When driving on Highway 121 between Mayfield and Bardwell, or Highway 51 from Bardwell to Fulton in far western Kentucky, you get the feeling that industrialism has to a great extent passed the region by. Sure, you may come across some industry, like the “Hamtastic” Harper’s Country Hams factory on Highway 51 between Bardwell and Clinton, but mostly the region features a gently rolling landscape of cornfields, barns, grain bins, and a few homes and businesses like Yoder’s slaughterhouse. It’s a lush, green agricultural region. If you decide to head to this part of the world, make sure you have plenty of gasoline in the tank. Stations are few and far between.
You’ll find plenty of human industry, however, at Ricky’s Prince’s barbecue shack, and if you plan on getting any of his scrumptious smoked meats you better plan on getting there early. Ricky smokes Boston butts, mutton quarters, ribs, whole Smithfield hams, briskets, tenderloins, and chickens over hickory and red oak coals using old-fashioned methods—burning down wood in a big stove and shoveling the remaining hot coals underneath the meat every two hours. He’ll also smoke whole pork shoulders if anyone wants them.
When I first visited Ricky’s shack, it was 1:30 on a Friday afternoon and he’d already sold out of everything but pulled pork. I ordered a sandwich and sat down at one of two picnic tables nearby the ordering window. Whole fresh tomatoes covered one of the tables, telling me that they are hardly used. Indeed, Ricky’s place is mostly a takeout shack, and he sells all his meats by the pound. He also sells plates and sandwiches.
Ricky was very busy tending his fire and pits, but he gave me a few minutes to explain his methods and show me the custom pits underneath a metal garage-like shelter out beside his selling shack. Huge slabs of twelve-foot-long hickory planks were stacked up behind the shack. He gets the wood from a sawmill up the road in Barlow as he’s done for twenty years. Displayed nearby the ordering window was a photograph of Ricky with food-meister Alton Brown, who brought a caravan from the Food Network into Bardwell and filmed Ricky doing his work for the show Feasting on Asphalt. I hadn’t realized before visiting that Ricky had already achieved fame as a barbecue man. And when I tasted his work I thought the accolades were well deserved.
From my seat at the picnic table I watched the heat shimmering off the stove used for burning down slabs of hickory. Ricky has to saw the slabs into smaller pieces to fit them into the stove. When I asked Ricky his specialty, he said, without blinking an eye, “All of it.” The biggest local seller, though, is pulled pork and mutton. The Boston butts slowly soak up heat and pit smoke for eighteen hours. Briskets get fourteen hours. Mutton quarters—sixteen hours. Ribs and chickens—five hours.
Ricky got into barbecuing as a young man smoking meats with his father, Donald “Gene” Prince, on weekends when he wasn’t working for the railroad. Gene’s regular meats were chicken, ribs, pork, and mutton. Ricky was still in school when he came over and started helping. When Gene got tired of doing it, Ricky took over. I met Gene when I saw a small tank smoker off the side of the road in the small town of Barlow and stopped to check it out (Barlow was not on my list of places to visit). Ricky smokes everything down in Bardwell and then Gene picks meat up in coolers and brings it to Barlow, where he starts a wood fire in the smoker to keep the meat warm—a kind of family franchising. When I reached Gene’s place at noon on a Saturday, he’d already sold out of everything but pulled pork. I asked Gene his personal history of barbecuing, and he told this story:
When I first got started there at Bardwell, I had a colored friend that had a barbecue pit over there. We’d been cooking out in the country, just a bunch of us boys and all, and I went down and asked him if I could rent his barbecue place and he said, “Nope, you can’t rent it but you can use it.” Me and him worked on the railroad together for a long time. I started that down there and he stayed with me about two weeks and he said, “Well, you don’t need no help.” I’d just cook on Friday. When I got off work at the railroad I’d come in and fire the pit up, load it up, cook on Friday and sell on Saturday. We sold out every day by dinner on Saturday most time.
The sandwich I ate that Friday at Ricky’s shack was a hefty helping of pulled pork on a bun that was warmed and smashed flat with a spatula. The meat was lean, tender, and moist, with a smooth smokiness and distinctive sweetness from a sprinkling of sauce. The sandwich I ate on Saturday, up in Barlow, was magnificent—a very generous portion of tender pulled pork with some smoky bark mixed in, drizzled with a tangy–sweet vinegar sauce— sweeter than what you find down the road at Nicky’s in Clinton—that mixes nicely with the meat. You can feel the weight of the sandwich in your hand. I loved the aftertaste—a lingering smokiness on my taste buds along with the tanginess and pleasant heat of the vinegar from the thin sauce. And all this magnificence for $2.50 per sandwich.
When I said to Ricky that his overhead should be pretty low—just a shack and all—he told me that Kentucky passed a law in May 2009 requiring roadside barbecue stands to have a bathroom. Ricky’s place, lucky for us, was grandfathered in. So before true barbecue shacks become a thing of the past, get yourself down to Prince Pit BBQ and try some of Ricky’s art. He says he plans to keep doing it all his life. In 2009 Ricky was just shy of forty. I hope longevity runs in his genes.
Open: Monday–Saturday, 9:00 a.m.–until he sells out
100 Elm Street (drive north of town on Highway 51; Ricky’s shack is on the right, just after Highway 62 runs into 51); 270-445-0334
UPDATE: I returned to Prince Pit BBQ in May 2012, nearly three years after my initial visit, at 10:00 a.m. on a Wednesday. Gene had just pulled into the gravel parking lot of Ricky’s shack ahead of me. I reintroduced myself, ordered a sandwich, and took some photos. Gene said to Ricky, “She ain’t got much left over there, hon,” referring to the woman selling Ricky’s barbecue over in Barlow. “They hit her hard this morning early. They called and ordered three to four pounds and a whole butt and I don’t know what all.” Nearly sold out at 10:00! As I said, get there early.
Ricky cooks mutton only by special order now. The price of the meat has recently tripled, so he’s not smoking it regularly.
Ricky believes the recent influx of Muslims into the region, concentrated in Mayfield and Murray, has boosted demand. Simple economics. “Used to you could buy mutton for 99¢ a pound on the hoof; now they’re like $3.69 per pound.”
Gene said, “I was talking to that old man, Blankenship, he got fifteen to twenty [sheep] out there in the field. I said, ‘If you miss one, just don’t say nothin’ about it.’ He said, ‘Why?’ I said, ‘I might get one of ’em.’ Blankenship said, ‘I believe if you opened your trunk and throwed a little food in there they’d jump right up in there.’” Gene laughed.
Ricky now sells fried catfish on Thursdays and Fridays from 3:00–7:00 p.m., about a hundred pounds per week, cooked up in one little fryer inside the shack. People get fish and barbecue to go or sit on the weathered wood-slatted deck beside the ordering window or at the three picnic tables underneath a metal carport—a nice shady spot amid the oppressive summertime heat of the Mississippi River valley. I noted that Ricky had increased his picnic tables by one since my visit three years earlier. Seriously, you better get to Ricky’s shack before he decides to go modern!
TRAVEL NOTE: Bardwell lies about six miles from the Big Muddy as the crow flies. When traveling in that far-flung corner of the state, you might as well venture down to Wickliffe to see where the river becomes “the Mighty Mississippi” after the Ohio River runs into it. Wickliffe stinks because of a West-vaco paper mill in town—a local fellow told me he thinks it smells like raw cabbage and that he’d “gotten used to it”—but despite the foul odor you can still enjoy the scenery. There’s a big parking area by the river where you can watch the tugboats with their loud engines and accompanying barges. A brief drive west takes you over the big steel bridges over the Ohio and the Mississippi, and you can see where the rivers merge.
Build it and they will come, I thought as I sat in this way-rural restaurant during a Wednesday lunch hour and watched tables fill with customers of all ages, male and female.
The cafe is located across the road from a car wash and near signs for a post office and for the Abracadabra Salon and Rudd Pecan Farm, the latter owned by Blair Rudd, owner and pit master at Hardware Cafe. Blair, along with cooking partner Shane Cornwell of Metropolis, Illinois, helms the Smokin’ Hose Grillin’ Team, a group of professional firefighters for the United States Enrichment Corporation (the uranium enrichment plant in Paducah) who first competed in Paducah’s Barbecue on the River in 2006. They won the Reserve Grand Champion honor that first year in competition. They’ve developed their own distinctive rubs and sauces and sell their Smokin’ Hose Grillin’ sauce at the cafe. It’s sweet, with a vinegar tang and pepper bite.
Blair opened the cafe on January 4, 2011. Business is booming. “When we done our business plan, we figured on a little bitty community like this at 70 people per day: 30 for breakfast, 40 for lunch. We’ve only had one day at 78, and the rest has been between 125 and 202 is the biggest day we’ve ever had in here, and you can’t even get in here to sit down and eat.” They serve a steady local crowd of farmers and are also getting people driving down from Paducah (about twenty-five miles away) and elsewhere. Blair said he strives to keep prices reasonable for this agricultural community, because he has farmers who will eat there for breakfast and lunch, and would come again for dinner if the place were open.
Out of high school, Blair worked as a cutter for family-owned Partin’s Country Sausage in Cunningham, where he learned how to kill and cut up hogs. Such skills, plus his work as an EMT, have made him a master at cutting up competition whole hogs.
At the cafe, they cook Boston butts on an Ole Hickory gas-fired rotisserie using pecan wood from Blair’s farm. He and his wife own two thousand pecan trees. Pecan smoke isn’t as strong as hickory and oak and gives Blair’s pulled pork, chickens, St. Louis–cut ribs, and beef briskets an earthy flavor. “I cook on green wood because it smokes better and you don’t burn it up so fast,” Blair said. “Pecan puts a beautiful ring on your meat, but it isn’t overpowering. Oak throws a weird taste on meat and I never use it. I use exclusively pecan, and I will put some hickory on.”
Pulled pork is available every day, and other meats are available depending on specials. For instance, Wednesday is fried chicken day (I relished the leg quarter I ate with mashed potatoes and rich gravy), and Thursday is the day for big barbecue baked potatoes, which I also ate (a day early, because Blair wanted me to try it).
They cook brisket flats unwrapped for fourteen to eighteen hours at 200°. Blair said when he first barbecued briskets he wrapped them, and that was a mistake because “it turns them into beef roasts. You can’t slice them.” They often serve brisket on Tuesdays. Fridays are often good days to get pork ribs.
The successes of the Smokin’ Hose Grillin’ Team are displayed inside the cafe, including a first-place trophy for chicken at the Jack Daniel’s World Championship Invitational Barbecue.
Blair and company are on the ball to serve the highest-quality home cooking. “We cook fresh every day,” Blair said. “We don’t reserve anything. If we don’t sell out, we’ll let the girls [employees] take it home with them. Especially a rib or a chicken or brisket.”
Considering the devoted local customer base, Blair said he wanted to remain flexible with his menu offerings. He doesn’t want to burn people out. “I’d have thought by now that these barbecue potatoes would have fizzled a bit, but we’re serving eighty every Thursday, so they haven’t fizzled at all.”
I can see why: a two-pound baking potato stuffed with all kinds of tasty stuff—butter, sour cream, abundant pulled pork, and cheddar, topped with Smokin’ Hose sauce—all this goodness tipping the kitchen scale at just over three pounds! The potato took up most of the serving tray. I asked Blair if he’d ever done a nutritional analysis of this potato, and we both laughed.
“I’m afraid they’d shut me down,” he said.
I loved that behemoth potato. To gloss the Big Lebowski, the reddish-orange peppery Smokin’ Hose sauce crowning the potato and leaking down its beautiful skin really brought that tater together. The sauce has chardonnay in it. Not many people use wines in their sauces, and it works. Oh, yes, my friend, it works wonders.
If you’re lucky, maybe you can get to the cafe on a day when they serve pecan cobbler—like a peach cobbler, but with pecans. Their pies, as with almost everything at the Hardware Cafe, are all homemade daily.
Open: Tuesday–Saturday, 6:00 a.m.–2:00 p.m.
7647 U.S. Highway 62; 270-642-2411
Hickman County barbecue, as passed down by local legend Woody Smith, who got it from his father, one of the oldest remembered pit masters in these parts, is defined by whole pork shoulders cooked over hickory coals for a full day in covered cinderblock pits. The local sauce, served at all three barbecue places, is mostly white vinegar with a heavy cayenne pepper kick. Nicky’s sauce reminds me of pepper vinegar, while Grogan’s and Ruby Faye’s sauces seem a bit sweeter. All three trace their roots back to Woody’s original recipe.
In 2012 on the last weekend in April, Clinton hosted the Second Annual Clinton-Hickman County Spring Chicken Festival (A Feather Rufflin’ Good Time) on the town square. This community-building event features a 5K run/walk, food vendors, arts and crafts, a chicken wing cook off, and an “egg-chunkin’” contest in which elementary school kids construct homemade catapults to throw eggs. Part of Hickman County’s agricultural economy involves raising chickens. Gordon Samples at Ruby Faye’s Bar-B-Que told me Hickman County has the highest per capita chicken barn count (over two hundred industrial chicken barns in a county of fewer than five thousand people) in the state.
While over in this sparsely populated region, take Highway 58 west of Clinton to Columbus-Belmont State Park, situated on a bluff overlooking the Mighty Mississippi, for excellent river views and Civil War history. In spring the songbirds were just a-gettin’ it, and I sat on one of several park benches in the delicious shade of an ash tree on a weekday afternoon in May and watched the barges on the river. It’s a relaxing place for a picnic, and I imagine—considering the high vista—that the western sunsets over the river are magnificent.
From the parking lot at Nicky’s, you can’t see much but corn, wheat, and sky. Fields stretch all around the cinderblock building. A man named Woody Smith opened the place in the 1930s. Current owner Nicky McClanahan has been here since 1974. Nicky, seventy-five years old in 2012, said he wakes at 4:30 and goes to sleep at 10:30 p.m., as he’s done for the past thirty-eight years of owning this business.
