A railroad-car steakhouse manager, a Texas saloon and an Atlanta bookstore.

LongHorn Steakhouse began in Atlanta in 1981. English Wikipedia names four founders: George McKerrow Jr., his father George McKerrow Sr., Bill Norman and Bill Dukes. It says the original restaurant opened on 10 August 1981 under a longer name, LongHorn Steaks Restaurant & Saloon, in a building that had previously been an antique store.

McKerrow came from another themed chain. Speaking at an FSR magazine event and quoted in a feature published on 21 December 2023, he said he cut his professional teeth at Victoria Station, a California-based steakhouse chain with a railroad theme, and was a regional manager there in 1981. Wikipedia adds that Victoria Station was known for using refurbished railroad cars as dining rooms and that McKerrow had managed one of its restaurants, Quinn’s Mill.

The idea itself came from Texas. McKerrow told FSR that he was introduced to a “honky tonk saloon” in Texas called Hoffbrau Steak & Grill House, and that he and his partners brought a similar concept to Atlanta “and called it LongHorn Steaks on Peachtree Road”, in a yellow-fronted former bookstore on a curve of road with a one-way drive lane. In the same conversation he described the gap he saw in 1981: prime-rib chains and family-style steakhouses existed, he said, but not a Texas honky-tonk saloon of the kind he wanted to build.

The start was shaky. The Saporta Report, in a column by Chris Schroder dated 17 June 2013, says the neighbourhood restaurant had a difficult opening few months and turned around during Atlanta’s January 1982 Snow Jam, when McKerrow threw open the doors to welcome stranded residents. Wikipedia tells the same story in more detail: LongHorn offered drinks and menu specials to motorists caught in the storm, and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution columnist Ron Hudspeth, a regular at Harrison’s pub across the street, wrote about it.

RARE Hospitality, Darden and a founder who moved on.

The single saloon became a chain and then a public company. McKerrow told FSR: “We took the company public in 1992, and I retired in 2001.” The Saporta Report says the business evolved into RARE Hospitality International, where McKerrow served as chief executive and chairman, and that he gave RARE his resignation after a trip to climb Mount Kilimanjaro over the 1999–2000 New Year, leaving his post a few months later. Wikipedia says that by 1990 the brand had restaurants throughout the eastern United States, the Midwest, the Southwest and Puerto Rico.

In 2007 the chain changed hands. Wikipedia says that in August 2007 LongHorn Steakhouse, then owned and operated by RARE Hospitality International Inc., was purchased by Darden Restaurants, and McKerrow told FSR in 2023: “Darden has had it since 2007.” Darden Restaurants has owned LongHorn since 2007; Wikipedia describes the operating company today as RARE Hospitality Management, LLC, doing business as LongHorn Steakhouse, with Darden headquartered in Orlando, Florida. FSR notes that Darden is also the parent company of Olive Garden and Yard House.

The brand has since stepped outside the United States. Wikipedia says a LongHorn Steakhouse opened in the Philippines on 11 April 2025.

McKerrow’s later career kept the Western theme. After leaving RARE, he wrote a concept called Ted’s Montana Grill around the bison ranching of the media entrepreneur Ted Turner, the Saporta Report says, and showed Turner the business plan in May 2001; the two sealed the venture with a handshake. Both the Saporta Report and FSR date the opening of the original Ted’s Montana Grill to January 2002, and FSR places it in Columbus, Ohio. In his 2023 remarks McKerrow said that when he visits Darden’s headquarters the LongHorn team still respects the original culture: having fun at work, treating one another with kindness and welcoming guests “into our home”.

Design and documentation.

Grill rooms, steakhouses, burger counters and roadside family restaurants have long carried their names on the building itself as much as on a menu. A sign on a pole beside the road, lettering along a roofline, a painted wall or a neon tube above the door can all serve as the first piece of a restaurant’s identity that a passing driver sees, before anyone has stepped inside or opened a menu.

Inside, the same name is repeated in smaller forms: on printed menus and table cards, on paper placemats, cups and carry-out bags, on staff uniforms and caps, and in the fabric and colour of booths, counters and stools. Some of these chains have redrawn their buildings and dining rooms several times as owners changed, while others have kept an older storefront or interior in use for decades.

Each guide separates what independent, dated sources record from what the company says about itself — the founding story, the owners over time, the buildings and the advertising — and attributes each claim to its source, so that a reader can see where every fact comes from.

A steer’s name, a saloon’s manners and a dining room of paintings.

The name does much of the work. The original trading name, LongHorn Steaks Restaurant & Saloon, joined the name of a Texas cattle breed to two words that described what McKerrow was building: a place for steaks and a place for drinks. McKerrow’s own shorthand for it, in his FSR interview, was “LongHorn Steaks on Peachtree Road”, and the chain now trades as LongHorn Steakhouse, the name Wikipedia gives for the Darden-owned business.

The rooms carry the theme. Wikipedia describes LongHorn as having a Western and Texan theme, with each restaurant decorated with oil paintings, photographs and selected Western memorabilia. That decoration is the descendant of McKerrow’s 1981 “honky tonk saloon”, filtered through the experience he had gained at Victoria Station, where railroad cars turned a steak dinner into a themed setting. In his FSR interview he spoke less of fixtures than of manners: the welcome at the front door, the sense that guests are being received into someone’s home and the respect among the team that, he said, survives at the Darden-era LongHorn.

The menu names follow the same voice. Wikipedia lists dishes such as “Flo’s Filet”, the “Texas Tonion” and “Wild West Shrimp”, names that keep the frontier vocabulary on the plate as well as on the walls. The brand’s founding story, as Wikipedia and the Saporta Report both tell it, begins with a snowstorm, a columnist and a saloon that kept its doors open.

For a design guide, LongHorn Steakhouse shows how a Western theme can be carried from a single Atlanta saloon in a former bookstore into a national chain owned by one of the country’s restaurant groups, with the name and the dining room doing the storytelling. Compare it with Texas Roadhouse, another chain that borrowed Texas from outside the state, and Sizzler. For this guide we use saddle brown, rawhide and canvas with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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