LAKE DALLAS — Just as renovations of the hush puppy room at Tierney’s Duck Inn finish, following a fire last year, the doors of the well-known restaurant will soon close.

Greg Tierney, who re-opened the restaurant in May 2002, is planning to close in Lake Dallas by Dec. 1 and move to a location in Lewisville under the name of Old Town Cafe and Tavern in a renovated 1885 house on Main Street.

The decision to move, he says, was a hard but necessary.

“I’m really going to miss that place,” Tierney said. “I put my heart and soul into it for five and a half years. It’s hard to walk away.”

The 8,424-square-foot building is now for sale for $639,500, according to Steve Howard, whose grandmother, Nellie Howard, opened the catfish restaurant more than 60 years ago.

With the rights to the restaurant’s name, Duck Inn, and the knowledge of family recipes, Howard said he hoped to find someone to reopen the family’s legacy.

“Help me find somebody who wants to keep it alive, and I’ll do like I did with Mr. Tierney, and I’ll come and show them how to do the hush puppies,” he said. “I’m one of the only people who know how to cook them.”

Howard said that Tierney, who was leasing the building, wanted to purchase it, “but he didn’t have the funds to purchase it for what it was appraised for,” Howard said.

Tierney said he made an offer to Howard, but it was less than what the family was seeking.

The building needs renovation, he said, and the cost of the building was too much.

“It’s a gamble I’m not willing to take,” Tierney said.

Bruce Martin, a Lake Dallas-area business owner and former chamber of commerce chairman, said the restaurant’s pending closure did not come as a surprise.

“I knew it was coming,” he said. “I think the general reaction [to the news] is one that as far as a business decision, the cost of keeping the place open has become ridiculously high.”

Carol Ann Connors, a Lake Dallas council member, has been a patron of the Duck Inn since she was a toddler.

“I’m disappointed,” she said. “It’s one of my favorite places. I’ve been going there since I was in a high chair, and I’m 54 years old.”

Connors said she and her husband even have their own booth in the restaurant.

“It’s going to be a big blow for Lake Dallas,” she said, adding that the restaurant had regained its popularity under Tierney’s tutelage.

“When Greg took it over, he got the old recipes from the Howards, and that’s what brought it back,” she said.

The Howard family had operated the original Duck Inn from 1945 through the late 1990s, Howard said.

Afterward, according to Martin, two Mexican restaurants opened in the building.

But they didn’t last long, Connors added.

“There were a couple of [restaurant] owners in between the Howards and Greg that did not do well at all,” she said.

Howard said he is hoping to find a restaurant to move into the building, either through a lease agreement or by selling the building, even if it is owner-financed.

“I didn’t really want to get back involved in the business,” he said.

The irony of the situation, several said, was that the room where the hush puppies were made was finally ready to reopen after a fire damaged it in May 2006.

“Tierney felt it was too much of a hassle” to reopen it and then close it again several months later, Howard said.

It was the hush puppies that captured regional and national notoriety, he said.

A musician, Howard says he once ran into a couple in an airport in Vienna, Austria, who knew of the Duck Inn in Lake Dallas and its hush puppies.

“It’s world-known,” he said.

Howard’s grandmother opened the restaurant with $35 and four chairs in her living room, Howard said. The restaurant, as it grew, attracted attention from a number of well-known people — Jack Palance, Richard Boone, Byron Nelson, and even John Wayne — when the restaurant provided catering service to a Hollywood gathering at the former Cielo Ranch in Shady Shores.

“It’s an interesting place,” he said. “It just needs a really good operator that has some money to do some things.”

DAWN COBB can be reached at 940-566-6879. Her e-mail address is dcobb@dentonrc.com.

Old Town Cafe and Tavern

Greg Tierney, who also owns Mill Street Cafe in Lewisville, plans to combine the cafe into the new location on Main Street in an old doctor’s home that once was known as The Veranda restaurant. Tierney and a partner are renovating the building and hope to open the new restaurant by Dec. 1.

Duck Inn

Sitting on 1.09 acres, the restaurant also is backed by Lakeview Drive, which city officials plan to expand once a new toll bridge opens across Lewisville Lake. For information about the restaurant, visit www.duckinnsale.com.