RIB & SIRLOIN RUNNING AGAIN, WITH NEW FOLKS AT HELM

                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, January 17, 1993                   TAG: 9301150104
SECTION: CURRENT                    PAGE: NRV-10   EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY  
SOURCE: PAUL DELLINGER STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: PULASKI                                LENGTH: Medium
RIB & SIRLOIN RUNNING AGAIN, WITH NEW FOLKS AT HELM
A Wythe County couple is working to bring a new restaurant to Pulaski County.
Actually, it's an old restaurant - the Rib & Sirloin next door to the Red Carpet Inn off Interstate 81 near Pulaski - but it had been closed for about a year when Doug and Linda Chrisley leased it.
Now its Rib Room is open Fridays and Saturdays, 5-9 p.m., and its lounge from 5 p.m. to midnight. It also offers a Sunday buffet, noon-3 p.m., with country food and homemade desserts, the work of chief cook Shirley Baker.
"That lady back there can flat cook," Doug Chrisley said.
The restaurant will offer music, dining, beer and wine, and dancing in the White Buck Lounge on Saturday nights.
"We have different bands each week," Chrisley said. He came up with the name when he happened to glance at the deer he had mounted after a successful bow-hunting trip.
By spring, the Chrisleys hope to offer breakfast and dinner on a regular schedule.
"It's going to take a while to get it all going," Chrisley said. "A lot of people still don't know it's here."
But the word is spreading. The restaurant has already attracted customers from as far as Roanoke, he said, some of whom remember eating here in its earlier days.
"It had been closed for a year," Chrisley said, "and we worked on it for three months."
The effort that went into it is obvious. The dining room with its distinctive red and white decor and the sparkling floors leading to the lounge with its leather-back furniture look much as they did when the restaurant was new in the 1960s.
That was before completion of Interstates 81 and 77, which cross west of here in Wythe County, helping to make that a popular place to stop and eat.
It used to be that lots of Wytheville folks would drive up I-81 to the Rib & Sirloin Restaurant when they wanted to eat out. Today Wytheville has 36 restaurants of its own in the town limits.
Chrisley, who lives near the Shot Tower State Park in Wythe County but is from Draper on the Pulaski side of the county line, said he and his wife thought of adding another restaurant in Wythe County. But they decided it would be an advantage to have the built-in Red Carpet Inn traffic to draw from.
The motel is advertised, but it is difficult to see the lights of the restaurant from the highway. So the new operators and assistant manager Daisy Holt of Dublin are depending on customers who have found it to talk it up.
"I love being around people," Chrisley said. "And this is what I wanted to do. I was going to build one up in Wythe County, but I never could get the right location and so forth."
About 12 people work at the restaurant, he said.
A number of business people have talked about the need for more dining establishments in Pulaski County lately. That kind of talk is encouraging to Chrisley.
"That's what I tell 'em all. If they support it, we'll do good, I believe," he said.

by Bhavesh Jinadra by CNB