Best barbecue joints in the South: a tour with father, son, dog — Heaven on earth
I ate at 10 of the South’s best barbecue joints and lived to tell the story.
Six of them came in a single, glorious day. It shall henceforth be observed as a personal holiday to further celebrate hedonism and gluttony on an annual basis.
I highly recommend you take your own Rolaids Tour. For encouragement, here are a couple of free tips:
▪ Either eat the hash or don’t eat it. But don’t go to a pig parlor and ask what’s in it.
▪ Do it on weekdays so you can fit in the door. Some of these joints get rocking on Saturday, especially when SEC football games are being played nearby.
Mind you, I didn’t say anything about fitting through the door on your way out. They have forklifts for that.
This was a 1,000+-mile trip of a lifetime.
I hopped in my son’s Subaru bound for the Promised Land with Winston, the 11-year-old Labradoodle, in the back seat and Sturgill Simpson on the music box. We started on Hilton Head Island and landed in the Big D in Texas.
We ate at Fresh Air Barbecue in Jackson, Georgia; Fox Bros. Bar-B-Q in Atlanta; Saw’s BBQ (an acronym for “Sorry Ass Wilson”) in Homewood, Alabama; the original Dreamland Bar-B-Que in Tuscaloosa, Alabama; Archibald’s Bar-B-Q in Northport, Alabama; A&R Bar-B-Que, Cozy Corner Restaurant, the Bar-B-Q Shop, and Charlie Vergos’ Rendezvous in Memphis; and Cattleack Barbeque in Farmers Branch, Texas, outside Dallas.
Now I go to sleep at night remembering tidbits from our tour.
Fresh Air has been in the same rustic building since 1929. I asked to see the pitmaster, and the lady at the counter said, “He’s mopping the floor for me right now.”
Pitmaster Shane Watson cooks 35 hams a day on indirect heat from hickory, post oak and pecan wood. Outside, wood is stacked in neat rows, and smoke drifting from a stout chimney starts the mouth-watering.
For 90 years, they’ve offered finely chopped barbecue, Brunswick stew and cole slaw. That’s the menu. With maybe some homemade brownies. That’s all you need. But some people will still ask for chicken fingers.
Fox Bros. is part of the new generation of barbecue joints. It’s hip, near Little Five Points in Atlanta. The Rolling Stones play in the background, and the menu offers salad. And wine. Do what?
Dreamland
Dreamland’s original location in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, is a mecca I’ve heard about since the Israelites were wandering in the desert.
John “Big Daddy” Bishop, a brick mason, “prayed to God asking if there was another way to support his family as he grew older,” the simple menu says. “Mr. Bishop says that God came to him in a dream and told him to build a bar-b-que café on the land beside his home and that’s just what he did.”
It was same year Paul “Bear” Bryant came to coach the Crimson Tide in Tuscaloosa, further proving divine intervention. Today, Dreamland has stores all over the place. But we wanted only the original.
Pitmaster Reginald Bell cooks 21 racks of spare ribs at a time, for about 45 minutes, over hickory wood in Big Daddy’s brick pit.
I told him I’d heard the sauce is addictive.
“Can be,” he said.
The joint is warm and lived in. It opens at 10 a.m. We got there at 9:50 a.m. It smelled smoky, like heaven’s going to smell. We ordered four bones. They came warm off the pit. They call it a rib sandwich. It came with two healthy servings of sauce and four slices of white bread, the kind with fewer nutrients than the plastic bag it comes in.
This was the breakfast of champions. We were at the right place at the right time. This was my favorite of all those we sampled from Robert F. Moss’s “South’s Top 50 Barbecue Joints 2019” list in Southern Living magazine.
‘College GameDay’
Archibald’s BBQ, across town in Northport, Alabama, is a hole in the wall around the corner from the New Zion Baptist Church, where a sign says, “A lot of kneeling will keep you in good standing.”
No. 2 LSU was coming to town Saturday to play football against No. 3 Alabama. ESPN’s “College GameDay” was expected to pop in at Archibald’s, along with swarms of Cajuns.
Pitmaster John Williams would start cooking for the Game Day crowd around 1 a.m. on a grill that that holds 33 slabs of ribs and six Boston butts.
What’s the secret? I asked him.
“The wood,” he said. “We don’t use no rub, nothin’. The pit’s seasoned. It’s been here since 1962.”
Memphis
In Memphis, we ate the sloppiest sandwich of them all at A&R Bar-B-Que. Slaw got all mixed up with tender pork pulled from shoulders cooked over Royal Oak charcoal out back. Pitmaster Damon Briggs said he was kin to the founders three generations back, Andrew and Rose, his auntie.
Artwork on the wall gave us our first Elvis sighting. We drove down the street to actually lay eyes on Graceland, thank you very much.
The sauces were sweeter in Memphis. The Bar-B-Q Shop boasted barbecue spaghetti. The slaw at Rendezvous was yellowish with mustard, and the ribs were cooked with dry rub. Cozy Corner was the first place to have an open Bible on the counter, as well as a photo of Leah Chase from New Orleans on the wall.
At Cattleack Barbeque in Farmers Branch, Texas, near our destination in Dallas, I got a “Toddfather” sandwich named for proprietor David Todd. This popular joint is open for lunch on Thursday and Friday, and has been judged best in Texas.
The Toddfather has pulled pork on the bottom, a layer of beef brisket next, and then some rowdy sausage with a serving of slaw on top. And a pickle.
It separates the men from the boys. The sheep from the goats. The living from the dead.
And I lived.
