Jane Reed’s Pleasant Shade Cafe

Franklin Grandstaff was delivering pizzas a few years back when he stumbled upon the abandoned building known around Pleasant Shade as “the old store.”

After 30 years of working for McDonald’s and Arby’s, he was asked to run a pizza place in the county. “I thought it would be a good idea to deliver, but I didn’t realize how big Smith County was,” Franklin says. “So, I had customers in Pleasant Shade that kept ordering pizza. I would be driving at night trying to find these houses.”

After getting yelled at a couple times — “I’m just across from the old store,” one customer kept saying — Franklin decided to do a little daytime sleuthing on his day off. “I finally found this store that everyone was talking about,” he says.

At first, he thought it would be a great place for his brother-in-law to open a barbecue joint. When that didn’t happen, Franklin took matters into his own hands. In 2018, he and his wife, Frances, opened Jane Reed’s Pleasant Shade Store & Cafe, a full-service, country-cooking restaurant with a small shop attached.

What’s in a name?

The store had been a fixture in the farming community for years. When Franklin went to start a Facebook page, the previous Pleasant Shade Cafe name was taken. That’s how he came up with Jane Reed’s Pleasant Shade Cafe. It combines his wife’s middle name, Jane, and his own middle name, Reed.

“Sometimes I get people in here asking for Jane Reed,” he says. “I always say, ‘She’s not here, but I might be able to help you.’”

Country food made right

In addition to its daily regulars, the cafe hosts people from as far as Lafayette, Lebanon and Alexandria. “It’s because you can’t get this kind of cooking anywhere,” Franklin says. “There are fast-food and chain restaurants closer, but it’s hard to find a meat-and-three anymore.”

Jane Reed’s cooks up main courses like meatloaf, fried catfish and smashburgers and sides of squash casserole, mashed potatoes and pinto beans. Milkshakes come in vanilla, chocolate, caramel and strawberry, and homemade desserts range from fried pies to banana pudding and pecan pie.

“I worked in fast-food restaurants for 30 years, but you don’t really learn to cook that way,” says Franklin, who grew up in Bellwood in Wilson County, near the Smith County border. “When I opened here, I hired people and asked what they were doing. They schooled me. And before my mom died, she had written down a bunch of her recipes. I also got a family cookbook that my aunts had made.”

Dark days

Despite the cafe’s popularity, the COVID-19 pandemic nearly shut them down for good, Franklin says. He’d show up at the restaurant every day to fill the few takeout and delivery orders they received, but he had to lay off most of his employees. At the height of it all, he broke down in tears, knowing he couldn’t pay his bills.

About eight or nine months into the pandemic, however, he got a call from someone who said they were from the Federal Emergency Management Agency. “They said they needed catering for a school system to feed kids,” Franklin says. “They needed stable food at room temperature, which isn’t what I do really.”

Still, Franklin figured out a menu of wraps, took the last few dollars from their bank account and loaded up two vehicles of ingredients from Sam’s Wholesale. With help from his family, he made 800 box lunches.

“I still wasn’t sure this was a real person,” Franklin says. “But I didn’t have a choice. I told my wife this would kill us — that we’d go bankrupt. I didn’t know this man.”

When Franklin rolled up to the drop-off point and found sheriff’s deputies ready to hand out the food, he heaved a sigh of relief. “I got back to the store, and he wired the money to my account,” he says. “It was enough to pay payroll and a payment on every one of my bills. I didn’t make any for myself, but that was OK.”

Strong ties

The fact that the cafe is still going strong today is evidence of the hardworking community and its people — along with a few newcomers. Franklin has met people who moved from California, Florida and Minnesota, because they could live in a small town with NCTC fiber internet that allowed them to work from home.

“In fact, that one lady from Minnesota said that was one of her requirements for moving here,” Franklin says. “So, yeah, we owe a big thanks to NCTC.”

But locals and newcomers alike love the scenery, the livable pace and the strong sense of community that comes with life in a rural town. “I think it’s good that the cafe’s here,” Franklin says. “It sort of grounds the community.”

Story courtesy of NCTC.