Macon Magazine

Richie Jones saw his career going one of two directions; insurance risk manager or restaurant manager. Insurance is what he’s supposed to be doing with his college degree from the University of Georgia, but the crazy, hectic restaurant world was more to his taste. He is now the proprietor of Downtown Grill in Macon.

“I enjoy the fast pace of a busy restaurant, whether it’s waiting tables, tending bar or cooking in the kitchen,” Jones said. “There’s a rush to it that I like. I work better under pressure.”

While in college, Jones got his first restaurant job working in a kitchen because he wanted to learn how to cook. He was moving out of the dorm and into a house and thought he should be able to prepare something other than ramen noodles. His interest in cooking grew beyond merely feeding himself, and he began collecting cookbooks and experimenting with recipes. However, it wasn’t until he bought Downtown Grill that he had a chance to try his experiments on customers.

It started with the desserts. Jones noticed that one of Downtown Grill’s more popular desserts, a white chocolate macadamia cookie with ice cream, didn’t sell as well in the winter. He thought bread puddings were wintery so he started searching through recipe books, inspired by the memory of a fabulous bread pudding he’d eaten at Crab Daddy’s on St. Simons Island.

“I found a Paula Deen recipe for chocolate bread pudding and it was OK, but I thought it was missing something,” he said. “I changed the sauce to one with heavy cream and white chocolate. I made it less healthy than she had it.”

Since then, he’s revised other recipes to create a bananas Foster bread pudding and his newest dessert, a triple chocolate-chip cookie with mint chocolate-chip ice cream. It’s hard to be more decadent than Paula Deen, but Jones somehow has managed to do it with his desserts.

Many of the main entrees are similar to previous owner Tom Noelke’s rendition of them over the years, but Jones has added his flair and updated many of them.