If you walk into True Grit Cafe, there’s a good chance the proprietor herself will be the one who greets you before the door shuts behind you.
She doesn’t spend much time up in her office, where there’s always a pile of paperwork to sort through, orders to place and numbers to crunch. You’ll often see her in the restaurant, working alongside her staff, because Tammee Tuttle is just as quick to tie on an apron and jump in on the hot line, help prep or run platters of chicken fried steak to hungry customers.
It’s not all that different from when Tuttle and her first husband, Dale, bought the Grit in 1996. Back then, she worked 10 shifts a week, splitting her time between the bar and the kitchen.
“You do whatever is needed,” she said of how she spends her days at the restaurant. “You fill in wherever you need to be.”
“I don’t know how to be that owner that can watch my staff doing their best and going under and not help. So I am always there to help. It’s intimidating to some of my newer staff at times, because they think, ‘She thinks I’m incompetent.’ That has nothing to do with it. I am here to take care of my customers and help you make money. I want nothing from you, and I don’t take your money. I’m just here to help you.”
Forty years after its founding as a tribute to the 1969 Western filmed in and around Ridgway, True Grit remains true to its roots: a place built by the community, for the community. Within its walls adorned by assorted taxidermy and memorabilia celebrating The Duke, there’s Carol the 73-year-old server asking if you want a clean or dirty joke while taking your order. The twice-weekly poker club is shuffling cards and sipping drinks at a table upstairs.
Longtime Ridgway ranchers Peter and Deedee Decker created the concept for the restaurant. They initially eyed the building on North Cora Street that now houses Thai Paradise and offered $20,000 for it. When that deal didn’t come together, they shifted one block to the east and, led by architect Ted Moews and builder Kent Parkinson, built a new two-story building on North Lena Street. The internal south wall of the restaurant was the original external wall of Chambers Grocery from one of the first scenes of the movie.
“She put that kind of investment into this area when Ridgway had nothing going for it,” Tuttle said of Deedee. “It is a fabulously beautiful building.”
The restaurant opened its doors on New Year’s Eve 1985.
True Grit Cafe owner Tammee Tuttle holds a drawing of commercial buildings as they appeared on North Lena Street in Ridgway in the 1980s. The building she’s pointing to still bears the “Fort Smith Saloon” sign that was created when the film was shot in Ridgway in 1968. The restaurant is two buildings to the right. Erin McIntyre | Ouray County Plaindealer
The evidence of locals who helped create its atmosphere is all around, from that opening day. Customers enter beneath the stained glass window created by artist-turned-mayor John Clark. They walk past the towering fireplace that stonemason and longtime public servant Don Batchelder helped build and the taxidermied animals her second husband, Don Latham, hunted and collected.
Eleven years after it was first built, Tammee and her first husband, Dale, became the third owners of the Grit. Dale, an Oklahoma native, discovered the San Juans as an adventure-seeking college student in the 1960s. He and Tammee met in Florida, where she worked as a server in college and spent nearly nine years overseeing food service, catering and accounting at the zoo in Jackson- ville.
They visited Ouray County together in 1994, camping in a wildflower meadow.
“Then (we) came and spent a Christmas here, did my first snow angel, and I was hooked,” Tuttle said.
The couple took out a $58,000 loan and purchased the restaurant in August 1996, unaware they were at the tail end of the busiest time of the year and staring at a monthslong dry spell. At the time, Ridgway had one-third the population it does today and was even more reliant on warm-weather tourism than it is now.
“By January I was in tears, thinking we were going to go bankrupt because there was no cash flow,” Tuttle said.
To make ends meet, she started catering, providing food for everything from Christmas parties and dinner theaters to leadership retreats. She continues to cater across the Western Slope, and has recently rebranded that business as Grace and Grit Catering. Tuttle tried to sell True Grit in 2008 under an arrangement where she carried the loan for the buyer. But she took back the business 18 months later when he stopped making loan and rent payments, buying his food, alcohol and merchandise and making sure his vendors were paid. She came back and kept it open.
“It cost me $46,000 to take over my own restaurant, but it was the right thing to do,” she said.
A deep-seated belief in what’s right has always guided Tuttle and how she operates the restaurant. Shifting customer palates play a factor, of course, which is why the restaurant features vegetarian and gluten-free options. But for nearly all of her 29 years as owner, Tuttle has treated the Grit as a family-friendly place, one that still features a children’s menu. Not long after she and Dale bought the business, they decided they wanted it to be less of a bar and more of a restaurant.
She retains a vivid memory of a customer drinking at the bar from morning until night during the first Valentine’s Day they owned the Grit in 1997.
“That was very hard on me. I mean, I’m not trying to judge. It’s just, that’s not a place I wanted to be,” she said. “We wanted to be a restaurant that serves liquor, not a bar. Somebody else could serve that role.”
True Grit owner Tammee Tuttle poses for a portrait upstairs at her restaurant, in front of taxidermied wildlife collected by her husband, Don Latham. The decor of the Grit is part of its charm. Erin McIntyre | Ouray County Plaindealer
The key to keeping a 40-year-old restaurant alive? Tuttle says it’s about faith and determination.
“Faith that God will wake you up the next day and you’ll have the opportunity and he’ll bring people in your door. Determination that if you fail, it’s not because you didn’t try. You don’t let life happen to you. You have to be an active part of it,” she said.
The day is coming — probably sooner rather than later — when it will be someone else’s turn to own and operate the community institution. The 57-yearold Tuttle sold the building that houses the restaurant in 2022. She has tried to sell the restaurant a couple of different times the last few years and but recently took it off the market while she brings on board a new general manager and celebrates the Grit’s 40th anniversary. She’s eager to spend more time with Don, whom she doesn’t see nearly often enough while he works their ranch in Oklahoma.
In the meantime, she’ll continue to personify another quality she considers vital to running a successful business: Giving back.
She believes strongly in supporting the people and organizations who support the community, whether that’s purchasing an animal during the 4-H livestock sale at the county fair or buying and delivering coffee and 50 breakfast burritos to firefighters battling a house fire in the middle of the night.
“I think that you have to give back to be a part of something. You can’t just take,” she said.