Nicky cooks meats in an Ole Hickory gas-fired rotisserie unit, putting hickory wood only into the firebox, and he also uses old-fashioned masonry pits. He smokes whole pork shoulders, beef briskets, quarter chickens, pork tenderloin (cooked whole and sliced), precooked hams, and whole rolls of bologna. The shoulders and briskets cook for twenty-four hours, while the precooked hams smoke for six to eight hours. Nicky added brisket—not traditional in these parts—to the menu back in the early 1990s, and now it’s a big seller.
Customers eat at the rectangular counter that runs the length of the building. Nicky’s vinegar-cayenne pepper sauces sit in plastic squirt bottles beside napkin holders and bottles of Red Gold ketchup positioned evenly along the counter. A shelf in the middle of the employee area holds candy bars, Hostess cakes, and Wonder buns. A sign hanging from this shelf advertises the barbecue potato: a baked potato with butter, sour cream, cheese, bacon bits, and barbecue beef or pork for $5 (May 2012 pricing).
When I first stopped by Nicky’s in summer 2009, my belly was so full by the time I arrived, having already eaten at three other barbecue places that day, I just got a pound of chopped pork to go. Later on that evening I sat with my friend John V. Glass III at his home in Mayfield and gave him a taste test. The pork was heavily seasoned and had some bark mixed in, and John appreciated the texture that comes from a less-fine chop. Some people unfortunately chop pork into “meat paste,” he said.
I returned to Nicky’s in May 2012 to get better photos and speak with the main man, who was away during my first stop. I’d learned some reporting skills during my three years of barbecue tripping, and I wanted to do a better write-up. I arrived at 10:00, before the lunch rush, and Nicky sat next to me at the counter and weaved his history in barbecue:
I was in manufacturing for twenty years before this, and I didn’t know anything about cooking. I hadn’t even boiled water. But there was a man here, a black man named Woody Smith, that had been here several years, and he was retiring, and Harper’s Hams owns the building. So Mr. Harper called me and said he wanted me to run it. I told him I didn’t know anything about cooking, barbecuing, or anything. It took me about two months to make up my mind. Finally I called him and told him, I said, “I’ll take it under one condition—that’s if Woody will work with me a year.” So he did and we cooked everything while he was here that year that he’d ever cooked. Then he retired and I’m still here. Barely.
Mr. Harper built the diner after Woody’s original place up the road burned, and Woody relocated for his last decade of preretirement barbecuing.
“How long you plan to do this?” I asked.
Nicky said, “I guess till I die, I don’t know. I’m healthy enough, but I’m seventy-five years old. It’s going to break some day.”
Nicky said the secrets to good barbecue are to “take your time, and have a good sauce and a good rub.” Nicky’s chickens, ribs, and briskets all get different seasonings.
“We’ll build up the fire, build up the smoke, then take the main fire away from it and just let it smoke all night. We can’t keep a live fire—don’t want to burn the place down. We’ve had a couple of fires. We throw water on the coals before we leave and that steams and takes the oxygen out of the closed pits.”
About his thirty-eight years in barbecue, Nicky said, “It’s a lot of hard work, and it’s hot in the summertime and cold in the wintertime. You gotta have a fan to pull the smoke out and when you pull the smoke out you pull the cold air in, and you can’t air-condition because you are pulling the smoke out in the summertime. So it’s hot in the summer, cold in the winter. Kinda like milking cows.”
Nicky’s delivers chopped pork seasoned with dry-rub spices that goes well with the thin vinegar sauce, with plenty of barky pieces that satisfy my desire for smoke. The cold slices of smoked city ham are good, and the bologna turns a dark brown color in the smoker. The sliced brisket, cut from the flat, was chewy and not very smoky. The tender, moist chopped pork, seasoned more heavily than at any other place I tried in the county, was my favorite of these. I recommend a chopped-pork sandwich on toast with some of the peppery vinegar sauce.
I asked Nicky if he’d had any problems from breathing in all that barbecue smoke over the years.
“Naw, naw,” he said. “I eat the barbecue two to three times a day; that hasn’t affected anything either.”
Nicky said he wasn’t even tired of barbecue yet. I told him I understood.
Open: Monday–Sunday, 6:00 a.m.–7:00 p.m.
3243 U.S. Highway 51 North; 270-653-6092
The pit behind Grogan’s restaurant is the real deal. Hickory is burned down in a chimney and then hot coals are shoveled underneath the meat inside cinderblock pits. Thick smoke billows out the doors of the smokehouse. The meats smoke all night long, put directly on the pits without the addition of any salt or rubs. Red Grogan, owner, still makes his own secretive sauce learned from Woody Smith, son of the original Hickman County barbecue guru.
“Woody was the king,” Red, now in his sixties, said. “When I was ten years old we didn’t have a lot of food around the house, and I’d go sit up all night with Woody [while he tended the pits] and he’d feed me. I didn’t think I was learning, but I did that until I was sixteen, and I guess I learned something.”
Red said he reckoned he was the only one in the neighborhood still cooking with 100 percent hickory coals without the assistance of gas. “These young people come in here and they can’t believe what I’m doing. I think the old-fashioned ways are dying. Hickory is hard to come by. A rick of hickory is awful expensive.”
Red’s outlook on the future of old-timey barbecue is not optimistic. “I expect if it ain’t got a thermostat on it, it won’t get cooked in the future.”
When I first visited Grogan’s in summer 2009, the barbecue was being served in a small market down the road from the big Hickman County courthouse in Clinton. I spoke with Red’s granddaughter Taylor, who along with Lisa Powell was helping put fresh shoulders on the pits, and Taylor said they tried to keep Granddaddy Red away from the pits because he’d inhaled so much smoke over the years. Lisa said the smoke would kill you, and as my eyes burned because of the intense smoke inside the pit, I understood. Soon after my visit, the market burned and Red came out of retirement. He still uses the original pits, and he’s back doing the barbecue. Red’s a real carpe diem kind of fellow. In addition to his barbecue expertise, he’s a three-time national truck-pulling champion and also a national fishing champion. One of Grogan’s customers, Scott Smith, who says he eats there almost every day, testified that Red is “one of a kind, can do anything he wants to do. He’s built houses for a living, owned a body shop, owned a restaurant more than once, done professional fishing, professional truck pulling . . .”
After the fire, Red rebuilt in style, fashioning a big open dining room with a dozen big tables and sturdy cushioned chairs, wood paneling on the walls (the knot holes and wood grain, along with the mounted wildlife hanging on the walls, recalls the decor of a hunting lodge). The wall menu, written on a white board and hung next to the head of a deer, listed extensive nonbarbecue offerings like fried chicken, kraut and Polish sausage, taco salad, grilled or fried bologna sandwiches, and burgers. Mr. Armbruster, curator of the museum at the Columbus-Belmont State Park overlooking the Mississippi River, bragged on the fried chicken at Grogan’s, and it did look beautifully breaded and fried as I watched a neighboring customer eat a plate of it.
I got the pulled-pork plate with potato salad and fried okra. The okra was hot and crunchy. The potato salad was one of the best food corporation-produced salads I’ve tried—diced potatoes mixed with pieces of bacon, green onions, chives, and a sour cream dressing. The fabulous smoky pork comes without sauce, thank goodness, because this is as pure as smoked pork gets— tender pieces from the interior of the whole shoulder mixed with the flaky smoky exterior bark, moist enough to nearly melt in the mouth. I liked the vinegar sauce but found it unnecessary since the naked pork tasted so miraculous on its own. This sauce seemed less like pepper vinegar than Nicky’s up the highway. More like straight vinegar with cayenne pepper in it. After getting a good taste of pure meat, I squirted some orange-red sauce onto the plate and dabbed the pork in it, and the combination was beautiful.
Even though I’d already eaten three times that day, I finished all the okra and pork, and most of the potato salad.
Open: Monday–Thursday, 10:00 a.m.–7:00 p.m.; Friday–Saturday, 10:00 a.m.–8:00 p.m.
211 South Washington Street; 270-653-4420
It took me nearly three years to finally eat a proper meal at Ruby Faye’s. I first passed by this full-service restaurant in summer 2009, not long after it opened, and at that point in my early barbecue journeys I thought I might not include places that had been open for fewer than five years (one of the criteria set by Staten and Johnson in their book Real Barbecue). Plus, I was just too full to eat and figured I’d get there later on. Fast-forward to summer 2011, and I’m cruising up Highway 51 with buddies John Glass and Todd Chappel after eating at Southern Reds in Pilot Oak and at Deno’s and Smoke House, both in Fulton. We stopped at Ruby Faye’s briefly on the way to the Fancy Farm picnic, and I ordered a sandwich. It was a good sandwich that left me wanting more. As my book deadline approached in late May 2012, my failure to give Ruby Faye’s a substantial evaluation nagged me, so I drove the two hundred miles west for a real sit-down meal.
Ruby Faye’s is just off the highway south of Clinton. Huge grain silos next door and a tractor supply across the road speak to the agricultural base of this Mississippi River region. The exterior of the restaurant looks a bit like an old barn, with weathered wood and a covered porch. Big windows let in natural light, and pretty paneling and a cathedral ceiling (all wood) lend a classy feel to the large dining room that often accommodates parties after local sporting events. Regional high school athletic jerseys decorate the walls.
This time around, I sat in the front dining room, admiring the blue corduroy Hickman County FFA (Future Farmers of America) jacket hanging on the wall—taking me back to my younger years at Barren County High School, where many of my best friends, farm kids, wore FFA jackets to school—and sampled a quarter chicken, pork spareribs, brisket, pulled pork, slaw, baked beans, potato salad, burgoo, and homemade banana ice cream. The in-house-made mayonnaise slaw isn’t my preferred style, but the ingredients tasted fresh. I liked the creamy baked beans with meat mixed in, tasting of honey and brown sugar. I loved the sweet tea (not too sweet, so you can drink a bunch of it) and found the brisket to be a winner—a whole brisket with good rendered fat, full of flavor, tender and smoky. The ribs and chickens were both incredibly tender, and both had that distinct smoke flavor you get from long-smoked meats. The pulled and chopped pork came without sauce. The typical Hickman County vinegar-cayenne sauce on the table complemented the pork well. Gordon smokes Boston butts with no seasonings— just meat, heat from hickory coals, and wood smoke—for fourteen to sixteen hours. Ribs and chickens cook for four to five hours at around 225°F. Briskets smoke nine to ten hours.
Of the meats, the brisket was my favorite. The brisket gets a dry rub and baste, as do the chickens. I’d be real happy with a plate of that brisket, baked beans, and some fried okra. I also liked the savory, chunky burgoo—the only burgoo I found in far western Kentucky. Ruby Faye’s menu is huge and includes an expansive list of vegetables, like black-eyed peas, turnip greens, and mashed potatoes. Save room for dessert, as their “Sweet Shoppe” menu lists a staggering array of homemade pies (pecan, chess, chocolate chess, coconut meringue), cobblers (blackberry or peach), cakes (strawberry or coconut), cookies (oatmeal raisin, Snicker Doodle), and—yes!—homemade ice creams (vanilla, chocolate, strawberry, banana). I finished my meal with a bowl of the super-creamy banana and just loved it.
Owner Gordon Samples sat down to talk with me. Gordon, like his local competition Nicky McClanahan and Red Grogan up the road, pays tribute to Woody Smith for early barbecue inspiration. On the Ruby Faye’s menu, Gordon writes: “My first memory of barbecue was that cooked by ‘Woody’ Smith at the Springhill ‘Y.’ I loved the smell when we would go to pick up a barbecued pork shoulder from hogs that we had raised on our farm. The taste was equally satisfying. We are honored to continue the tradition and add to this legacy from our past.” Gordon farmed for twenty years and then held a job in Clarksville, Tennessee, for eight years before moving back home to Hickman County and starting the restaurant. He said there wasn’t much to do in Hickman County other than farming, unless you owned your own business. “I just came home and bought a job,” he said of the restaurant venture.
His mother, Ruby Faye, was a schoolteacher who loved to cook and entertain. Most of what he learned about cooking came from watching her in the kitchen. The core concept at Ruby Faye’s is “homemade.” Before long they’re going to start selling sourdough bread, because Ruby Faye always made sourdough bread and Gordon’s eighty-nine-year-old father still makes it using his late wife’s sourdough starter.
“My parents were married fifty-three years,” Gordon said. “They never wore out a couch, but they sure didn’t have any finish on the dining-room chairs. If you came to her house, she would feed you, and that’s where you spent your time, around the table. If she were alive, she’d be here. She would be visiting tables and trying to get in the kitchen every once in a while—we couldn’t keep her out—so my honoring my mother is keeping this place open and serving. This place is my memory to her. I think of that as far as our service and our food.”
They’ve developed family recipes and created a menu with something for everyone. “We have way too many items on our menu,” Gordon said. “But the whole population in this county is under five thousand. There are four restaurants in this town. Three of them are barbecue. There are three other restaurants in the county. There are way too many restaurants here for the number of people. But many of my loyal customers eat with me five to seven times a week, so I have to have variety because that’s my market.”
Ruby Faye’s Sweet Shoppe Chocolate Torte
This sweet treat, courtesy of Gordon Samples, is from the kitchen of Ruby Faye Samples, inspiration for Ruby Faye’s Bar-B-Que in Clinton.
1 large box (14 ounces) graham crackers
3 cups whole milk
2 packages (3.4 ounces each) vanilla instant pudding and pie filling
8 ounces Cool Whip
15-ounce can of milk chocolate frosting
Combine milk, pudding mix, and Cool Whip. Mix until smooth. Line bottom of 9 x 13–inch pan with graham crackers. Don’t crush them. Add half of pudding mixture, and then cover with another layer of graham crackers. Add rest of pudding mixture. Cover this layer with graham crackers. Cover with milk chocolate frosting, thinning frosting with milk to make it spread easier. Refrigerate until pudding is set, 1–2 hours.
Gordon introduced burgoo to the community. “People around here didn’t know what it was.” He likes mutton, but said he doesn’t sell it because he can’t find a good supplier.
A note of interest: a Yamaha grand piano sits in the back dining room, owned by Don Nicholson, a transplant from Los Angeles who now lives in Hickman County and rebuilds and tunes pianos. As Gordon said, laughing, this might well be the only grand piano you’ll find in a barbecue restaurant anywhere. They’ve been trying to have some regular piano music on weekends.
