Hungry Farmer Barbecue on East Crosstimbers

Picture by Lauren Meyers (sevfiv), 2015. Creative Commons license.
Our post today covers what is now and what has been Hungry Farmer Barbecue at 40 East Crosstimbers Street since around 1975 (I believe this is the first location), but what was once a location of Roy Rogers Restaurants, opened under Ram-Hart Systems in 1969 and surviving several years after the failure of the franchisee. (The Bryan store wasn't one of the lucky ones). Some additional information can be found here. At the time, we (I mean "SpaceGhost" and I, not the royal we) weren't aware of the whole Ram-Hart Systems debacle, so that thread only reflects what was known at the time.

Former Jojo's on Braeswood

A newspaper clipping from 2006 with a photo that indicates how long it's been abandoned.
This was a Jojo's from 1980 to at least 1998 but seems to have been converted to Denny's before closing around early 2001 (or late 2000). The pad was torn out in 2007, and redeveloped into townhomes about a decade later (just in time for Hurricane Harvey!). There's a HAIF thread as well, in which someone claims it was once Champs as well.

Former Randalls #50

From Showcase, cropped. The former Randalls is to the left, the freeway in the foreground is East Sam Houston Parkway. 14705 Woodforest Boulevard plays host to the main offices of Galena Park ISD these days, but it was built as one of the first Randalls "New Generation" stores (#50) with their distinctive, oversized architecture, this operated roughly from 1990 to 2000 before becoming the offices for Galena Park ISD, which gutted the interior while upgrading the exterior (mostly adding new windows). The New Generation stores (there was another similar store in College Station that kept its exterior until around the mid-2020s).

The New Generation stores were fantastic grocery stores at the time but most of them were in the worst locations, usually more blue collar instead of Randalls' more upscale clientele, so even before Safeway really dug into the chain, most of these stores weren't successful.

Despite the failure of the grocery store, a strip center built around the same time hosts Domino's and a few other storefronts.

Cleburne Cafeteria

Photo from Yelp, "Doug C.", taken in 2012, showing the 1990-2016 incarnation of the restaurant.
3606 Bissonnet Street has been rebuilt twice from what we know of. Home to Cleburne Cafeteria today, the address originally hosted Carter's Lucky 7 (built in the mid-1940s; Lucky 7 was a local grocers co-op) and the 5,400 square foot building later became Gerland's #4 before closing in early 1953. In 1958, the former grocery store was converted to a restaurant, Mexico City Restaurant (probably closer to Tex-Mex), and in 1969 became the new home of Cleburne Cafeteria, which had been previously at 1018 Cleburne since around 1942 (hence the name). In August 1990 the building was destroyed in a fire but was rebuilt and reopened in December 1990. Nearly 26 years later, in April 2016, a fire once again destroyed Cleburne Cafeteria. The restaurant rebuilt and reopened once more in November 2017.

This entry originally appeared on Carbon-izer's Houston entries and in that section, I mentioned a restaurant review guide Fearless Critics a few times before. While I've never eaten at Cleburne Cafeteria myself, they HATED it. Whether they were exaggerating or not, I found their review, which you can see here highly entertaining.