Willie Earl Bates – Memphis Flyer

Patrice Bates Thompson, owner of The Four Way Restaurant

The wait is over. The Four Way Restaurant will begin offering its full menu — just a bit tweaked — for takeout beginning Friday, July 17th.

That’s the restaurant’s famous soul food, including fried catfish, spaghetti, fried chicken, yams, and greens.

“My definition of ‘soul food’ is just delicious home cooking made with love that feeds your soul,” says owner Patrice Bates Thompson. “Makes you happy, happy, happy.”

The iconic restaurant has been serving a limited menu for the past several months, but now Thompson is ready to offer just about all the restaurant’s other items.

Fried catfish is their top seller, she says. “And the turkey and dressing and fried chicken run next, behind that.”

As for the menu, she says, “We’re going to kind of tweak it just a smidgen. Create specials on certain days.”

Pork chops were an every-Wednesday special, but, Thompson says, “I’m going to move pork chops to Sundays ’cause I know people really like them and they sell really well.”

Customers also will be able to get the restaurant’s popular neck bones, as well as their vegetables. “The only thing we use from a can are the pickled beets. Otherwise, we make everything in our kitchen. Our cabbage, yams, greens — they’re all fresh.”

The restaurant now will offer its regular menu items for call-in and walk-ups between 11 a.m and 4 p.m. on Fridays and Saturdays and every first and third Sundays. “We’re working on developing and online ordering service soon, which will provide contactless service.”

She’s not ready for in-house dining, Thompson says. They plan on opening “when the numbers have leveled off or dropped significantly. So, my thought is, when everything’s leveled off and we feel like it’s safe. I just don’t think it’s safe right now.”

Thompson is part of the Bates lineage that has owned the restaurant since 2002. Her parents, the late Willie Earl Bates and the late Jo Ellen Bates, bought the restaurant, which originally was opened in 1946 by Clint and Irene Cleaves. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is among the notables who have dined at The Four Way.

A native Memphian, Thompson was raised on her mother’s cooking. Her mother, who grew up in Haywood County, “learned to cook from her mother.”

And, Thompson says, “Things we have to go to the store to buy today my grandparents had in their backyard. Greens, cabbage, peppers. I could get chitterlings all year round if I wanted to.”

Thompson began cooking when she was in the fifth grade. “For some reason I learned how to fix spaghetti, which is actually the recipe we use today. Over the years I’ve kind of tweaked it to make it my own. And lasagna, too. One of my dishes I perfected early on before I went to high school. I’d periodically cook for my family. I learned how to fix spaghetti, lasagna, chili, and cakes. I did a lot of baking. So, those are things my mom would let me play around with and I perfected.”

Her spaghetti is extremely popular at The Four Way. “A lot of people don’t put a lot of meat in their spaghetti, but our sauce if very hefty when it comes to meat. It truly is a meat sauce. We use ground beef and plenty of fresh seasonings and dry seasonings that just brings flavor out. A lot of people put sugar in their spaghetti. I don’t do that. But it just has a powerful seasoning.”

Thompson, who was in middle school at the time, only visited The Four Way twice before her father bought the restaurant. She went on to Hamilton High School and then Xavier University in New Orleans, where she graduated with a degree in management information systems. “You would manage software progress on the computer. I had been in management since I graduated, but I was always managing people and departments. Not software.”

She remembers when her dad bought The Four Way. He “didn’t know how to cook at all. My daddy was not a cook. He was a business man. He was an entrepreneur. And my mom was a business education teacher for the Memphis City Schools for 42 years.”

Jo Ellen and Willie Earl Bates at The Four Way Restaurant

Her father “purchased the building with the goal in mind of having a business in the neighborhood he grew up in, LeMoyne Gardens. His hope, mine, my children and husband, we pray other businesses will come back to that community and be a part of that community to revitalize the community.”

Her father bought the building with a friend, Thompson says. “He didn’t know what he was going to do with it, initially. My husband, who has over 33 years of restaurant and food industry experience, convinced by dad to reopen The Four Way because of the history.”

Thompson met her husband, Jerry Thompson, at Xavier.

Her father “just kept the name of the original restaurant. People still refer to it as the ‘Four Way Grill,’ but for legal reasons my parents dropped the ‘Grill’ and just went with ‘The Four Way Restaurant.’”

At one point before her father bought the restaurant, other businesses were in the same building. “On that corner where we are the restaurant was there, a shoe shop was there, a pool hall. There were other businesses.”

But, she says, “All of them closed” before her dad bought the building. Her dad gutted the building and expanded the restaurant.

They didn’t have a lot of the restaurant’s original recipes when they opened, Thompson says. “I think we lucked up and found a couple of them, but most of the recipes we have are our family recipes.”

The restaurant was an instant success, much to her dad’s surprise. “It was also a shocker for him. He probably didn’t expect it would take off that quick. So, we were kind of bum rushed and we had some hard times ’cause it wasn’t as good as it needed to be. Some people were discouraged. But we regained the customers, some that we lost.

“I remember the day we opened there were people everywhere. We didn’t have enough employees to service everybody. We had some faithful people that stayed and waited and supported. ’Cause my dad grew up in Memphis. They knew him and they came to support him.”

Some customers “helped serve the first day. And I would say the first week. It was crazy. Maniac crazy. We were in over our heads. We were not ready. “

But “over the years with trial and error and just learning to organize” and with her husband’s experience, they’ve “gotten a whole lot better. We’ve done a tremendous turnaround.”