As Don left the restaurant, he stopped to say good-bye (I’d spoken with him earlier when ordering my food). I asked how he liked living in this out-of-the-way place after living in Los Angeles, Phoenix, and Memphis.
Don said, “It’s God’s country out here. I never thought I’d end up in a place like this, but now that I’m here I wouldn’t change it for the world.”
On behalf of proud Kentuckians everywhere, I say, thank you, and welcome, Don.
And thank you, Gordon, and the nice folks at Ruby Faye’s for a filling and informative lunch and taste of Hickman County hospitality.
And before closing, please note that if you are a lover of ice cream, don’t leave Ruby Faye’s without trying some of their homemade concoctions, made in a White Mountain freezer.
Gordon said, “People ask me how we get our ice cream so creamy. I say cream. Lots of cream.”
In May 2012, they added StrawBaNut ice cream, made with strawberries, bananas, and ground pecans, to the menu. Mama Ruby Faye mixed this up one day for a church function, and it’s been a hit at local socials throughout the years. Now it’s available to the public. Yet one more reason to return to Hickman County.
Open: Monday–Saturday, 11:00 a.m.–8:00 p.m.; Sunday, 11:00 a.m.–2:00 p.m.
155 U.S. Highway 51 South; 270-653-2271
Way on down in southwestern Kentucky, the town of Fulton straddles the Tennessee border. On the north side of the divide you’ll find Deno’s, barbecue so good that it—according to a local woman at the gasoline pumps at a nearby service station—will “make you want to smack your mama and then ask her forgiveness.” Ricky Prince, from his barbecue place up in Bardwell, seemed to think I could get some good barbecue there as well. And Ricky knows his stuff.
I arrived at Deno’s late on a Friday afternoon after a full day of barbecue sampling in western Kentucky, so I could make only a small dent in a large pork sandwich that was truly large, with nearly half a pound of meat heaped onto a white-bread bun. Local custom is slaw on the sandwich, so I got it. The overall effect was pleasurable, as the slaw added crunch and sweetness, but the combination of slaw and sauce did overwhelm the meat. The sauce is a tomato-vinegar base with a slight sweetness, moderately hot, delivering a slight bite at the end. The meat is pulled and chopped finely. They use hickory wood and charcoal and cook whole shoulders twenty hours, imparting a real nice smoke flavor to the meat. Valerie Minor and husband, Henry “Deno” Minor, have been serving barbecue since the early 1990s. They started out cooking in competitions, like at the Tennessee Soybean Festival down the road, across the border in Martin, and after many first-place wins they decided they wanted to collect money instead of trophies.
Several people stopped at Deno’s concession stand for takeout orders of ribs and chopped pork while I ate my sandwich at one of several wooden picnic tables shaded by the protective roof of the pole barn. Hanging from the rafters were plastic bags filled with water to scare away the flies. A good warm breeze blew through the dining room. Valerie said when she and Deno were first talking about opening a barbecue place, Deno wanted to build or lease a building for a sit-down restaurant, but Valerie objected on the grounds of high overhead. The pole barn has been successful, keeping costs low while attracting a steady stream of mostly carry-away customers.
Valerie says that pork barbecue sandwiches are their specialty, and that they “cook with love” so you can taste it in your bites. They also sell a lot of ribs and half chickens. Another big seller is homemade deep-fried chicken on a stick—a kebab with potato, onion, pepper, chicken, and pickle.
While there I spoke with a man who drove up from Martin to get a slab of ribs, testifying to the Minors’ smoking-with-love methods. I tried one of the ribs, and it was mighty tender and flavorful with impressive smoke penetration. The big sandwich was good, but the rib was even more flavorful. The ribs, after all, are what they’ve won awards for.
ADDENDUM: I returned to Deno’s in August 2011 when over in that neck of the woods for the Fancy Farm picnic and ate another of those distinctive sandwiches. The open pole barn with picnic tables under it looked just as inviting as it had on that hot Friday afternoon two years before. Valerie remembered our conversation at the picnic table and how I’d enjoyed tasting the big rib and sandwich. I got another sandwich, this time sharing with friends Chappel and Glass, and it was as good as I remembered—juicy sweet meat piled high, creamy slaw, and a sauce that pulls it all together. That’s right—I didn’t leave the slaw off as I’d promised myself, and I didn’t regret it. While waiting on the sandwich, I listened to Valerie’s cleaver rapidly chopping the pork on a block, as a classic-hits station played “Freeze Frame” by the J. Geils Band over speakers loud enough to permeate the entire seating area. A steady breeze, cooler than two years before because of the morning rain, kept the flies away. Or maybe it was those plastic bags of water hanging from the rafters.
Henry introduced himself as Deno and quickly disappeared—not like a magician, but like a man with plenty to do. I heard a chainsaw roar up minutes later, and while sitting at a picnic table admiring the new fly-catching baskets they’ve hung from the rafters of the barn, we talked about the natural sweetness of the sandwich and watched Deno sawing long slabs of hickory into smaller pieces for his smoker. Noting the hanging bags, I told Valerie she was the one who showed me that home remedy for fly repellant two years ago. I said, “I learned this method from you but don’t know how it works, but I got these bags hanging on my porch right now.”
She answered, “It really works. You put a penny or a dime in there and they think it’s a hornets’ nest and [it] frightens them. And it keeps flies away.”
I said, “Well maybe that’s why mine hasn’t worked, because I haven’t put a coin in mine!”
Valerie laughed and said, “Ahhhhhhh, you have to put something in there! Put a penny or a dime—I was afraid to put a dime because, you know, it’s hard times, and I don’t want nobody stealing my stuff,” and she laughed again.
Valerie said they were thinking about expanding the business to Mayfield—that people up there needed them—and they are looking for a location to set up their “Deno on Wheels” with a stainless steel refrigerator, double sinks, and a steam table. Valerie intends to stay in Fulton, and Deno will work the Mayfield spot three to four days per week. I thanked Valerie for the fine sandwich, and she said, “Y’all come back, next time when y’all can spend a little time—enjoy our chandelier,” as she motioned up at the hanging water-filled plastic bags, “and have a wonderful time.”
Open: Thursday–Saturday, 10:00 a.m.–8:30 p.m.
600 North Highland Drive; 270-472-2020
Not far off the new Highway 60 that runs between Paducah and Wickliffe, in the wonderfully named spot in the road called Future City, stands a green cinderblock building with a lunch counter and old-fashioned stools inside. Future City—I imagined the Jetsons flying around in a glass-bubble space buggy, but I’m guessing that whoever named this hamlet was just overly optimistic. The stripped-down menu at Leigh’s includes pork, ham, chicken, and ribs (sandwiches and plates). Out back, several long rows of cut-up wood wait to fulfill the noble purpose of cooking some of the tastiest barbecue you’ll ever put in your mouth.
Pay attention to the hours of operation. I’ve come to Leigh’s a few times when they were closed and had to content myself with gazing longingly through the glass windows at the menu and empty bar stools. When I finally found them open one Friday afternoon around 2:00, they had just enough meat remaining to make me one sandwich. In other words, you should get there early.
Oh, but that sandwich ranks as the best I’ve ever had. Well-seasoned salty pulled pork, piping hot and deeply smoky with a lot of bark, topped by a thin and hot vinegar sauce between two pieces of bread they toast in an old-fashioned iron toaster. I love the hot crunchiness of the toast mixed with the real smokiness of the meat.
As I sat at the counter finishing off that magnificent sandwich, a woman came in and asked for a sandwich. Ray Leigh, who along with his father, Eddie, takes care of the meat smoking, told her they were out of pork. He said, “I got one and a half chickens if you want ’em.”
“I’ll take ’em,” she answered promptly.
I said, “Is this pretty typical of you all, selling out on a Friday?”
“Pretty much, yeah,” Ray said.
The woman getting the remaining chickens said to me, “That’s what I had my heart set on, a barbecue sandwich.”
“Don’t make me feel guilty, now!” I said.
Then I learned that the chicken this woman scored was being held for someone who was supposed to have been there three hours before at 11:00 to pick it up. She said to Ray, “Just tell them I begged you out of it.”
Ray said, “They was supposed to come up at 11:00 and I hadn’t had a phone call or anything. Like I said, I got one sandwich left, and I wasn’t going to sit for a chicken and a half until 4:00 waiting on them.” Ray said he does ribs and chicken every day he’s open, but “they go pretty quick,” because they smoke only a certain amount of them since they refuse to sell day-old chicken and ribs.
Eddie said, “I run out of chicken and ribs intentionally. If you want some, just call ahead and I’ll save some for you.” They get a lot of local regulars, and Ray said they often have their orders fixed before they even get out of their cars.
The Leighs smoke whole shoulders over hickory on old-fashioned pits for twenty-four hours. The spareribs and chicken smoke for four hours. Ray said about the shoulders, “What you’ll eat tomorrow I put on at 6:30 this morning.” He salts the shoulders one time before putting them on the pits to “lock in the flavor” and flips them during the long smoking.
Eddie’s father started the barbecue business in the 1950s to help feed the people who were building the atomic energy plant—“the bomb plant,” Ray said. Then he passed it on down to Eddie, and now it has come to Ray— three generations of smoking expertise. They’ve been at their current location since 1964. Ray, who was thirty-nine years old when I talked with him, said he’d been helping make barbecue for thirty years, ever since he was old enough to do it.
I mentioned the large quantity of hickory stacked up out back. Ray said it came all the way from Van Buren, Missouri. I said, “No kidding?” and he said, “It’s about like gold. It’s getting harder to get because all the furniture companies have it bought up because all these doctors and lawyers now are wanting tongue-and-grooved ceilings and wood floors and it’s hurting people who cook with it.”
I loved everything about the sandwich I had at Leigh’s. They set the bar real high for smoked pulled or chopped pork. I can’t wait to get back there, early on one of their opening days, and try their ribs and chicken, too.
Open: Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday, 8:00 a.m.–4:00 p.m.
9405 Old Highway 60 West (a hopskip south of the main drag of Highway 60); 270-488-3434
Make a pilgrimage to McCracken County, where you can eat at a half dozen top-notch barbecue places and sit in the shade of willow oaks at Paducah’s waterfront park and watch the Ohio River roll. Some tall birdhouses are set up to attract purple martins, and walls covered in painted murals depicting the history of the city stretch two hundred to three hundred yards along the river. Moving away from the river, you’ll find local restaurants and arts and crafts shops, part of Paducah’s successful downtown revitalization plans, including the only store I know devoted to the art of meat smoking, called bbQ & More. Paducah is also home to the National Quilt Museum, “a non-profit institution established to educate, promote, and honor today’s quiltmaker.”
On the last weekend in September, Thursday through Saturday, Paducah hosts the Barbecue on the River festival, a “barbecue tournament and pig out” that raises big money for local charities. The streets of downtown are filled with wood smoke carrying the sweet aromas of sixty tons of slow-cooked chicken and pork. I went to the Seventeenth Ever Barbecue on the River festival in 2011, arriving late on a Friday afternoon on the twisty road from Marion where I’d eaten earlier at Hickory Heaven, belly full and happy to be a Kentuckian, soaking up the blue skies, fluffy white clouds, green farmland, and cool air after the recent rains. I crossed the Tennessee River just east of town on a narrow, butt-clenching old frame bridge, a single lane running each way and the steel beams stretching skyward. I’d seen the same river down in Chattanooga two weeks before, still running southward before making its odd northward turn in Alabama, grazing the northeast corner of Mississippi before heading straight north back through Tennessee and Kentucky, being impounded many times along the way and finally merging with the Ohio just east of the waterfront park in downtown Paducah—a good picnic spot if you wish to eat your barbecue in less-crowded surroundings than you’ll find on the people-packed streets of the festival. The park is a short stroll away from the main action between North Second and Water streets.
Cruising into downtown, I saw the streets were lined with parked cars and roads were blocked off for pedestrians. Parking lots nearby the grounds charged $5 to hold your vehicle. Being frugal by nature and needing to walk off a bellyful of barbecue anyway, I parked farther away to the west side of the festival and saved a fiver. At 5:00 p.m., families walked along the levee of the Ohio River and funneled in to the festival, where children played carnival games and a young man climbed a tower with ropes around his body to catch him if he fell. Kids wearing harnesses attached to bungee cords leaped into the air, defying gravity, and vendors sold clothing and purses and many other things I ignored, because the delicious fragrance of barbecue smoke captured me, luring me along until I reached the distinctive shiny, red-painted barrel smoker of Deno’s BBQ, one of my favorite sandwich places from way down the road on the southern border of the state in Fulton. Deno’s was busy, with a line of people waiting to order. Out behind Deno’s stand, I saw a striking image: two members of the Boudin Man BBQ Team from Louisiana and Arkansas prepping a whole hog for competition cooking. They told me they had until 9:00 in the morning to prep and cook the hog. They’d got a late start. Zydeco music filled the air, and the hairless pig looked almost comfortable resting on the table, its front hooves tucked back under its head, ears flopped out and alert like a young German shepherd, legs splayed out behind, and the hams looking oh so delicious. The naked pig drew a circle of admirers, mostly women snapping photos with cell phones. One of these ladies was Valerie Minor of Deno’s BBQ. She gave me a hug and said I hadn’t been down to see them in a while, although it was just over a month ago during the Fancy Farm picnic weekend. She tried talking me into buying their fried chicken on a stick, but I begged off on grounds of swollen belly as I’d already eaten at four places that day. Valerie tried twisting my arm, saying, “Make us five.” I just smiled and told her I’d see her later.
I made my way along the facades of vendors, past Happy’s Chili Parlor and Barbecue from Paducah, an establishment claiming it’s been in business since 1929, and I wondered how I’d missed it during my research. A man out front offered me a Happy’s rib tip and said the barbecue man had been away in California awhile but was now back in business, and the Barbecue on the River was his debut party. Their motto: “Takes No Teeth to Eat Happy’s Barbecue Meat.” They do “ribs, rib tips, beef brisket, pulled pork, and more.” The rib tip was saucy and smoky, real good. They are known for their chili, the rib tip peddler said, but now do barbecue.
