Owner works to re-open doors after popular barbecue restaurant goes up in flames

PARSONS, Tenn. — After a local barbecue restaurant is damaged in a late night blaze, the shop owner is working to get his family tradition up and running again.

“I tried my best to build it to where it would be fireproof, but it’s not 100 percent perfected yet,” Ramey’s BBQ Shop owner Daryl Ramey said.

A fire damaged his restaurant Friday night, forcing Ramey to temporarily close the doors.

“When you have grease involved and you’re cooking whole hogs, anything is possible,” he said.

Lt. Joe Vaughn with the Parsons Police Department was the first on scene.  He says the fire most likely started in the pit of the restaurant.

“I noticed a lot of heavy smoke in town and I started looking for the source,” Vaughn said. “I came back and noticed there were already flames starting to come through the windows.”

Vaughn says no one was in the building when the flames broke out.

While debris and ashes littler the restaurant’s front steps for now, Ramey says he’s working hard to get the doors back open.

“We’re going to try to get it put back together within a couple weeks, it won’t be down long,” he said.

Ramey says he hopes to have his family tradition back up and running by April.

“This is just a bump in the road, that’s what I told the kids,” he said. “We’ve just got a bump in the road, and will be back hopefully better and stronger than before.”

Investigators with the Parsons Police Department say this is not the first time the building has caught fire.

They say it most likely was a grease fire that caused the damage.

No injuries were reported.