Our Story

Owner: Read this through and fix anything that isn’t right: the year you bought the hotel, what you restored, and anything your guests should know about the building. Add old photos of the hotel if you have them.

In 1910 Mamie Cornellia Neyland Patten built a two-story hotel across Austin Street from the Jasper County Courthouse and named it for her two daughters, Belle and “Miss Jim.” Mrs. Patten and her four children were active in Jasper’s civic and social life, and her hotel became a fixture of the square.

After her mother died in 1936, Miss Jim took over. Traveling salesmen filled the rooms, and from the 1930s until Miss Jim’s death in 1974 the hotel also housed Jasper’s Western Union telegraph office: for forty years, news came into town through the Belle-Jim’s front door.

The building is a well-preserved example of vernacular residential design with modest Classical Revival details. It was named a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark in 1998, and the state marker stands by the front porch.

The Guizar family

The hotel had been for sale for years when Ed and Sujey Guizar came from Houston and took it on. Ed totally remodeled the building, and today the Belle-Jim is family-owned and run: rooms upstairs, and Sujey’s New American Table in the old lobby downstairs.

Sujey Guizar is the owner and, as Ed puts it, the backbone of the place. Sujey Jaramillo is the general manager.

Chef Ed

Owner and Executive Chef Eduardo Guizar is self-taught. He started in 1999 at Shadow Hawk Country Club in Richmond, Texas, under Chef Mark DeNittis, and was promoted to sous chef in 2002. He learned hotel kitchens as sous chef to his mentor Chef Jim Mills at the Houstonian Hotel, while also cooking under Chef Miguel Rodriguez back at Shadow Hawk.

As Executive Chef at Blackhorse Golf Club in Cypress he won Vida Magazine’s Emerging Chef Award in 2004. He spent four years leading the kitchen at Safari Texas Ranch, cooked at the Magnolia Hotel in downtown Houston, and then served as Area Director of Food & Beverage for American Liberty Hospitality’s downtown hotels, including the Embassy Suites and The Sam Houston Hotel, where he helped launch Pearl Restaurant & Bar and The Veranda rooftop venue.

Now he cooks in his own kitchen, on a stove nearly as old as the hotel.