Down the street I stopped to chat with Rex Jewell, overseer of Rex’s Kentucky B-B-Q-Express, a catering and concessions business out of Corydon in Henderson County. Rex was kicked back in a chair wearing a straw hat as younger men did the work of making curly fried potatoes by using an electric drill to force a whole potato through a mold to make it come out twisted. Rex, a native and lifelong Kentuckian, said, “I’m an old fart. I got tired and I sit here more than I get up there.” He motioned to the potato-drilling activity. We talked Kentucky barbecue a while, and Rex said, “There’s two things in America—barbecue and pizza. They’re the only true American foods. They’re still mom and pop. Nothing else is mom and pop. My barbecue sauce is a family recipe. Same with pizza. Every little town’s got a guy who does pizza and he’s got his own little recipe. To me, these are two true foods that if a man is going to get out and travel, anywhere you get a chance you should try them. Unbelievable how many unique flavors there are.” On Texas barbecue, Rex said, “I’m not a big Texas barbecue fan. I think they smoke too long. Maybe that’s just me. Maybe I’m wrong.”
Rex said the Paducah festival is an atypical barbecue cook-off because teams don’t use Southern Pride or Ole Hickory units but instead cook on open pits or on homemade smokers. “This is truly a unique cooking area,” Rex said. “These guys are burning wood off and shoveling ash and cooking true open-pit barbecue. If I remember right, the dictionary says barbecue is food cooked over an open fire. So they truly are barbecue, where if you use a Southern Pride or Ole Hickory cooker, you’re really getting into smoked meats. And Ole Hickory, I can’t knock it—I think it does a hell of a job—but I mean it’s a lazy man’s piece of equipment, and I am a lazy man.” I laughed at that.
Rex went on, “My living’s made on an open grill, not barbecue.” He was talking about the large number of pork chops they sell at festivals. Rex noted the regional preference for spareribs over baby backs, saying that in Henderson, Kentucky, he’d sell six cases of spareribs to one case of baby backs. I’m thinking the people of Henderson have good taste—spareribs have more marbled fat (and hence a richer flavor).
As I said good-bye to Rex, he told me that when in Owensboro I should get me a fried hot dog, a local specialty. I said I would if the cholesterol police would get off my back.
Susie Coiner, president of Barbecue on the River, Inc. and cofounder of the festival, summed up their mission succinctly: “We want to cook the best barbecue in the world, raise the most money for charity, and draw the biggest crowd.” The 2011 festival hosted forty-five thousand people and raised over $400,000 for charities. For example, the Paducah Symphony averages about $25,000 every year with proceeds from its beer garden. Other barbecue teams have built new churches with proceeds. Susie added that she and the executive director of Barbecue on the River, David Boggs, strive to keep the quality of their main product, barbecue, high by carefully evaluating vendors before allowing them to compete and sell at the festival. All vendors have to sell to the public for three full days and cook in at least one category—whole pork shoulder, ribs, chicken, and whole hog—as a backyard (amateur) or circuit (professional) competitor. Grand champion and reserve awards go to two teams that submit barbecue entries in all four categories. Andrew Coiner, Susie’s husband, confirmed what Rex Jewell had told me earlier: “We’ve been told by some of our competitors that our festival is probably the largest hardwood barbecue competition still left in the country. Whereas other competitions use gas and pellets, most of our teams still use hardwoods.”
Barbecue on the River is particularly special because the public can taste real competition barbecue. I’ve been disappointed by other so-called barbecue festivals where the only people eating the great stuff were barbecue judges. Susie said each competition team and food vendor is inspected every day by the health department.
“They’re treated like eighty little individual restaurants out there,” said David Boggs. “Whereas most contests benefit one organizing body, we benefit seventy-five different charitable organizations.”
I recommend going to the festival hungry, because you’ll be tempted with more treats than you can reasonably taste in a weekend, vendor after vendor selling sandwiches and ribs and such heart-stopping carnival foods as deep-fried Oreos and Twinkies. Many of the barbecue vendors had won awards at previous competitions and decorated their booths with trophies and banners, and people stood in long lines to sample their wares. One of these was Smoke Shack BBQ from Columbus, Ohio, whose colorful motto is “Follow the Smoke and Get Your Bone On.” I admired the red barn facade of Cookie’s Grill, lit up beautifully in the pre-dusk sunlight, and I read the banners on top hanging from white-painted plumbing pipes: first place for “Backyard Chicken” at the 2008 Barbecue on the River festival, second place for “Backyard Ribs” in 2008, 2009, and 2010, and third place for “Backyard Whole Hog” in 2009. A large pink plywood pig outside wore a black scarf with a menu scribbled in white letters.
Nearby, the Pathway Baptist Church displayed a sense of humor by naming their barbecue team “Certified Holy Smoke.” Their previous awards for “backyard” whole hog, chicken, and ribs were also displayed proudly on the top of their storefront. And on down the line, the Good Ole Boys BBQ Team displayed a sign announcing, “To get a better piece of Chicken than ours, you’ve gotta be a Rooster.”
Throngs of people moved like a wave down the streets. The pretty old brick storefronts of Paducah lead down to the river, and kids and senior citizens alike stretched their necks to see into a portable aquarium displaying “Fishes of the Ohio” right there in the street. Just a couple hundred yards away rolled the real river, and the colorful big murals of Paducah’s history stretching along the concrete flood walls show men arriving in wooden boats, men surveying the land, a pioneer cabin near the river, an early settlement map, a steam engine leaving a train depot belching smoke from an iron chimney, and pop-art scenes of modern Paducah with old-timey automobiles cruising a neon-lit commercial district. Lew Jetton and 61 South played their Southern Fried Chicago Blues on Water Street with the big river as a backdrop, across from a booth selling pigsicles (pork kabobs).
Paducah’s BBQ on the River festival is a great street party, with entertainments for young and old alike, superb people-watching opportunities, and more barbecue than you can possibly sock into your gullet. What more, this is a charitable event, and vendors display their charities proudly. The River City Rib Ticklers, for example—“Smokin’ for a cure”—donate 100 percent of profits to the Laurel Foundation, an organization that funds cancer research. Raising money for good causes, goodwill shared among people, a racially diverse crowd, and everyone from kids to seniors meandering the streets and savoring the smoky offerings—Paducah’s river fest ranks highly on my list of barbecue “must dos.”
“We can decorate your hog and your house,” Susie Coiner told me when I walked into this commercial shrine to barbecue in downtown Paducah. “We can dress your hog—we can supply all the sauces, rubs, injections, and tools you’ll need to barbecue.”
Susie’s husband, Andrew—a lawyer by vocation and barbecue judge by passion—showed me a wall of sauces and explained that many of them were developed by competition cooking teams southwest of Paducah in Carlisle County, where I’d eaten lunch shortly before at the Hardware Cafe in Cunningham. “They are the reason this store opened,” Susie said. “This was our barbecue office for the festival, and we thought we should sell some of our competitors’ sauces. We originally intended to just have a little retail nook in front, but then our city commissioner said, ‘Why don’t you really go for it and put in a kitchen and be like Williams-Sonoma.’ Now we’re a licensed restaurant with the ability to do cooking demonstrations.” They plan to do more of these now that they’re selling Memphis brand pellet grills—computerized high-end meat smokers.
I’m usually allergic to shopping. The Christmastime commercial frenzy makes me grumpy. I avoid shopping mauls [sic] like the plague. Exceptions are food and beverage stores. I can get happily lost in those.
So it was with bbQ & More. I wandered about the store like a kid in Candyland, feasting my eyes on gourmet coffee beans, multicolored bottles of barbecue sauces, pepper sauces, and many Kentucky Proud products, like sea salts flavored with bourbon and smoked on a charcoal grill by a nurse in Louisville. Now that’s unique. Susie and co-owner David Boggs have also developed a line of products under the Quilted Pig label, a tribute to Paducah’s two major tourist draws: barbecue and the National Quilt Museum. David is actually an accomplished quilter. I took home a bottle of Quilted Pig BBQ sauce, an orange-colored mustard sauce that goes well with pulled pork. They also sell lampshades and pillows bearing the brand’s memorable image: a standing pig marked with the pattern of a hand-pieced quilt.
Open: Monday–Saturday, 10:00 a.m.–5:00 p.m.
321 Broadway; 270-534-5951
Backwoods’ award-winning barbecue (voted #1 in the Paducah Sun Readers’ Choice poll in 2012) has two locations in Paducah. Ballard County native Sudie Holdman, a former tobacco farmer, and sons Tristan and Matthew run this family business, open since October 2000. I spoke with Matthew, who has a passion for the cultural history of food (he wrote his M.A. thesis on the Columbian Exchange—the movement of plants, animals, and diseases between Europe and the Americas after Columbus’s arrival in the Caribbean— which includes a discussion of barbecue).
“What makes Backwoods special?” I asked.
Matthew said their hash brown casserole “launched us into regional superstardom,” and that their homemade pies, like coconut and chocolate with tall meringues, are also a big hit. They also have pecan, chess, and Dutch apple. Pie expert Connie Peyton has made them daily for twelve years. “She’s irreplaceable,” Matthew said.
They smoke whole shoulders on custom cookers made in Clinton, Kentucky, by a do-it-yourself ironworker. An electric rotisserie keeps the meat moving, and a firebox on the side ignites wood on an electric burner. They buy hickory from an ax handle company in the Ozarks. Matthew said customers didn’t mind when they switched the shoulders from open pits to this electric cooker.
Backwoods Bar-B-Que’s Coleslaw for a Crowd
The following recipe and description are offered courtesy of Matthew Holdman, a member of the family at Backwoods Bar-B-Que in Paducah: “This recipe was originally intended for large southern gatherings such as receptions and family reunions. Mrs. Connie Peyton has worked in kitchens for over thirty years and restaurants for nearly her entire adult life. She loves cooking and making eaters smile, and says that southern cooking and soul food are one in the same and include many of the same elements: grease and love.
“The original coleslaw recipe at Backwoods was missing something crucial, and Connie used her experience to change it into what it is today. I witnessed this change, and today the coleslaw at Backwoods is not only my favorite, but also reminds me of the many fresh slaws I ate in the Caribbean, notably Belize and Quitana Roo, Mexico (the connection I’m sure could be explained through African influences). This side dish is simply wonderful, and goes best with a splash of hot sauce.”
10 pounds shredded cabbage
4 cups sugar
1 cup distilled vinegar
⅛ cup celery seed
⅛ cup black pepper
cup salt
½ cup minced onion
3½ cups mayonnaise
Combine sugar and vinegar and stir until fully dissolved. Toss spices over one quarter of the cabbage. Pour sugar and vinegar mixture over spice and cabbage mixture. Add mayo and onions and mix thoroughly. Gradually add remaining cabbage and mix until well incorporated.
Ribs and chickens, prepared daily, cook on an open pit over hot hickory coals for five hours. Additionally, they cook whole pork tenderloins and slice them an eighth of an inch thick after chilling them; smoke city hams in the regional fashion; and sell the Paducah favorite, an open-faced chili cheese dog.
“The ribs are our pièce de résistance,” Matthew said. They dry rub St. Louis–cut spareribs and cook them on the pit, then apply sauce, wrap them in foil, and leave them in a 170° warmer for five hours until serving. They do fall apart after that long steaming. (Note: This method is similar to Ol Joe’s World Champion Ribs recipe included in this book.) Country music stud Vince Gill stopped by in 2007 and “really tore into a slab of them.”
These are the kind of spareribs that most people love: extremely tender and flavorful. Those who prefer competition-style ribs—where the meat is supposed to cling to the bone and pull off it easily, not fall off it—will think these ribs are overcooked. I’m not a huge fan of wrapping ribs, as steaming dilutes the smoke flavor, but I’ll still eat them and like them. Maybe we could name these “old man ribs,” since you don’t need strong teeth to eat them.
The hash brown casserole was creamy, cheesy, and hot, with crumbled cornflakes baked on top. The pork on toast was a good portion of tender, moist pulled pork with hardly any bark drizzled with a sweet and tangy vinegar sauce with flecks of black pepper and spices on two pieces of lightly toasted white bread. The sauce is prepared in house. Because of the sweetness, I’d call this closer to a Memphis or St. Louis sauce than to the thinnest of the western Kentucky vinegar-pepper sauces. The bread wasn’t buttered before toasting (as it is at Jewell’s Open Pit in Princeton), so didn’t add anything to my enjoyment. I picked the meat off the toast. The pork by itself with the sweet and tangy sauce was good, though.
Recommendation: get ribs, hash brown casserole, and a piece of pie. And by the way, a local guy told me Backwoods has the reputation for having the coldest bottled beer in town.
Open: Monday–Thursday, 11:00 a.m.–8:00 p.m.; Friday–Saturday, 11:00 a.m.–9:00 p.m.
5172 Hinkleville Road; 270-441-7427
Faye Tinsley, owner of O’Tyme Hickory Pit, comes from a barbecue dynasty. Her brother, Kenny Ramage, owns Ole Hickory Pit in Louisville. Their father, Murvin, worked at Kountry Kastle and owned the Plantation Barbecue drive-in restaurant in Paducah back in the day. Murvin built many of the masonry pits at barbecue joints in western Kentucky, including the old pit behind this restaurant. The pits look strikingly similar to those at Ole Hickory Pit in Louisville: long rectangular structures with thick firebricks for insulation and steel around the top for stability, with steel grates about halfway up from the ground to hold the meat, and a heavy steel lid operated by a pulley to keep the heat in. Of course, there’s an access underneath to burn the wood and shovel coals.
In July 2009, Faye had been doing the smoking at the restaurant for over twelve years, while managing to drive a school bus full-time as well. She recently retired from the driving job and said she’d turn sixty-nine her next birthday, and yet she was still tending the pits.