Thompson, who graduated from Xavier in 1989, worked at The Four Way from the time her dad bought it. “I worked part time. I was office manager at Metropolitan Baptist Church. I could walk from my church in five minutes in the next block and work at The Four Way.”

She did whatever she needed to do. “I’d work in the kitchen. I’d work the register. If I had to serve, I’d serve. To be honest, I still do that. Sometimes you’re short handed. You never know when your employees are going to come in and have a chip on their shoulder and not do what they’re supposed to do. I just fill in where I need to. You might come in next week and see me on the line.”

Her mother worked at The Four Way “until my dad passed. It was just me and my brother, Roman Bates. We lost my brother in 2013. We were all devastated by it, but my parents went through major depression. And I don’t think my mom ever kind of got out of that.”

Roman Bates, Jo Ellen Bates, Patrice Bates Thompson, and Willie Earl Bates.

Her mother took over the restaurant on paper, but, Thompson says, “I was doing all the work. She didn’t really do a whole lot of the physical work after my dad died. She was doing most of the paper work at home. And she would come up a couple of days.”

Patrice Bates Thompson and her mother, Jo Ellen Bates.

Thompson and her husband have two children. “JoElle Thompson — she was named after my mom — just graduated from Hampton University. A biology major. And our son gradated from the United States Naval Academy in 2018. Jerry R. Thompson.”

The Four Way Restaurant is a part of all of them, Thompson says. “Ultimately, my goal is to work another 12 to 15 years and try to hold it down. JoElle works with us full time. Her ultimate goal is to get her master’s in public health. I want her to reach her dreams and goals, but, ultimately, the restaurant is going to be passed down to them. I feel in my heart they may run the restaurant.”

And, Thompson says, “We’ll see. We definitely plan on keeping the restaurant in the family. My children will inherit what I inherited.”

The Four Way Restaurant is at 998 Mississippi Boulevard; (901) 507-1519 and (901) 305- 4488.

Jerry and Patrice Bates Thompson with their children Jerry Rashaan Thompson and JoElle Simone Thompson.

Willie Earl Bates, owner of the Four Way Restaurant in South Memphis’ Soulsville, USA community, died from cancer last week. I’m not sure the city of Memphis knows what it has lost.

Willie Earl Bates

In 2001, after 50-plus years in operation under Clint and Irene Cleaves, Bates purchased the tiny but famous restaurant. He had been an executive with Universal Life Insurance, a real estate developer, and, early in life, delivered The Commercial Appeal in a red wagon, of which he was quite proud. The wagon sits outside the restaurant today in a fenced garden courtyard, dedicated to Bates’ mother, the late Magnolia Gossett Bates.

Bates was also proud to be the owner of a restaurant that helped change history — and served some of the best soul food in the world. Clint Cleaves was Mayor E.H. “Boss” Crump’s driver, and Crump told all of his friends that they needed to support the Fourway Grill (as it was known then) and it soon became the first truly desegregated restaurant in Memphis.

It was also a popular gathering spot for civil rights leaders such as Dr. Martin Luther King, Rev. Jesse Jackson, and others. The Fourway was immensely popular among musicians, hosting the likes of Aretha Franklin, Elvis Presley, Gladys Night & the Pips, Ike & Tina Turner, and practically every artist who ever recorded around the corner at Stax Records.

I’ve been eating at the Four Way every couple of weeks since starting to work at Stax back in 2004. In 2014, I wrote a piece on Bates for Memphis magazine, and when I asked Mr. Bates what he thought about all of the celebrities who had eaten there (including hip-hop superstar Drake, who had just been there weeks earlier), he said: “I had a mother and daughter from Oklahoma in here not too long ago who had come from St. Jude. They had found out about the restaurant, and the little girl wanted to eat here. That was so touching, so satisfying, to know that we were able to make her happy during a time like that.”

That pretty much sums up Willie Earl Bates and why Memphis may not really know what it has lost.

Bates was a successful businessman and could easily have retired long before his death at 76, but he was too intent on making Memphis — and particularly Soulsville — a better place. He worked with numerous nonprofit organizations to help improve life in the community and often donated food to children’s organizations and other causes.

Former Mayor A C Wharton told me, “The Four Way always has been, and continues to be, a gathering place for community leaders. It may seem a bit quirky, but it was a status symbol to enter The Four Way through the back door and dine in the back room. Principals, doctors, lawyers, and accomplished entertainers, and occasionally, a skinny, hungry black Ole Miss law student like me could often be found in the ‘back room’ being served by Miss Dot.”

Various crews from the Food Network and Travel Channel featured his famous catfish, turkey-and-dressing, yams, peach cobbler, and chitterlings, which Bates always told me never to order, as he made a face and shook his head.

Last year, author Dave Hoekstra published the critically acclaimed The People’s Place: Soul Food Restaurants and Reminiscences from the Civil Rights Era to Today, and the first restaurant he visited was the Four Way. Hoekstra was asked by the New York Times, “If someone wanted to follow your path, but had time to visit only one city, what would it be?” Hoekstra’s answer: “Memphis. I know at least seven or eight soul food restaurants in Memphis. But to get to what we’re getting at in the book, with the whole combination of the food and the civil rights movement, the Four Way holds a special place in my heart — they were so giving with their stories and with their hospitality. Just the whole history of Memphis and the civil rights movement .”

When I wrote my story for Memphis magazine, it was pretty much standard journalism and storytelling. What I didn’t get to include was how much I loved Mr. Bates and what an important friend he was to me. He had a genuine light-show twinkle in his eye every time I saw him. He was one of the kindest people I have ever known. Memphis was lucky to have had him. I’m luckier to have been his friend.