were gone, replaced by a fenced lot for storing the boats of the new business inside.

The Old South Bar-B-Q Ranch in Clewiston is closed. It is for sale.

On US 27, south of Lake Ochechobee, is the Old South Bar-B-Q Ranch. At one time they had billboards up and down US 27 advertising the place for many a mile. They have cowboy and cow mannequins in the parking lot and continue with the country cowboy theme inside. The walls are adorned with various antique farm implements and country jokes. The bar-b-q isn't bad either. It'd make a good lunch stop on a trip out to the Cypress Knee Museum, especially since there isn't a whole lot out that-a-ways. I was last out that way in the winter of 1996, and they were still operating then.