I sidled up to the counter and spoke with Pawnee Dennis, Faye’s daughter and assistant manager. The interior is homey, especially if you’re a fan of University of Kentucky basketball. Posters of Kentucky basketball players going back many years line the walls, and you can tell the time by a Kentucky Wildcats clock. Ceramic pigs and figurines of various sizes line shelves, alongside two regal statues of American Indians carved from wood by Jerry Ramage, Faye and Kenny’s brother, a hobbyist woodcarver.
The pork sandwich was a nice portion of meat on a bun—you can also get it on Texas toast—with a medium smokiness and a vinegary-pepper sauce to give heat. The meat is served “dry” instead of “wet,” because Paducah folks—with their good tastes that agree with my own—don’t like their meat overpowered by sauce. They smoke whole pork shoulders over hickory with a little oak. Unfortunately, they were sold out of ribs when I visited on a late afternoon, so I didn’t get to try them, but I’m impressed by a place that cooks only enough ribs to sell on the day of smoking. Their beans are a mixture of brown sugar, Worcestershire sauce, onions, bell peppers, and ketchup, baked in the oven. The barbecue ham is a round of boneless ham smoked on the pit for six hours. They sell a lot of ham.
I asked Ms. Pawnee what the locals liked, and she said, “The barbecue is good and everybody loves our chili cheese dogs—we split a hot dog open and serve it on a round bun with chili on it.” She said Kenny didn’t sell many dogs in Louisville, but that in Paducah they “sell ’em like crazy.” Well. I guess locals can get good barbecue anytime they want it, so I can’t blame them for craving variety.
When I posed my often-asked question, “Why is barbecue such a tradition in western Kentucky?” Pawnee deferred to Debbie, who served up my sandwich, and she said, “We just like to eat out a lot. Paducah people are outdoorsy people, with the river and Kentucky Lake and Lake Barkley.”
I loved the comfortable family atmosphere and sweet hospitality given by the genuine folks who keep this barbecue tradition going. Pawnee told me the restaurant was up for sale—that her mama Faye was tough but ready to retire from the hard work of smoking meats, and that she, having managed the place for nearly two decades, was getting a little tired, too. Fearing the worst—that the family would have sold the place, and that a franchise restaurant would move in—I called them months later, and Ms. Faye answered the phone early one morning. She said her son was probably going to take the place over and keep it going. I sure hope so.
Open: Monday–Wednesday, 10:00 a.m.–5:30 p.m.; Thursday, 10:00 a.m.–6:00 p.m.; Friday, 10:00 a.m.–8:00 p.m.
1535 Broad Street; 270-442-1680
This is one of the most famous barbecue joints in Paducah. The pork sandwich, in the distinctive regional style, is smoked meat served on toasted white bread. The meat was chopped fine, tender, a little mushy, and served with a vinegary pepper sauce and a sprinkling of salt on top. The sandwich comes served on wax paper. I ate it right off the wood-toned laminate countertop while sitting at a barstool at the U-shaped counter in the center of the diner. The sandwich was good, but I prefer a more intense smoke flavor.
The simple menu includes sandwiches of pork, beef, ham, bologna, and turkey, with sides of potato salad and slaw. The diner’s decor is simple as well, with tiled floors and cinderblock walls painted the color of pistachio pudding. Out back of the building, a huge fan blows smoke out from the pits, which I didn’t see, and stack upon stack of wood stand near a brick chimney that vents the pits. The smoke smells wonderful. In short, Starnes has all the makings of an authentic barbecue joint. Indeed, Vince Staten and Greg Johnson rate it as “real good” in their guidebook Real Barbecue. I like their thin tomatoey-vinegary pepper sauce, which they sell in bottles. If you’re in the Paducah area, Starnes is surely worth a visit for its old-fashioned flavor, tradition, and simple style.
Open: Tuesday–Saturday, 8:00 a.m.–6:00 p.m.
1008 Joe Clifton Drive; 270-441-9555
This place ranks highly on my “BBQ Places with Character” list. American flags fly from two castle turrets at the top of the brown-painted wooden facade. Inside, especially on a hot summer Friday afternoon like when I first visited, you’ll find a darkened pub atmosphere with air-conditioning and a jukebox and bar patrons, even though Kountry Kastle is a family joint. Living in Baptist-heavy Kentucky, in which 30 percent of its 120 counties are still dry, I don’t expect to find beer served at barbecue joints, but locals tell me Paducah has been a destination for thirsty travelers going back many decades.
Lake Edwards founded the business in 1939, and he served beer from the beginning. When Lake died in 1964, his son Max took over. Now, the torch has passed to Lake Edwards’s grandson A. J., who said he liked their electric cooker—which bakes meat and creates smoke by burning hickory blocks on a heating element—because you don’t have to babysit the meat so much. He said a lot of times people can’t tell the difference between traditional and electric, and that pretty soon nobody would be able to afford traditional smoking methods because wood prices were going up. A. J. took me back to the pits and showed me their meats and explained how they doctor their beans and smoke them, too. They cook whole pork shoulders skin up at 210° for fourteen hours and sheep quarters for eight hours. A. J.’s father makes up the spice mixture for the secret sauce. When I asked what they do best, A. J. said, “Barbecue on toast is the biggest seller. That and the chili cheese dogs.” They’ll pull or chop your meat “any way you want it.” By the way, “barbecue” here means pork. If you want to sound like a local, ask for “barbecue on toast.”
Kountry Kastle has an extensive menu of burgers, chili dogs, Polish kraut dogs, fried seafood, Philly beef and Swiss sandwiches, and cold beer on tap. The waitresses know people by name. I sat at the bar and ordered a mutton sandwich. The meat was rich and tender, a little chewy but gamy in the good mutton way, and heaped between two slices of toast. The thin sauce had a lot of chili powder in it and good heat. They also offer country-style ribs (sauced or without), chicken and pork dinners, beans, slaw, and potato salad.
I revisited the Kastle in May 2012 and found the place hadn’t changed since my first visit three years earlier. The interior was still darkened and illuminated with neon beer signs, flat-screened televisions, and the jukebox. In late afternoon a few patrons, mostly middle-aged men, drank mugs of beer and talked. I asked for A. J. They hollered for him, and he came to the counter and greeted me like an old friend. He said that even though the price of mutton has gone way up, they’d hardly raised their prices.
I walked beyond the bar area and discovered that Kountry Kastle is huge. They have a room near the back where a young boy was shooting basketball. The ball went through the hoop high on the wall and then rolled back to him. Nets keep the ball from going wonky and disturbing patrons at nearby tables. They’ve also put in a smoking patio, now that Paducah has banned indoor smoking. The restaurant is like a maze once you get beyond the bar area. They’ve added on several times, and now the Kastle sits 275 people.
In a little nook off the bar area, I happened upon Eddie Guess, quietly sipping a mug of beer. Eddie has patronized the Kastle daily for years. He said, “This is my table. They take care of it for me. The Kastle is about family. Gooood people. It’s Cheers in Paducah. Coldest beer in town. Put that in your book.” Marvin Gaye played softly in the background. “When you walk in this place you can feel it,” said Eddie, relaxing in the untroubled atmosphere of the pub after his workday at Progressive Rail, a company that builds locomotives. “Always stop at a railroad crossing—because I do the air and the brakes on ’em,” Eddie said. He paused a second for that to sink in and then laughed.
His conclusion? “When I’m feeling real bad, I stop in here. When I leave here, I’m smiling. It’s not like you’re a customer. This is a family.”
Open: Monday–Wednesday, 10:00 a.m.–10:00 p.m.; Thursday, 10:00 a.m.–11:00 p.m.; Friday–Saturday, 10:00 a.m.–12:00 a.m.
3415 Clarks River Road; 270-443-9978
Side Dish: Where Is the Mutton Line?
There’s no mutton in Murray or Mayfield, which seems odd since the annual Fancy Farm picnic—where they cook up nearly ten thousand pounds of it—is nearby these western Kentucky towns. But there is mutton at Woodshed in Hopkinsville, and you can get it in Lexington at J. J. McBrewster’s and in Louisville at Ole Hickory Pit (the owners at both these places have roots in western Kentucky). There seems little rhyme or reason about which counties favor mutton and which ones shun it. The most I can say is that with a few strange exceptions (like the random places in Louisville and Lexington), Hopkinsville forms the eastern border of the mutton line. It stretches up to Owensboro—mutton central, with Moonlite serving the most and Old Hickory serving some of the best—and goes all the way over to Bardwell, not many miles away from the Mississippi River, where Ricky Prince cooks up whole mutton quarters on special order. But it just gets haphazard between these poles, with some counties cooking up plenty of mutton and others treating it like some ugly stepchild to be shut away in the basement.
My math says that eighteen barbecue establishments in Kentucky serve mutton. This list shows that, like burgoo, mutton is a rare find, which means try it when you get the chance. For the record, the cost of mutton has skyrocketed. Several restaurant owners tell me they make little to no profit on it, but keep it around for the customers who want it. In short, expect to pay more for mutton, and be glad to do it.
As of February 2012, these places smoke and sell mutton. For convenience, my list begins in the far west and moves east.
Bardwell: Prince Pit BBQ (by special order)
Paducah: Kountry Kastle
Uniontown: Uniontown Food Mart
Waverly: Peak Bros.
Henderson: J & B Barbecue; Thomason’s Barbecue
Slaughters: Good Ole Boys
Madisonville: Dave’s Sticky Pig
Hopkinsville: Bar B Que Shack; Woodshed Pit BBQ
Owensboro: Dee’s BBQ and Diner; Moonlite Bar-B-Q Inn; Old
Hickory Bar-B-Q; Ole South Barbecue
Russellville: Roy’s Bar B Q
Louisville: Ole Hickory Pit
Lexington: Billy’s Bar-B-Q; J. J. McBrewster’s
By the way, I’ve heard Kentuckians claim that we’re the only ones barbecuing mutton—I’ve even said it myself—but in the book America’s Best BBQ: 100 Recipes from America’s Best Smokehouses, Pits, Shacks, Rib Joints, Roadhouses, and Restaurants, Ardie A. Davis and Chef Paul Kirk note that many central Texas barbecue joints serve it, and that it was once served at Boyd ‘n’ Son Bar-B-Q, a joint that’s now closed, in Kansas City. So I reckon we aren’t the only ones chowing down on mature sheep—but I’m wagering we eat more of it.
On the road between Paducah and Reidland, just west of where Highways 60 and 62 split off from each other, sits a little square, white-painted cinderblock building that houses the only barbecue drive-in restaurant in Kentucky. A wall of wood runs behind the drive-in, and their sign promises, “OLD FASHION BAR*B*Q.” I was surprised when I pulled into a space and a young woman walked over and asked if she could take my order. The menu hanging on the outside of the building displays the kinds of foods you’d expect from driveins, like burgers, hot dogs, chuck wagon sandwiches, and ice cream products, in addition to barbecue sandwiches and plates with fries, onion rings, beans, slaw, and potato salad. “Cash only” signs are posted at several spots inside the diner’s windows. I visited at 6:00 p.m. on a Saturday and most of the parking spots were filled with cars, trucks, and motorcycles.
The large barbecue sandwich was pulled meat, slightly chopped, on a large bun. The meat was tender and had a moderate smokiness. Nice little pieces of fat were mixed in with the lean. When you pull the sandwich apart, chili pepper sauce clings to the bun and meat. The sauce is what makes this barbecue sandwich stand out. It’s a thinner cousin to Arthur Bryant’s Kansas City sauce, with the taste and color of cumin and dried ground chili peppers. My friend John Glass said the sauce tastes like taco seasoning mix, which might sound pretty crappy if you don’t like tacos, but pretty interesting if you want a sauced sandwich different from the regional norm.
On another trip to Paducah in 2012, I ate inside the drive-in and spoke with Rock Harned, one of four brothers who have managed the place over the years, and he gave me some history:
My granddaddy built it in 1955. He had a place down on Eleventh Street called Slim’s Barbecue, and my uncle took it over when granddaddy moved out here. My uncle continues to run that one, and when my dad came home from the Korean War, him and mama took this one over. Back then we were a long way out in the country, but the city just keeps bringing it to us.
The four of us brothers were all born on this piece of ground, and you started working in the restaurant when you turned five. A year before you started school you started weighing French fries and hauling in wood. We went to school, do what we do, come back home and went back to work. Matter of fact, some days you’d be sick and want to stay home from school, and about 10:00 Dad would come up there and go, “Get your work stuff on, boy, and come down and help us through lunch.”
Rock laughed and said, “It got to be where you just might as well go on to school.”
The brothers have a tight-knit relationship and see each other every day. There’s Rick, the oldest, and then Rock, Rhet, and Rob, who passed away in 2011. “We’re blessed,” Rock said. “I know lot of guys don’t see their brothers but twice a year.”
When the brothers were younger and got mad at each other while working the drive-in, Daddy Harned would send them out back to work out their differences. “He’d say, ‘Just get after it,’ and I mean you’d just wear each other out, and you’d get done and he’d go, ‘Okay, you done? Go in there and wash the blood off and get you another shirt and come back to work.’ Well sooner or later you learned it just really wasn’t worth going out there fightin’ cause you was going to come back to work anyway, so you’s just best to get over it. It wasn’t a bad lesson,” Rock said, laughing. “Just get it done.”
They cook whole shoulders and sugar-cured hams on open pits and sell lots of “Paducah dogs” with the same chili recipe used by Rock’s grandmother. In a rare shift from my barbecue monomania, I broke down and tried the Rock-recommended chili cheese dog: a chubby old-style frankfurter sliced in half and splayed on a toasted hamburger bun, topped with thin, spicy chili and goopy cheese. I raised the top bun to peek at the wicked goodness inside and said, “Man alive—heart attack on a plate.” Two wide frankfurter slices laid side-by-side spanned the width of the hamburger bun, bathed in melted cheese and chili—so hot, gooey, and decadent I nearly broke into “The StarSpangled Banner.”
Additionally, knowing more about what to eat in Paducah than I did three years earlier, I asked for the pulled pork on toast this time around. My friend Cy Quarles, the septuagenarian barbecue master from Grand Rivers who smokes whole shoulders for twenty-four hours over hickory coals, had recommended Harned’s pork during one of my visits to his restaurant, Mr. BBQ & More, and biting into the pork on toast this time around I understood Cy’s admiration. The pork was pulled in good-sized strips and had some browned barky pieces mixed in and tasted deeply of hickory smoke. I requested no sauce so got the full flavor of that righteous pork. The white bread was toasted to a lovely golden, and the chili powder–laden vinegar sauce—their single sauce— made for a good palate cleanser when I dabbed bites of sandwich into it.
