07 Sep 2025 Stoby’s and the sandwich generation
By Donna Lampkin Stephens
In 1976, David Stobaugh was nearly finished with his degree in banking and finance at the University of Arkansas when he decided that career was not for him.
So, he looked to a higher power for guidance. “One morning about 2 a.m., while praying on a hill overlooking Fayetteville, I felt like the Lord put his hand on my back and said that I should go into the restaurant business,” Stobaugh, 71, remembered. “At this point, the only (service industry) experience I had was busing tables for a few months at the Sirloin Stockade in Springdale.”
Forty-nine years later, Stobaugh’s namesake restaurant, Stoby’s, the Conway and Arkansas icon, is celebrating its 45th anniversary. Its sister restaurant in Russellville opened in 1984. “It’s remarkable to me,” Stobaugh said of Stoby’s success. “I can remember thinking several years ago, when Frank Brannan’s (Drive-In, a long-time Conway landmark restaurant) had been around 50 years, and it was, ‘Wow.’ And now to realize you can see that within eyeshot, it’s just amazing. Just one small step at a time.”
After that conversation on the hilltop, Stobaugh spent several years in various restaurant positions all over the state, landing in Conway to work in management for the old Danver’s. One day in 1980, he drove down Donaghey Avenue, passing Mrs. Smith’s Pie Shop at the Robinson intersection. “I thought to myself, ‘That’s a good spot for a restaurant, right down the street from the college,’” he recalled.
“I went in and asked Mrs. Smith if she would be interested in splitting the rent with me, where she would sell pies and I would sell sandwiches. She said the place was driving her crazy and that she and her son-in-law, who owned it together, might just make me a deal. A couple of days later, she called me and said that if I bought her stainless-steel table and the pizza ovens she had bought to bake the pies, I could just take over the rent.”
With a $4,000 loan co-signed by his brothers, Stobaugh paid Mrs. Smith for the equipment. “She said, ‘Now I need a job. Do you want to hire me?’” he said. “I said, ‘Yes, ma’am, I do.’ She was my first employee and stayed with Stoby’s for 20 years. We kind of adopted each other since she didn’t have a son and I had lost my mother in college.”
He credits that partnership for a huge part of the restaurant’s early success. “She not only brought her delicious pies but also her years of experience and a warm, welcoming presence that customers loved,” he said. “Our small, unique menu and her comforting pies were a winning combination.”
A church friend had given him “some unusual but wise advice”: to have just one item on the menu. “This worked out well marketing-wise because it communicated, ‘It must be good; there’s only one thing on the menu,’” Stobaugh said. “It also worked in my favor because it was only Mrs. Smith and me in the beginning, and I only had one thing to cook in the kitchen, so consistency was easily achieved.”
After 45 years, the Stoby Sandwich, with its 33,000 combinations, is still the most popular item on the menu. Other signature items are the tuna pita, with a special recipe from the same friend who advised him to open with one item; the taco salad, with the dressing recipe from his friend Jim Crowson; and of course, the cheese dip. “I would experiment with it, through trial and error,” Stobaugh said of his creation. “In the early ’80s, people’s taste for spicy wasn’t what it is now, so the recipe for the original was very mild. That has turned out to be an advantage because we have toddlers eating it at 2 years old.”
Eventually, he was able to expand the menu, add more seating and hire more employees, several of whom have built careers with him. Betty Sims has been a waitress for 41 years. Jake Green has kept things organized in the back for 37 years. Waitress Debbie Patrom has been a staple for 29 years. Tim Ester retired 10 years ago as general manager after 26. Gina Perkins was the head waitress for 20. Pam Chastain was Stobaugh’s secretary for 20. In Russellville, he also has several long-time employees — Amanda Reed (15 years), Chastine Baggett (10), Emily Massey (nine), and Melanie Branch (eight).
Even long-time recipes can be tweaked. “I heard somewhere that you cannot improve anything 100 percent, but you can improve 1 percent 100 times, so that’s sort of our approach to things — a little here, a little there,” he said. “We’re always open-minded if we can improve something.”
Recent examples of that willingness to innovate include an improved roast beef sandwich, despite a higher cost, and a shift to packaged Tostitos tortilla chips for to-go orders after in-house chips started going stale waiting for pick-up.
Stobaugh said he’s not a cook, but he knows what he likes, and he has been inspired by other restaurant offerings. The grilled chicken salad was inspired by the old Bennigan’s. A manager came back from a Florida vacation with the idea of a peanut butter and jelly cheeseburger, and now Stoby’s PB&J Jalapeños is the second-best-selling specialty burger.
Saturday breakfast is one of the busiest times of the week. Lunch and dinner are also lively. He said 40 percent of the business is through the drive-thru. “It does help that we are in the residential part of Conway,” Stobaugh said. “With the hospital next door, the college down the street and 40 years of graduates coming back, we pull in a lot of people.”
The original building suffered major damage during a 2016 fire, but Stobaugh and his wife, Patti (whose PattiCakes Bakery was another local favorite), rebuilt to make it look like the original building, with expanded seating. “That turned out to be a very wise decision,” he said. “The familiarity of the building has played a big role in the success of our reopening and our current business, which is now more than double what it was before the fire.”
He listed three pillars from restaurantowner.com as keys to Stoby’s success: culture, systems and finances. But perhaps the biggest has been customer loyalty. “That has certainly been a huge part of the equation,” he said. “The secret to Stoby’s is customers loyal enough and committed enough to call us and let us know when something is wrong. That’s been a help.”
The restaurant isn’t open on Sundays, but Stobaugh has found it very satisfying to turn the building over to nonprofits for pancake fundraisers, which he does often.
His son Clifton Stobaugh, “who grew up in the business having to stand on a stool to use the dishwasher,” is the manager of Stoby’s Conway. Son David Cooke, who holds a business degree from the U of A, manages Stoby’s in Russellville. “It is extremely satisfying that they are in the business,” Stobaugh said. “They are certainly both meaningful and helpful to me.”
The little pie shop on Donaghey has become a successful restaurant. “And it was all because of a prayer on a hill, a few kind people and the willingness to take a chance,” Stobaugh said.
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