New restaurant in Boyle offers a mix of delicacies
By Angela Rogalski
The Bolivar Bullet
“Mississippi Delta Latitude – Tropical Attitude.” The logo for Darry’s Food-n-Drink, a new restaurant located at 122 East TM Jones Hwy. in Boyle, is the premise for the atmosphere around the eatery. Owners Darry and Debbie Davis want the Darry’s Food-n-Drink experience to focus on casual, quality and good-time food at reasonable prices.
“Our mix of the Mississippi Delta and the Gulf Coastal waters makes for a gumbo-type of fun and an experience you will always remember and hopefully tell others about,” said Darry Davis. “Our restaurant has been opened for a little over three weeks now, but started in 2019 when I was able to purchase several lots in downtown Boyle. We spent 19 months building the restaurant from the ground up, so it was born during the pandemic. We’re going to build four more buildings on the other property there and rent it out to other businesses.”
Davis said his main goal with buying these lots was to create a great dining, shopping, arts, and recreation environment for those who live and shop in Boyle.
“I want to provide and promote Mom and Pop businesses in the buildings we build,” he added. “I want to build on an authentic sense of place and help attract local businesses and residents as well as visitors, which creates a thriving and exciting community. I moved from Washington County to Bolivar County in 1975. Often, I would pass through Boyle and see a lot of remodeling going on downtown. Curiosity got to me and one day I stopped to check it out. That’s when I had the pleasure of meeting the guy that was responsible for the ideas that started the early revitalization project. His name was Doug (Dud) Collier. He had a great vision for the future of the downtown Boyle shopping area, creating new business opportunities. I wish I could have gotten to know him better, but unfortunately, a sudden tragedy took his life, and his downtown Boyle revitalization dream came to an end. Since then, over the years, I have often thought about his project and wondered “what if” he had finished. So hopefully I can continue his dream.”
Davis is no novice when it comes to the restaurant business as Darry’s Food-n-Drink is the third eatery that he has owned overtime.
“We had a restaurant in Merigold in the ‘90s, and then we opened Darry’s Eat Place in Cleveland and had it for several years,” he added. “And now we have Darry’s Food-n-Drink.”
Davis said that the restaurant is a combination of steak and seafood with many other tasty dishes offered to temp your palate.
“We serve premium steaks and we’ll have crawfish in season, along with oysters. We have something we call “Skinny Cat,” which is fried catfish, but sliced extremely thin and battered. It’s really good. You can get the “Skinny Cat” in an appetizer or in a plate with all the fixings. We also serve BBQ, po’ boy sandwiches, etouffee, and everything is homemade. The etouffee has blackened shrimp around it, so it’s extremely tasty. We have Red Beans & Rice, gumbo, and we make our fresh, homemade chili. We even have the “Shotgun,” which is famous in the Delta; it’s a chili cheeseburger with no top bun on it. We serve hand cut fries and vegetables, such as asparagus and green beans. So, the menu is a variety of different dishes. And we have a full bar with plans to have live music in the future. Darry’s is a very unique experience with our homemade family recipes and we hope people will come out and see us.”
The restaurant is opened Tuesday through Saturday for dinner, from 5:00 p.m. until 9:00 p.m., but is available on Sundays for special occasions.
For more information, visit their website at: www.darrysonline.com