As I raved about the sandwiches, a heavyset man sitting on a barstool at the counter said, “I don’t come here for the food—I come for the hospitality.”
Rock said, “That’s right, that’s what I’m looking for. To be honest with you, that’s the best thing I love about our restaurant is during lunch, when people come in, I bet 85 percent of them I call by name as they walk through the door. They’ve eaten with me since I was little bitty, and then they bring their grandbabies with them, and next thing you know, well, they’re coming in too. They just can’t wait to eat here again.”
I said, “Is this Cheers without the beer?”
Rock laughed. “We’re just cheerful people.”
The future looks good for Harned’s. The man who made my sandwiches was Rock’s nephew Aaron, a recent graduate of Western Kentucky University who in sixth grade worked at the drive-in for fifteen hours weekly. When he was even younger he came in to weigh fries: measuring five-and-a-half-ounce portions of frozen fries from five-pound bags for cooking to order. “We don’t cook a whole bunch of fries and leave ’em back here to get cold,” Aaron said. He studied agriculture and minored in business administration at WKU, but he seems happy working at the drive-in. “It’s what he’s always wanted to do. It’s his for the taking as we all go,” Rock laughed.
When leaving I totally got my redneck on and purchased a camouflage ball cap with their logo—HARNED stitched in red letters inside the shape of a pig, above the words “The South’s Best Bar-B-Q.” That’s a mighty big boast, but that pork on toast surely ranks up with the best sandwiches in the state of Kentucky, which means it’s as good as you’ll find anywhere. I wear it proudly.
Open: Monday–Saturday, 11:00 a.m.–9:00 p.m.
4421 Clarks River Road; 270-898-3164
Graves County is home to several great barbecue places plus the annual Fancy Farm picnic—once named the largest in the world by the Guinness record keepers—where in 2011, the 131st of these events, they smoked ten thousand pounds of pork and nine thousand pounds of mutton at this church fund-raiser that’s a mixture of carnival games, bingo, and political rally. I don’t know why Graves County deserves so much fine barbecue. My friend John V. Glass III, a devout Catholic who lives in the county seat of Mayfield, would probably chalk it up to providence. I can’t argue with him: the mutton and pork the Catholics smoked for twenty-four hours at Fancy Farm were truly divine. The people in this part of Kentucky appear fond of some items rarely seen on barbecue menus outside the region: stuff like precooked turkey breast and city ham smoked for additional flavor (on the menus at Hoskins’ and Carr’s) and also—wonder of wonders—“barbecue” bologna.
Micah Seavers of Southern Red’s Bar-B-Que in Pilot Oak sums up the regional tastes this way: “Western Kentucky as a whole, everybody’s pretty open to eatin’ a little bit of anything, and so everybody’s learned to be pretty open to cooking a little bit of anything.” Let’s go on a tour of a county that, while not boasting status as a “Barbecue Capital,” deserves it.
The small town of Fancy Farm seems an unlikely location for the largest picnic in the world. American flags hung from light poles and political signs rose up from many front yards on the weekend of this famous picnic, the official kickoff to the Kentucky election season. Cars were parked all up and down the highway, on the baseball field owned by St. Jerome, the big Catholic church in the center of town, and everywhere else I looked. I drove there for the barbecue and left with a $5 raffle ticket for a 2011 Dodge Challenger and two pounds of the nineteen thousand pounds of meat the men of the Knights of Columbus from St. Jerome Catholic Church cooked up for this charity event. The yellow church building stood out beautifully against the blue sky on this perfect sunny picnic day.
As we parked at the Fancy Farm Elementary School, my friend Glass spoke some old Kentucky Catholic folklore: “This school has the unique distinction of being the only public school in Kentucky that was run and taught by nuns. The parish had a school, and when the state came and built the public school, the only teachers available in Fancy Farm were the nuns from the church school, so they just took all their students down the street to the new building and taught there. The only place it ever happened. In Kentucky.”
We walked onto the picnic grounds, and first thing I noted was a huge covered building full of people. I thought this was the political rally until I heard a man barking bingo numbers. Beyond the bingo was the rowdier political rally. Rand Paul, Kentucky’s newest U.S. senator, was pontificating as I walked the perimeter of the crowd, and Tea Party backers yelled support and held up outdated signs like “Rand Paul U.S. Senate 2010.” Paul said, “The American dream is not about dividing a shrinking pie but enlarging that pie.”
All this talk about pie made me hungry, so I quickly headed to the concession stand to see their offerings. The menu, sponsored by Pepsi Cola, said:
WELCOME TO FANCY FARM
ICE COLD PEPSI 20 OUNCES 1.00
CHIPS .50
BBQ SANDWICH 3.00
BURGER 2.50
HOT DOG 1.50
BOTTLED BBQ SAUCE 3.00
Real simple. The mutton, cooked on pits out back of the concession stand, smoked overnight for twenty-four hours. It was finely chopped, and the smoke flavor was distinct. It was dry enough to need some sauce.
I returned to the rally, and in the spirit of the big Bluegrass barbecues of the 1800s, fiery rhetoric burst from the mouths of politicians and boomed from big speakers. Current Kentucky governor Steve Beshear talked about his recent trip to Afghanistan and Iraq and praised the men and women in military service without saying anything specific about how to solve Kentucky’s problems like unemployment or the destruction of Appalachian forests and streams by mountaintop-removal coal mining. Then Republican challenger David Williams stood up. “You know, if I was Steve Beshear I wouldn’t want to talk about my record either. The old lawyers used to say, ‘Now if you have the facts, beat on the facts, and if you have the law, beat on the law, and if you have neither beat on the table,’ and it looks like Governor Beshear has chosen to beat on the table!” Williams’s speech was interrupted by an audience member shouting, “Stop the war on workers!” His voice blended with others shouting the same, and Williams stepped back and talked to some policemen guarding the speakers’ platform. The police left the stage and walked into the audience to remove the heckler. Williams stepped back up to the microphone and said, “That’s okay. Leave the guy alone. I remember what it was like when I had my first beer. You’ll be okay tomorrow, buddy.” Audience members variously booed and cheered and waved small American flags, and some had Old Glory mounted from their baseball caps, and one woman used Old Glory as a hairpin.
Gatewood Galbraith, the independent candidate for governor, followed Williams with the most folksy speech of the afternoon. “People say, ‘Galbraith, you’re a perennial candidate,’ and I say, ‘Well, Kentucky’s got perennial problems.’ If the people had picked me the first time to solve the problems I wouldn’t have had to run again!” and “The leadership of both parties has their horns locked up like two white-tailed bucks fightin’ over territory while our business lays dead in the dust!”
R.I.P Gatewood
Gatewood Galbraith died January 4, 2012, five months after I heard him speechifying at Fancy Farm. I’ll miss your populist platform and defense of civil liberties, Gatewood.
After listening to a few speeches, I fetched a Sun Drop cola from the concession stand and walked down the hill to talk with the men who smoked the meats for the picnic. The chief in charge, Mr. Eddie Carrico, said they barbecued 11,090 pounds of whole pork shoulders and 8,600 pounds of mutton halves. The pork came from Paducah, and the mutton came from Owensboro’s famous Moonlite Bar-B-Q Inn, which, according to manager Pat Bosley, “semi-truck[s] it in—five thousand to six thousand pounds—two times per week” from three suppliers in the Midwest “where they raise sheep.”
The Carrico family has been cooking at the picnic for thirty-two years. “Every family does the same thing for generation after generation, you know,” he said.
They began on Friday morning with Mass at the church and then put the meat on after 8:00 a.m. and fired the pits by 9:00. “Then we stayed with it all day, all night. We had another crew come in at 5:00 this morning and kept it warm and basted. We basted it during the night five or six times with a vinegar base: two gallons of vinegar to one gallon of water, plus cayenne pepper, salt, and sugar.” They have to strain the basting liquid in order to squeeze it through a sprayer, because nearly nineteen thousand pounds of meat is too much to sop with mops. With the sprayer, they can baste over three hundred feet of pits in less than thirty minutes.
The pits at Fancy Farm are truly impressive: cinderblock and masonry brick pits covered with heavy-duty corrugated steel roofing with steel panels on the side to remove for the shoveling of coals underneath the meat. Eddie said every time you remove the steel tops to baste the meat you lose heat, so they have a system where guys remove the tin, another sprays the meat, and they put the tin right back on to keep the heat in. They burned down seventy bundles of hickory shipped in from Missouri to fire the pits. Eddie said, “We liked to not got any [hickory] because after the river got out after all that flooding, they couldn’t get in to get any trees. We was kindly gettin’ worried.”
I asked Eddie about the tradition of Catholics smoking meats at these community picnics, and he gave me an abbreviated history of Fancy Farm: “The picnic started with families eating fried chicken on the creek. But it got a little too big, so they moved it up to the school grounds. St. Jerome owns all these school buildings, so they moved it up here. The first picnic they had was a political speaking, barbecue, and a gander pull. You know what that is, don’t you? It’s a goose. Pulling down. Then it just growed into a big political thing, and here we are. We can’t get any bigger. This little town can only hold so much.”
Eddie said they have five hundred families at St. Jerome, and family tradition is strong. So the young people at least fifteen years old were helping all night with the barbecue. He said the young’uns thought it was great until about 5:00 in the morning. “We do this for the church and the kids,” he said, pointing out that they’d built two baseball diamonds with money raised at the picnic.
As we talked, strong young men removed the tin from the pits and, wearing thick rubber gloves, hoisted out the pork shoulders and carted them off in wheelbarrows to be chopped by a team of men and women wielding cleavers in a covered area where you, the lucky eater, can buy as much as you want (if you get there early enough). The prices in 2011 were $10/pound for mutton and $8/pound for pork. Eddie said they’d be lucky if they broke even on the mutton because prices for wholesale mutton have risen so much. “But the people expect it,” he said, “so we got to have it.”
I didn’t win the Dodge Challenger, but I left Fancy Farm with my belly full of hickory-smoked pork and mutton, my head full of political rhetoric, and a deepening respect for the Catholics of western Kentucky and their sense of family and community tradition. It was a really good time, and I’ll be back.
Hoskins’ is sort of stuck out in the middle of nowhere between Mayfield (about ten miles north) and Paducah, a cute little country house restaurant with a red metal roof in a rural neighborhood (there’s another house next door). Open for over forty years, they serve mostly barbecue, fried catfish, standard barbecue side dishes, and some great-looking pies. I arrived around dinner time on a Friday and got a pork plate and struck up a conversation with a local fellow eating fried catfish, which looked real good, and he said it was. The finely chopped pork—pulled from Boston butts smoked twelve hours—had a real nice smoke smell and rich flavor with a lot of bark mixed in by my special request. The pork plate comes with a quarter pound of pork (the portion they measured for me was a generous quarter pound) and two side dishes chosen from baked beans, potato salad, slaw, macaroni salad, french fries, onion rings, and potato wedges. The fries were thick cut. On Friday and Saturday they have all-you-can-eat spareribs. They also offer smoked city ham, beef brisket, and smoked turkey breast. Table sauces included a sweet sauce with a lot of mustard flavor and a hot sauce with a vinegary–chili powder flavor with a consistency thicker than bottled hot sauce like Tabasco but thinner than commercial barbecue sauces. The macaroni salad was creamy and pickley, and the fried onion rings were crispy. While I sat there jawboning with the locals, I saw a lady eating a piece of coconut cream pie, and she said it was very fine.
While eating the pulled pork, I got to talking with a man at the next table about barbecue. This fellow, probably up in his sixties, had plenty of opinions about who had the best barbecue—and some real strong opinions about those places that are using electric or gas cookers. “That’s not barbecue,” he said. “They use electricity and put one stick of wood in there. That’s not right.” As he talked, the sounds of a knife chopping meat on a block provided background ambiance. He told me that back in the late 1940s and early ’50s, Kountry Kastle in Paducah “sold their stuff out the back door,” meaning they were bootleggers. “That was about the last place you could get beer,” he said. “And whiskey—you had to get whiskey up in Paducah.” He also informed me that people in Paducah loved hot dogs.
As I stood at the counter to pay, a man placed a very specific order. “I want one beef brisket sandwich with no sauce and a little fat on it. And I want one of them with mild sauce—no fat on that one. And the other two I want hot with a little fat on ’em.”
I asked the man if the brisket was sliced or chopped.
He said, “They’ll do it any way you want to, and it is good.” He said Earl Hoskins, the original owner, was a sheriff down in Texas who moved back to Kentucky, and they just kept his name on the restaurant over the years. At this man’s recommendation, I got some beef brisket to go, and when sitting in the parking lot in my truck couldn’t help but taste it, even though I was full. It was a flavor explosion—pulled beef with plenty of fat, salt, and spices.
John Latch had done the smoking of the pulled pork I ate, as he’d been doing at Hoskins’ for over thirty years. Mr. Latch wasn’t there when I had dinner, but I was allowed to go outside and see the pits. There were four old-fashioned masonry pits under the roof of a garage-like building. Ash covered the floor, and the cinderblock walls were blackened by smoke. A single incandescent bulb burned from the ceiling. The pits were cool, but had obviously been well used for a long time.
