In downtown Greenwood, at the intersection of Ramcat Alley and Main Street, is a restaurant that serves Southern and Creole fare hot — with a side of crispy fried green tomatoes and tangy comeback sauce.
If the smell of fried catfish and steaks sizzling on the grill doesn’t guide you true, a sign hanging over the sidewalk makes sure you can’t miss the entrance of Fan and Johnny’s, a Greenwood culinary gem that’s been feeding the Delta since 2016.
Taylor Bowen-Ricketts is owner and head chef of the restaurant, which she named after her grandparents. The Jackson native turned Greenwood resident is the creative mastermind behind the restaurant’s award-winning cuisine and the flair of its decor.
Once customers step inside, they are greeted by an atmosphere that is uniquely Delta. Hand-painted drawings and artistic representations of the Southern lifestyle hang from the walls alongside larger artistic pieces. One piece depicts a kitchen, and another shows some of the animals used in Southern dishes.
Atmospheric lighting dangles above some of the booths, but not much extra lighting is needed during the daytime. The building once housed a station for judging cotton yields, and part of the roof is angled in such a way that sunlight beams down into the interior, providing a natural warmth.
Most of the art and decorations were created by Bowen-Ricketts, who earned a bachelor’s degree in art from the University of Mississippi. She has a flair for Southern landscapes, lifestyles, people and food, and it finds its way into her art. Food just happens to be another canvas that lets her passion for art shine through.
“It’s important to me that the food looks good, as well, because you eat with your eyes first,” she said.
Taste-wise, she isn’t afraid to add a creative twist to some of the South’s favorite comfort foods.
You can start your meal with a variety of appetizers, such as fried alligator with comeback sauce, pimento cheese queso with house-made chips, crab bisque with crostini, frog legs with lemon pepper vinaigrette or even tomato basil naan pizza.
For the main course, options include po-boys, grilled or fried chicken, fried catfish with bacon caper tartar sauce and even a portobello mushroom melt with mozzarella cheese, mayo and baby greens.
“This food is kind of the food that I think people want from me around here,” said Bowen-Ricketts, whose passion for cooking was stirred by watching her grandparents operate in their kitchen. “I try to offer a variety of menu items to make everybody happy, because everybody has different likes and wants and needs from food, and I try to meet a lot of those needs, as well as continue to maintain the integrity of the food here, because that is important to me.”
The menu also includes a large selection of salads that each feature unique proteins, such as salmon, crawfish, Nashville hot chicken and grilled chicken. Most dishes at Fan and Johnny’s are served with some sort of greens — Bowen-Ricketts’ way of sneaking a little health into her patrons’ day.
“I try to offer vegetables because I acknowledge that this is definitely a food desert,” she said. “The dietary situation here is horrendous, and the options are so limited around here. Not saying (our food) is all healthy — we do fry foods — but everything that we serve is high-quality and is all made from scratch.”
The key is fresh ingredients. She uses locally sourced items from nearby farms and even grows some of her own herbs in the alley.
“I had my first successful broccoli this season, so I’m pretty excited about that,” she said.
Heartier meals are also an option. Chow down on the steak frites, a 16-ounce ribeye served with garlic fries and comeback sauce; masa fried Delta catfish, sourced from the nearby catfish farms; or the duck confit and ricotta ravioli, served with portobello mushrooms and garlic cream.
Those items can be ordered every day, but there’s a special menu called “Today’s Offerings” that changes for both lunch and dinner and allows Bowen-Ricketts to let her creativity take over. She doesn’t follow a guide or weekly schedule but rather just cooks whatever is on her mind.
If you are lucky, you might be able to snag a seat at the chef’s table — a hidden spot right in the kitchen.
You get to see the action and the hustle and bustle of the kitchen up close, and Bowen-Ricketts or the waitstaff will come by and drop your food off.
For her standout creations and creative takes on comfort foods, she was named a James Beard Award finalist in 2011, and has been recognized by USA Today, Southern Living and other publications.
It all stems from her long culinary journey.
She’s been in the restaurant business since her college days in the early 1990s. In the early 2000s, a friend introduced her to Fred Carl Jr., the founder of appliance manufacturer Viking Range, who was looking for new management at a restaurant called Fresh Market on Park Avenue. Carl made Bowen-Ricketts a job offer she couldn’t refuse, and she moved from Oxford to Greenwood in 2005.
“That was when Viking was at the top of its game,” she said.
It was her first time in Greenwood, and she was immediately wowed by the community and the positive effects Viking had on people’s lives.
“When I got here, It was a magical place like that,” she said. “(Carl) made a place that wasn’t even supposed to be here. That’s one of the things when I first moved here that I really respected and still respect about the people here, because they were very proud to be here and very proud to be where they’re from and how people come back here.”
That restaurant eventually moved to the location of Fan and Johnny’s and was renamed Delta Bistro. During that time, Carl was keen on having some of the best chefs around work with Viking and would send Bowen-Ricketts to the Culinary Institute of America in California for more in-depth culinary instruction.
“He wanted the best for the best — and for that, of course, I’m forever grateful,” she said. “That’s an irreplaceable experience. So, for years I’d go out there for weeks here and there and did get formal training after the fact, and it was fantastic.”
Over the years, the business relationship between Carl and Bowen-Ricketts dissolved, and she purchased the building and opened Fan and Johnny’s, which has become a local and regional hot spot.
Through it all, Bowen-Ricketts has had to battle ever-fluctuating ingredient and food prices to keep up with a large and changing menu.
Recently, she also has dealt with the sudden loss of friend and fellow Fan and Johnny’s chef Webster Hunt. In the middle of March, Hunt and Bowen-Ricketts were in the kitchen during the lunch hour rush when he suffered a heart attack and “dropped dead right next to me,” she said.
Hunt, a husband and father of two children, was 40 years old and had worked with Bowen-Ricketts since 2009.
He was “like my right arm, and now it’s gone,” she said, holding back a few tears.
“He also loved to cook, and he knew he could cook. And the way he cooked and the way I cooked were very different, and I loved seeing my influence in the way he cooked, and I loved seeing his influence in the way I cooked. Together, we really made it work.”
She said it’s been a struggle to lose such a close friend suddenly, but continuing to cook for the people of Greenwood helps keep her going. With the closure of The Crystal Grill, the move of Lusco’s, the loss of other popular local spots and the influx of new fast-food chains, Bowen-Ricketts said she feels it’s important to carry the torch of local homestyle restaurants.
“I love to cook, and that’s why I’m here at the end of the day,” she said. “Everybody’s got to eat. We’ve got to eat; I’ve got to eat. So the best we can do right now is to maintain the quality and focus on positive changes and to maintain the integrity here and do what we’ve always done to make Greenwood as proud as we can. Because I want to make this place, with all its hardships and troubles, a better place and a bright light.
“I feel like I will have a restaurant forever. And I want to continue this commitment to Greenwood in a way that will continue to improve the quality of life around here as long as I can. And, we’ll just continue to evolve in this environment in whatever ways the future holds for us.”
- This article first appeared in Leflore Illustrated, a quarterly magazine published by The Greenwood Commonwealth.
