
photograph by michael donahue
Linda Huckaby and her son, Josh Huckaby
Back in the 1950s, I remember my dad telling us the Green Beetle Café was the roughest bar in Memphis. My brother and I always liked the sign picturing a green beetle on the front of the building on South Main.
I asked Linda Huckaby about the iconic bar/restaurant. Huckaby, daughter of the late Green Beetle owner Frank Liberto and his wife, Mary, grew up at the business, and she’s currently working on a book about it.
“It had a really bad reputation,” she says. “I remember my dad throwing people out of the Beetle. They rented a lot of rooms to river people. Some rough people would get off the riverboats and stay there.”
Huckaby’s son, Josh Huckaby, who now owns the Green Beetle, says, “I know it was established in 1939. My grandfather originally owned the whole block of South Main, from Vance down to Pontotoc.”
It’s moved around a bit. The Green Beetle used to stand across Vance from its current location, Linda says. Her father also opened a liquor store called “Frank’s Liquors” next to the restaurant.
She still remembers the delicious Green Beetle hamburgers her father made with hand-pattied beef or ground chuck, mustard, pickle, and onions, then cooked on a flat grill. She enjoyed “just watching what goes on downtown. My dad was raised Catholic Italian so he was very strict. When we would go downtown, we could walk to Pontotoc and Goldsmith’s and that was it.”
Frank Liberto “was ahead of his time,” Linda says. “He played music at Christmas with an old tape recorder before places had music in their buildings. He only had a fourth-grade education; I’d read to him almost every night. Dale Carnegie (How to Win Friends and Influence People) was his favorite. He could read, but he never read a book.”
Her mother took over after Linda’s father died in 1977. “My mom tried to run it by herself and that didn’t work, so she sold it,” says Linda. “It was pretty much a honky-tonk and whatever.”
Josh Huckaby, the current owner, was working as a food and beverage manager in Charlestown, West Virginia, and remembers when the late Bud Chittom called him and said, “‘Hey, I’ve got your grandfather’s building available if you want it.’ He had bought the building years and years ago.”
Josh quit his job and moved back to Memphis. “Who has the opportunity to take over their grandfather’s famous restaurant?”
The Green Beetle had changed hands multiple times. “It was a late-night place, open until 6 in the morning, when I took over. It had gotten in trouble and lost its liquor license. I had to come in and clean it up.”
He remembers calling friends to see if their young-adult kids needed jobs as servers. “They said, ‘They’re not working there.’ It took time to rebrand. I put in a lot of time and energy. I didn’t want to be the bar where everybody’s ripping shots. I wanted to be known for food.”
The Green Beetle is now a welcoming place with tall French doors, which Josh added to the front. The walls, which are loaded with old newspaper and magazine articles about the Green Beetle, are still painted bright green.
They have an extensive menu, which includes oysters on Mondays and prime rib on Thursdays. They also serve “farm-raised Mississippi catfish.” As far as their most popular food item, Josh says, “Hands down it’s the burger.”
He plans to put in a breakfast spot next door where Frank’s Liquors was located, featuring combos like brisket and biscuits. “We’re also going to get an indoor smoker and put it over there and smoke meats for all the restaurants.”
He plans to name that restaurant after his grandfather. “I think we’re going to call it ‘Big Frank’s.’”
So, why did Linda’s dad name his place the Green Beetle Café?
“The story he always told me was that when he was young he had a paper route and used to go down where The Peabody is,” Linda says. “There was an old Greyhound station, nearby and it had a sign that said ‘Green Beetle.’ For some reason, he told himself one day he was going to open his own place and call it ‘The Green Beetle.’ And he did.”
Years ago, I wrote about what happened to the original Green Beetle sign. I remember an artist bought it and had it in his apartment on South Main; I lost track of it after that. Linda showed me a newspaper story she had saved. The sign sold a while back at auction for $16,000.
The Green Beetle is located at 325 South Main.