UPDATE: I returned to Hoskins’ around 5:30 on a Friday afternoon in early August 2011. I ordered a beef (brisket) sandwich and pork sandwich and asked if they pulled the meat or chopped it, and the lady at the counter said, “Any way you want it.” I told her pulled and added that I like bark. The brisket wasn’t ready, so I ordered a ham sandwich out of curiosity. I learned that the brisket would not be ready for two more hours, and at that point the restaurant would already be closed. Why wasn’t the brisket ready? Because the woman doing the smoking (apparently John isn’t doing it now) didn’t get the meat on the pits until Friday morning. At least they aren’t rushing the process. While waiting for my made-to-order sandwiches, I heard the chop-chop-chop sounds of a cleaver on a wood block coming from the kitchen. A sign on the wall beckoned to my inner sweet tooth by listing a string of scrumptious desserts (which you can see on display in the glass counter by the register; particularly eye-catching are the pies blooming with lofty meringues): coconut pie, chocolate pie, peanut butter pie, banana pudding, coconut cake, lemon icebox pie, and carrot cake. They also sell their sauces in bottles. The old wooden floors in the dining room and University of Kentucky sports decorations on the walls, along with the non-fancy tables and chairs and booths, make for a homey eating space, and indeed, several middle-aged couples were already eating dinner at this early hour, as they were when I had visited on a Friday two years earlier.
I took my sandwiches outside and ate at a picnic table. The ham sandwich was good, but it wasn’t really barbecue in my humble opinion—just precooked ham (what I’ve always known as “city ham” to distinguish it from heavily salted and cured country ham) sliced and served warm on a hamburger bun with some thin hot sauce. The pork sandwich surely satisfied my desire for smoky bark. Some pieces were dry but balanced out with a tongue-numbing vinegary hot sauce with ample black and red pepper. The meat itself appears seasoned primarily by smoke. The hot sauce complemented the pork, adding pepper and saltiness that brings out the flavor of the meat. The generic bun it’s served on is a waste of belly space.
After eating the sandwiches, I decided I had enough room for the Friday night special—two meaty spareribs with tips attached, slaw, beans, and two slices of white bread for $5.95. The ribs were tender and nicely smoked, sweet on the front end and spicy on the back. The vinegar slaw was medium-chopped cabbage with slivers of carrot and celery seed—a sweet and crunchy palate cleanser. The baked beans were nothing special. Hoskins’ sweet sauce is thick and studded with pepper flakes. I preferred it to the hot sauce (something that rarely happens), and I liked how it enhanced the flavor of the smoky tender rib meat and then tingled in the throat.
The prices at Hoskins’ are reasonable, and the ribs were great. The pulled pork was also really good. I missed the brisket, durn it, but will have to get that next time around. And if I ever have room, I’m going in for a slice of one of those beautiful pies.
Open: Monday–Thursday, 10:00 a.m.–3:00 p.m.; Friday–Saturday, 10:00 a.m.–7:00 p.m.
1015 State Road 849 East; 270-856-3400
I ate at the original Carr’s Barn in summer 2009 and enjoyed the half-century-old rustic diner. Soon after my visit, Carr’s opened a new steakhouse across the street. The diner is still open, serving breakfast and lunch, and the barbecue you eat at the steakhouse is still cooked on the original pits behind Carr’s Barn. I’m including here my original take on the Barn, followed by an update on the new place.
Smoke poured from the rustic shack behind Carr’s Barn, and inside it the forty-year-old brick masonry pits were as well used as I’ve seen. Suzanne Flint, whose family has owned Carr’s Barn since 1951, was feeding the fire with chunks of hickory when I visited during a hot summer lunch hour. Her grandfather, Wayne Carr, ran the place back in the day.
Located just off Mayfield’s town square with its magnificent courthouse, the original Carr’s is easy to find, a long, red-painted cinderblock structure with greenish asphalt shingles on top that looks like a barn. Inside, a single line of customers ate at the counter that stretches the length of the diner, seating only twelve people. Suzanne called customers by name. She said some of them have been coming there for fifty years.
I ordered a pork sandwich with potato salad, recommended by Suzanne. The potato salad was fluffy and had nice pickle and onion flavor. The sandwich was a generous helping of sweet and moist smoked pork—probably piled an inch thick—on a slightly toasted bun, with a sweet tomato-vinegar sauce on the side. They cook whole pork shoulders overnight on the already-hot masonry pits. When Suzanne comes in at 6:00 she takes off the shoulders and fires the pits again, adding coals underneath the meat every two hours, and by the time they close in the afternoon the firebricks have soaked up enough heat to keep the new batch of shoulders cooking overnight.
On Fridays they serve chicken and smoked hand-patted hamburgers. Pork barbecue and smoked sliced city ham are served daily.
Thank you, Suzanne and Carr’s Barn, for keeping it simple and real.
Open: Monday–Friday, 6:00 a.m.–2:00 p.m.; Saturday, 6:00 a.m.–1:00 p.m.
216 West Broadway; 270-247-8959
UPDATE: Perhaps I should feel foolish for writing that final line two years before. First, you can find the phrase “keep it real” in the Urban Dictionary, and I’m hardly that hip. It’s also a song by the Jonas Brothers—not my taste in music. Second, I’d no sooner congratulated Carr’s Barn for keeping it simple when they decided to go upscale at the bigger, swankier place across the road. They continue to smoke meats on the rustic pits out back of the original building, but their new location holds 149 people (and they can serve alcoholic beverages), whereas the old place only seats a dozen. For a while they boasted the big chicken featured on the set of the film In Country, based on the famous novel by Graves County native Bobbie Ann Mason. The chicken has traveled around Mayfield a bit since the filming in the late 1980s. Ask a local to tell you about it.
I walked into the new place on a Friday evening and had to wait five minutes for a table to clear before a hostess—this isn’t your typical barbecue shack—could seat my friend Todd Chappel and me. Carr’s Steakhouse is located in a remodeled car shop. The high ceilings and the old original brick walls make for a classy ambiance. We sat at a booth in the main dining room and ordered the “west Kentucky combo,” a choice of three meats (barbecue pork, ham, turkey, or rag bologna) and two sides. Rag bologna is an old southern staple found behind the counter of country stores where they’ll slice off a thick piece and throw it between two slices of white bread, so named because it was traditionally sold in a cloth bag instead of a plastic casing. Rag bologna is typically saltier than mainstream brands like Oscar Meyer and often has a higher cereal content (so it’s cheaper to make—you know, like dough burgers or slug burgers cut with such fillers as bread, crackers, eggs, or oatmeal). The Carr’s menu says their rag bologna is “cooked slowly on our hickory pit.”
We waited over thirty minutes for the order to arrive, which gave us plenty of time to snack on the four hot buttered rolls with whipped strawberry butter and regular whipped butter our waitress brought, gratis, to the table after we ordered drinks. The new restaurant has an upscale feel, but the clientele were dressed in regular-folks clothes like shorts, jeans, and T-shirts. One middle-aged guy wore a sleeveless shirt and a camouflage cap. I saw families eating steaks and potatoes and young adults eating burgers. The noise level in the main dining room was high because of the acoustics (one big open room separated by a half wall). Ceiling fans above us kept us cool. We sat in a high-backed, burgundy-colored pleather booth with decent wood rimming, and fake but attractive houseplants sat on a shelf above our booth. Todd, a.k.a. Asian Lad (he was adopted from Korea as a child and was raised in Dawson Springs, Kentucky), noted that people of significant girth should request a table, because even he, with his 150-pound frame, felt cramped in the booth.
A potential disadvantage of a barbecue shack moving upscale is that it’s hard to find someone who can honestly tell you about the meats. Such was the case here at Carr’s Steakhouse. I asked the friendly young woman who served us some questions about the ham—trying to figure out if it was a smoked fresh ham (the back quarter of a hog) or a sugar-cured ham—and she said, “It’s really good.”
To my question “Is it the kind of ham you eat at Christmas?” she replied, “Yeah, something like that.”
I asked how the smoked bologna was prepared, and she said, “I hear it’s really good.” She then confessed that she really didn’t like barbecue much. Fair enough. On the other hand, when I ate at the original Carr’s Barn, the pit master, Suzanne Flint, was the same person who served me at the counter. She answered all my questions with authority. Again, it’s the problem of economies of scale. Perhaps I should know better than to ask a teenage server specific barbecue questions, but sometimes I luck out and find one who knows the meats. For example, the young woman who took my order at Smoke Shack in Scottsville told me that everything on the meat menu was grilled except for the pork tenderloin, ribs, and Boston butts—meaning that the word “barbecue” in her mind designated slow, long smoking at low temperatures.
Side items at the new Carr’s include steak fries, baked potatoes, mashed potatoes, sweet baked potatoes, homemade potato salad, green beans, white beans, sautéed broccoli, baked beans, coleslaw, and homemade mac and cheese. I asked the waitress why the potato salad and mac and cheese were the only items that said “homemade,” but she didn’t know. In addition to an eighteen-ounce rib eye, they also have salmon, tilapia, coconut shrimp, pasta dishes, grilled chicken, and so on. As I pondered the menu—which tilted away from “grub” toward “cuisine”—the tune from The Jeffersons danced in my head. “We’re moving on up!”
Our meal finally came. The smoked turkey was sliced thinly and appeared to be cut from a precooked turkey breast (the kind you’d order at a deli counter). We also chose rag bologna because I’d already tried the ham at Hoskins’ Bar-B-Que in Boaz and wasn’t terribly impressed; it tasted like what it is, slices of city ham on a bun with a bit of smoke flavor—a good ham sandwich but not barbecue. So we got the bologna by default (I’d gladly order ribs or chicken if those were options on the combo plate). What came on the plate was a slice of bologna about three-fourths of an inch thick with a darkened exterior rim from the smoking. It tasted like—well, you guessed it—bologna! Todd sliced it into triangles and said, “This is like a bologna pie.”
Like the smoked city ham that seems so popular in these western Kentucky counties, the bologna tasted as good as bologna can taste. Growing up, some of my first cooking experiments involved fried bologna sandwiches, and when I worked on a dairy farm in high school I used to order for lunch cold, thick-sliced bologna sandwiches from Zack’s Food Mart in Lucas, Kentucky. In short, I’m no stranger to bologna, and as bologna goes the stuff at Carr’s Steakhouse is great. But it pales in comparison to the pulled pork, which was even better than I remembered from my initial visit to Carr’s Barn. The pork was pulled in big pieces, incredibly moist on the inside, with a great smoky flavor. Carr’s sauce is vinegary-thin with strong tomato notes and red pepper for heat. A dab goes nicely with the pork. Mostly, I just liked the smoky flavor of the pulled pork, especially the flavorful exterior pieces.
The smoky sliced turkey breast was coated with diced caramelized onions, and I even found a sliver of steak mixed in, which makes me think they heated the turkey on the same flat top as they use for the steaks and hamburgers. The addition of the onions, if not intentional, should be (there’s nothing about onions mentioned on the menu description of the barbecued turkey). The turkey and bologna were both very salty and would work better between pieces of good bread to balance the saltiness. The potato salad was whipped, almost like mashed potatoes, with the dominating flavor of pickles, maybe bread-and-butter pickles—a cross between sweet and dill.
I’d save a bit of money and just order the pulled-pork plate, heavy on the bark, and forget the bologna and turkey. Save those meats for sandwiches on a day when you’re not craving real barbecue. Carr’s pulled pork with bark and a drizzle of the thin sauce ranks right on up there with the best pulled pork I’ve ever eaten.
Worth noting is that off the dining room is a long bar area—the first bar in Mayfield’s history and a source of local controversy. I listened to laughter coming from that farther room and thought, “Those folks are having a really good time.” I watched a young waitress wearing high-heeled shoes carrying a full shot of liquor in her hand—sort of tiptoeing to keep the full shot from running over the glass. Carr’s Steakhouse even offers Schlafly beer from St. Louis.
I missed the intimate diner atmosphere of the original Carr’s Barn, but the new steakhouse offers big tables for group dining and an extensive menu with many nonbarbecue options, including burgers and salads. Still, if you want to keep it simple, head to the Barn for breakfast and lunch.
Open: Monday–Thursday, 10:30 a.m.–9:00 p.m.; Friday–Saturday, 10:30 a.m.–10:00 p.m.
213 West Broadway Street; 270-247-1111
My buddy John told me I had to try the barbecue here and talk with Mr. James “Juggie” Stovall, who was passionate about his work, and because I trust John’s barbecue judgment, I went.
The pork sandwich I ate at Larry, Darrell & Darrell came with two very large pieces of pulled pork topped with a tangy tomato-vinegar hot sauce served on a bun warmed on a flat top. It’s a hefty sandwich for the price. You know you’re eating meat when you bite into it because the pork is pulled into such large pieces. The sandwich had a pleasant sweet-smokiness that lingered in the mouth five minutes after tasting. I loved the sweet and smoky spareribs, which may be glazed with honey. The moist meats, both the pulled pork and the ribs, conveyed excellent flavor even without a sauce. The brisket sandwich was a heap of meat, chopped and well seasoned, on a bun grilled on both sides—the most flavorful item I tried. Tasty fat pieces were mixed in with the leaner meat. LDD also smokes precooked city hams “until they fall apart.” Side dishes include beans, potato salad, slaw, apple sticks, corn nuggets, fried okra, and white beans.
Mr. Stovall has been smoking meats for over thirty years. He started at home and then refined his craft while cooking to raise money to take some boys on a church trip. He smokes with hickory, red oak, cherry, and pecan. Whole pork shoulders cook at 225–250°F, three to four hours per side. The dry-rubbed St. Louis–style ribs smoke for three to four hours. Mr. Stovall credits his rub for the sweetness of the ribs. He sears beef briskets on the meat side first, then flips them and cooks the fat side up so that the fat saturates and tenderizes the leaner meat. “We season the fire out of it,” he said.
Talking about what makes barbecue, Mr. Stovall said, “I don’t want the taste of a sloppy joe. I want to taste the meat, so sauce should just enhance the meat, but you should be able to taste the meat first.”
Amen.
Inside the restaurant, you can see numerous trophies and plaques that Larry, Darrell & Darrell—“The Smokin’ Pigs” barbecue team—has won over the years, including five grand championships from Paducah’s Barbecue on the River festival. They won the whole-hog category five years in a row. Mr. Stovall said there’s a fair amount of comedy that goes into their competition cooking, and the triple-named team—Larry, Darrell & Darrell—seemed comical, so they adopted the name. We talked a bit about cooking with wood versus gas, and he said you just can’t beat the flavor of hickory. He said folks serving barbecue who cook with gas could get sued for false advertising, because he thinks “barbecue” must be cooked with wood. But he admitted that when traveling he sometimes eats at places that use gas cookers. “It’s decent, but just different,” he said.
