Group of Local Investors Led by Bob Thames Purchases Marilynn’s Place

Major updates are in the works for the Madison Park po’ boy joint; Boz Baucum’s last brunch as owner will be Sunday, Oct. 12.

A group of local investors led by entrepreneur Bob Thames, co-founder of Single Source Business Solutions, has purchased Marilynn’s Place, a long-running po’ boy joint and brunch spot located at 4041 Fern Avenue in Shreveport. The restaurant will officially change hands on Tuesday, Oct. 14. Marilynn’s Place owner Boz Baucum will host his last brunch as owner on Sunday, Oct. 12 from 10 a.m. until 2 p.m. 

The restaurant will keep the name Marilynn’s Place under its new ownership. Thames said that changing the name and concept of the restaurant was an option that was considered but ultimately rejected. 

“The more I thought about it, the more it just made sense to keep it as Marilynn’s,” he said. “I asked Boz what he would think of us keeping this as Marilynn’s Place, and he said ‘Absolutely.’ This way, it gets to live on.”

Baucum opened Marilynn’s Place, his first restaurant, in a shuttered Texaco service station situated along Bayou Pierre. He named it in honor of his mother, Marilynn Watkins Baucum, who supported Boz’s education in a French culinary school and helped fund the restaurant’s startup costs. Marilynn Baucum died of cancer seven months after the restaurant opened. 

Marilynn’s Place built a following by hosting NOLA-style boozy brunches, enthusiastically welcoming pets on their patio, and cultivating an eclectic tribe of regulars for whom the restaurant has come to serve as a second home. As Marilynn’s Place grew, the Madison Park neighborhood around it flourished, adding high-traffic businesses like Ki Mexico in 2015 and Lowder Baking Company in 2019. 

Baucum said that his mother would approve of the new owners as “good stewards of her dream.” 

“Mom would have said that Bob was raised right,” he said. “She would have liked him. And the group of investors that he’s assembled are Highlands, South Highlands, and Broadmoor people with restaurant experience. They’re local or have deep ties to the community, and so I really feel comfortable passing the torch. I’ve had several people offer to buy me out, but the only one of those offers I ever thought twice about was Bob’s.”  

Shortly after the Oct. 12 brunch, the restaurant will close briefly for a deep cleaning and “revamping” that Thames said will include “a complete overhaul” of the bar, dining room, outdoor spaces, and patio. Expect the restaurant’s menu of Cajun- and Creole-inspired dishes to be “tweaked,” but “it’s still going to be your place for a neighborhood po’ boy and a beer,” Thames said. He expressed hope that the restaurant will only need to close for eight to ten weeks. 

“The initial plan is to invest in the renovation, get the restaurant reopened, and then continue to make investments over the next several years,” Thames said. “We all look at this place as a huge piece of the community, and we want it to be the best Marilynn’s Place that it can be.”  

The Oct. 12 brunch will also function as a tip drive benefiting the staff, who will be out of work temporarily while improvements are underway. During interviews conducted for this article, both Baucum and Thames repeatedly expressed their hopes that the transition would go as smoothly as possible for Marilynn’s Place employees. While he didn’t wish to speak for all of his current employees, Baucum shared that Elise LaBarre, the restaurant’s longtime manager, plans to return to her position as general manager of what he calls “Marilynn’s Place 2.0.”

After the restaurant changes hands, Baucum will sail off into the sunset.

“I’m going back out on the water,” he said, referring to his previous career cooking aboard cruise ships for Norwegian Cruise Lines and National Geographic. “I’m going to be a chef on a Mississippi River tug boat, going from New Orleans to Detroit and back again like Huck Finn.” 

Thames and his crew of investors will be setting sail at the same time as Baucum, albeit headed in a different direction. Speaking on behalf of the group, Thames comes across as genuinely committed to the restaurant and excited to see how an influx of resources and attention can refresh and improve the place.

Eats from Marilynn’s Place photographed by Chris Jay and Jim Noetzel.

“There’s nine thousand things that I want to do immediately,” Thames said. “But, first, we’re gonna clean this place up, give it a fresh coat of paint, put in some new furniture, and give it a whole new vibe. There is going to be a bar, for example, where you can actually sit down and have a drink.”

Baucum smiled sheepishly as he listened to Thames recite a punch-list of planned improvements.

“These are all things that I should have done,” he said.

Here’s the thing about Boz and his team, whose unpredictable energy made Marilynn’s Place thrive as a gathering place for its first fifteen years: Instead of doing the things that needed doing, they were usually busy pursuing absurd sidequests that made the restaurant so much fun. Instead of hot-mopping the hallways leading to the bathrooms, they were trying to figure out if a hot air balloon could safely be landed on the roof for a Mardi Gras party. Instead of upgrading the bar to something that didn’t feel like it was built overnight by frat brothers, they were dreaming up the restaurant’s incredible Thanksgiving Destroyer po’ boys or cookie butter-stuffed beignets.

When Boz got the hankering to cook German cuisine, he’d go missing for a half day and return in the late afternoon, his Range Rover weighed down with crates of sausage from his favorite Texas sausagemakers. There was always an easier, more “turn-key” way to do things, but Baucum and his team rarely chose it. Why have Sysco deliver a box of bratwurst to your restaurant, when you can personally drive to Plano, Texas and buy a box of handmade sausages from an elderly woman named Brunhilde, instead?

Bob Thames and his team of investors will inherit a lot of deferred upgrades and cleaning on Oct. 14, but they’ll also assume leadership of a restaurant that chronically eschews normalcy in favor of a good time. As much as I want to see a clean, functional Marilynn’s Place, I hope that it continues to not make sense in all of the right ways. 

Amid all of the number-crunching, reorganizing, and streamlining, I hope that the new owners will remember to light the barbecue pit with a flamethrower once in a while. I hope they will throw handfuls of cash from the roof of the building on the day of the Krewe of Highland Parade. I hope they shout “woo hoo” at strangers, kiss babies, and play The Meters a little too loudly when the weather is nice and all of the bay doors are open. I hope they make tons of money, but I hope they don’t always make sense.