Popular home-cooking cafe known for cinnamon rolls sold to new owners near Fort Worth

Ginger Brown’s Old Tyme Restaurant & Bakery, a home-cooking cafe with a West Texas heritage and nearly 40 years of history on Texas 199, has been sold to the owner of other local cafes, Brown wrote Tuesday on Facebook.

Known for giant cinnamon rolls and one of the region’s best chicken-fried steaks, Ginger Brown’s has served crowds and long lines since May 1985 at 6312 Lake Worth Blvd.

New owner Mazen Haddad said his family plans to keep the cinnamon rolls, perhaps reopen for dinner and “keep Ginger Brown’s Ginger Brown’s.”

The Haddads also own Benbrook Cafe, JR’s Cafe in Saginaw and Moe’s Cafes in Azle and River Oaks.

“We love [Brown] and her restaurant,” Haddad said, adding that he hopes to bring even more pies.

Brown, whose father was a Pentecostal pastor in Odessa who also owned restaurants and motel coffee shops, wrote on Facebook that the Haddads are “humble, loving and energetic” and thanked God for the opportunity to meet so many guests and friends.

She started cooking in her family’s restaurants at age 12. At 20, she took out a loan and bid on some leftover J.C. Penney Co. department store coffee shop equipment to open Ginger Brown’s in the then-new Lake Worth Center on Texas 199 at Boat Club Road.

“I was 20 years old, with big dreams, full of energy, faith, confidence, a smidgen of experience and even less money,” Brown wrote on Facebook.

One of the Browns’ cooks in Odessa, Eva Stockton, came up with the recipes for Ginger Brown’s cinnamon rolls and breads, Brown said in a 1988 Star-Telegram profile.

Besides the chicken-fried steak — once ranked by Star-Telegram readers as a local top-10 choice behind legendary but long gone Massey’s Restaurant — Ginger Brown’s is also known for its “mile high” individual meringue pies.

Ginger Brown’s remains open for breakfast and lunch daily; 817-237-2114, gingerbrowns.com.