Finally, Mr. Stovall said he wants to give people hefty portions, because money’s tight, and so when customers get up from his table they should feel well fed, especially from one of the plate lunches. “I want you to have a meal when you set down to one,” he said, “and you’ll think more of that than if you just get a skimpy sandwich and all that. You’ll get up and you’ll say, ‘Shoooo, that was alright!’”
Everything I tried at Larry, Darrell & Darrell was more than alright. I think the Glass family—John, Kathryn, and their six children—better get ready to host me again soon, because I really want to get back there to sample more of Mr. Stovall’s fabulous food.
Side Dish: What’s Bad Barbecue?
Bad barbecue tastes like old meat.
Bad barbecue is sauced to death.
Bad barbecue tastes like baked meat—without distinctive smoke flavor.
Bad barbecue is tough and dry.
Bad barbecue tastes like it’s been cooked in a crock-pot.
Still, on most days I’d probably prefer a bad barbecue sandwich to a fast-food hamburger. But why bother when we’ve so many good to excellent places to eat barbecue in Kentucky?
Open: Monday–Wednesday, 7:00 a.m.–7:00 p.m.; Thursday–Saturday, 7:00 a.m.–8:00 p.m.
1106 Cuba Road; 270-251-0464
Pilot Oak, a hamlet four miles north of the Tennessee line, has a feed mill, extensive cornfields, some big tobacco fields, a catfish farm, and the Pilot Oak Baptist Church, whose marquee said “Come in: We are prayer conditioned” when I passed by on a rainy August morning, traveling with friends John Glass and Todd “Asian Lad” Chappel. Southern Red’s is a barbecue oasis in the middle of this sparsely populated southern section of Graves County, far enough south to support a good stand of kudzu. I’d have thought I was in southwestern Tennessee or Mississippi if I didn’t know better.
A sign outside the cinderblock building says, “Hope y’all came hungry,” and it’s not lying. The food at Southern Red’s is worth stuffing yourself over. Another sign closer to the road features a gruff-looking red pig wearing a Confederate gray hat and bandanna. But don’t be scared away by the redneck iconography; the folks inside are as sweet and hospitable as they come.
Southern Red’s offers a fun dining atmosphere. Wooden pigs on the restroom doors are sex-marked “Boars” and “Sows.” The cinderblock walls are painted a vibrant green and yellow. The towel rack in the boars’ room is a pig. The wooden floor shows years of wear from when the building was the old Pilot Oak country store. A pig-shaped sign at the ordering counter says, “Eat Mor Possum.” The menu is scribbled on a white board on the wall. Ceiling fans circulate the conditioned air, and it was plenty frigid.
We ordered a large barbecue platter with fried okra and fried green tomatoes and also a quarter rack of ribs. The platter came with three slices of fried tomatoes and over a dozen pieces of crispy okra. The tomatoes were particularly unctuous, so deeply fried you can feel the fat on your tongue, akin to the pleasure of eating a piece of bacon when the fat is crispy and seems to melt in the mouth. The pulled pork by itself has ample fat mixed in with the lean, good smoke, very tender and moist. It was piled high on a regular hamburger bun, with beautiful pink and browned pieces. All three of us loved the hot sauce, a medium-thick tomato sauce loaded with black pepper. The sweet sauce served on the ribs is thinner than the hot, also with a liberal amount of pepper. The quarter rack of ribs was four bones of meaty spareribs with the tips on and a gorgeous bark on the outside, glazed with sauce and a bit of sugar. They were cooked perfectly, tender while still retaining some texture and bone adhesion. We all thought these were some of the best ribs we’d ever eaten.
I guess we stood out like sore thumbs—three unfamiliar men snapping photos of food, sharing ribs and a sandwich, and talking into a digital voice recorder—because this hulking man walked over in an apron and stood by me. He said, “How y’all doing?” I looked up at his massiveness and told him how good the food was to allay his suspicions before telling him about our barbecue road trip. His name is Zach, and he’s the steak cooker. Zach went back to the kitchen and sent out Micah “Red” Seavers, who along with his father, Fred, tends the barbecue. Red, an extremely gregarious fellow, came out and said, “You run everybody else off, guys.” I looked around and sure enough, the half dozen men who’d been eating lunch had left while we were immersed in a daze of ribs and pulled pork.
Glass said, “That’s terrible news—we didn’t mean to,” and Red laughed and said, “That’s Saturday—that’s the way it goes. How y’all doing today?” He agreed to sit with us a while and spin us a family history in barbecue.
Red runs the place with his dad, mother, wife, and “a bunch of yayhoos.” He’s been smoking meats since he was twelve years old, for a total of fourteen years. His mom, Belinda, walked over while we were talking and said, “He could barely pick up the shoulders when he first started.” The patriarch of the family, Fred, is a full-time preacher who used to live down from Hutchen’s Bar-B-Que in Benton, and he’d go spend nights “preaching at” Mr. Hutch while he tended his barbecue pits. That gave Fred the know-how of barbecue, so that when he got injured drywalling and couldn’t climb a ladder anymore, he decided to open Granddaddy’s Barbecue near Berea, Kentucky. They sold their business in Berea to a man who “ruined it”—“You can never sell your family business and it stay the same way it’s supposed to,” Red said—and then they moved to West Virginia. Red graduated high school early (at age sixteen), and his father told him he needed to find something to do. So they opened a restaurant in Hinton, and then moved to Beckley.
I said, “There’s not much barbecue in West Virginia—how did those folks take to it?”
Red said, “They didn’t know what barbecue was—we threw a wrench in their cog. They had no idea. They was like, ‘What is this?’ and I was like, ‘Eat it—it’s good.’” They did well with the West Virginia restaurants but ended up selling them to move back to western Kentucky to take care of the grandparents. Red said his grandfather and father used to cure country hams and smoke meats outside.
“He’s been doing this forever,” Red said, “and you got to pass on a trade, I guess,” and when I asked how long he intended to do barbecue, he said, “I got to make money, don’t I? Everybody’s got to do something, and I enjoy it. I don’t have very many skills,” he said with a grin.
Glass said, “This counts double.”
I asked, “Y’all smoke whole shoulders or Boston butts?” and Red answered, “I cook anything.” Glass mentioned a photo on the wall of Red holding up a giant beaver, and Red said he’d smoked it. They have a special smoker that he uses only for custom cooking wild game. “If you can kill it I can cook it,” he said. “You know, everybody’s known for a certain kind of meat and this and that; not everybody can cook every kind of meat, but western Kentucky as a whole, everybody’s pretty open to eatin’ a little bit of anything, and so everybody’s learned to be pretty open to cooking a little bit of anything.” And so Red smoked that eighty-three-pound beaver—the second biggest he’s ever caught.
“I’m a federally licensed specialty nuisance trapper,” he said. “That’s my other skill set.” Belinda said the beaver didn’t taste half bad, and Red added, “Tastes like really sweet goat.”
Red said the biggest problem with running a small family barbecue business these days is finding good workers. “Workers is the hardest thing. Even in western Kentucky,” he said. “Used to be everybody was a good worker. Now it don’t matter where you are. I think that’s happened with all your family barbecue restaurants. I bet it’s harder and harder to come by little barbecue places than you think.”
I said it’s getting harder to find places cooking with wood, and Red said, “Well, yeah! You know how much work is in that?” He said that luckily, the young woman who took our order is the daughter of a man who runs a sawmill, so they have a good source of fresh cut wood. “He got nine kids,” Red said. “We trade him food for wood.”
Red said they use two different kinds of wood. I asked if they use sassafras, and he said, “No, we don’t use sassafras! That’s a Yank wood!” Then he guffawed and said, “I’m sorry, but there you go.” They actually use oak and hickory in measured amounts. “Oak is a dynamite wood,” Red said, “but it’s strong. Hickory pulls some of the harsh taste of oak out. Hickory is the flu shot for curing the bitterness of the oak.” That’s one of my favorite barbecue lines ever.
Before leaving, we sampled a smoked quarter chicken and the brisket. About chicken, Red said, “Dark’s always better. Not that my white-meat chicken ain’t good, but dark’s always better.” When I expressed my surprise that they served brisket, he said, “We’ve been having it every Saturday and it’s finally picking up. This isn’t a beef-eatin’ area. They’re scared of it.”
Belinda said, “We’ve kindly had to build it up.” Now, people call ahead to reserve the brisket, and all but a taste had been sold before noon on that Saturday.
The taste of sliced brisket made me exclaim, “Lord, have mercy!”
Red said, “I try my best to put Texas to shame. That’s what I shoot for. That’s my beef brisket goal.”
The brisket was juicy and flavorful throughout the entire piece. Glass foolishly asked, “What do you put on it?” and Red said, deadpan, “Stuff.” We all laughed at that one.
They started cooking briskets in West Virginia. “We probably threw out the first dozen we cooked,” Red said. “That’s the hardest possible meat for me to figure out how to do right. It’s either right or it’s wrong.”
Glass, who has a keen nose for food and drink, was attempting to figure out the special seasoning on the chicken, and he said, sniffing delicately, “Is that cinnamon?”
Belinda said, “That’s very simple—just salt, pepper, and smoke.”
The magnificent ribs come off the pit at 9:30, 12:30, and 3:30. Everything is cooked up fresh daily. They’ve been serving about thirteen hundred to fifteen hundred people per week on the three days they are open. I’m not surprised that word has spread about this gem of a barbecue place located in “Podunk City” (to use Belinda’s words). As Glass drove away, we couldn’t stop raving about how good everything was.
Southern Red’s Bar-B-Que’s Quick Ribs
Fred Seavers of Southern Red’s says, “Most of the time things work out pretty well at the pit; but sometimes things don’t go as planned. One evening as we were running low on ribs, it seemed we just could not get the next batch done. Having remembered something I had watched a seasoned older barbecuer do to get his ribs done in an oddly short amount of time, I took a chance on it. It worked! This is not the way most slow smokers will make them because they will tend to be a little more firm than some like them, but many thought they were great.”
The following cooking method is one you can use at home on your regular backyard grill. The ribs will not have quite as much of a smoky flavor, but they will have a great taste nonetheless.
You can use gas or charcoal. Put several hickory chips in a small pan with a little water on them, and lay over the fire. Put grill grate 8–12 inches off of flame. Rub ribs with salt, pepper, and brown sugar. Score back side of ribs with a sharp knife. Cook ribs bone side down over medium to high heat for 10 minutes. Flip ribs—cook meat side down for 10 minutes. Repeat up to 40 minutes. Do not allow ribs to burn. There is a difference between burned and charred. It may take you a few ribs to find out the difference. On last turn where you are putting the meat side down, glaze with your favorite sauce (preferably Southern Red’s regular or sweet sauce).
Southern Red’s is one of the rare barbecue places that I’d drive many miles to get to. Red told us, “There’s two things to do in Pilot Oak. One is eat barbecue. The other is to watch the corn grow.” The corn grows but for a season, but thankfully you can go year round to Southern Red’s to feast on their magnificent meaty arts.
Open: Thursday–Saturday, 7:00 a.m.–9:00 p.m.
5085 State Route 94 West (in the old Pilot Oak Grocery); 270-376-2678
The masonry pits behind 4 Little Pigs are well used. They smoke whole shoulders over hot hickory coals for eighteen to twenty-four hours, depending on the season (longer cooking in the winter). Naked shoulders are cooked skin-side down until caramelized, about twelve hours, and then wrapped in foil for the rest of the smoking. The juice makes the exterior bark soft again.
Pit master Eric Binson said their barbecue pits had been there twenty years. Eric’s grandmother used to own the restaurant, and he’d already been tending the pits for fifteen years (he was a mere twenty-nine years old when I met him in 2009). He said much of the skill of barbecuing you had to figure out on your own. “Of course, the nastier the pit looks, the better the flavor. If you’ve got a clean pit, you’re doing something wrong.”
The odor from the smoky pits was wonderful. My friend Dixon, visiting me from Mississippi, remarked, “That’s a great smell.”
Eric said he’d prepared over two thousand pounds of barbecue on Christmas Eve. During the holidays they smoke fifteen shoulders on all three pits (forty-five total), but on a normal working day they smoke only twelve because they want the meat to be fresh. “We want to pick ’em fresh every day, because people want fresh barbecue. People around here, you can’t fool them about the quality of the barbecue.”
The pork sandwich, chopped or pulled, is a generous portion of moist meat topped with a complementary mustardy sauce and served on a warmed hamburger bun. I got a “hot” sandwich, and it appears they sprinkle some cayenne pepper on the meat. Dixon got the mild sandwich, and it seemed there was a dry rub sprinkled on his meat.
This is a full-service place serving country ham, omelets, salads, burgers, catfish, and hot wings. They specialize in pulled and chopped pork with barbecue rib and chicken dinners on Friday and Saturday.
Open: Monday–Saturday, 6:00 a.m.–7:30 p.m.
100 Beach Wood Lane; 270-527-9471
Manley’s 4 Little Pigs Bar-B-Que’s Sweet Potato Casserole
This (recipe courtesy of Teresa Manley) is the most requested side dish at Manley’s restaurant.
3 cups sweet potatoes, cooked and mashed
1 cup sugar
cup whole milk
2 eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
½ cup butter
TOPPING
½ cup butter, melted 1 cup brown sugar
cup all-purpose flour
1 cup chopped pecans
2 cups cornflakes cereal
Preheat oven to 350°F. Rub a baking dish with butter. Mix the topping ingredients in a bowl. Whip together the sweet potatoes, sugar, milk, eggs, vanilla, and butter and pour into the baking dish, then crumble on the topping. Bake until golden brown and bubbly at the edges.
Sitting in one of the red booths in this old-style diner, I got a flashback to the Happy Days era. Nostalgia is the best reason to visit this place. It’s a full-service diner with an extensive menu, including breakfast items and a long list of sandwiches like burgers, BLTs, Philly steaks, chicken clubs, and catfish filets. I was prepared to like Hutchen’s because it’s such an established place, but I wasn’t overwhelmed by their ribs or pork sandwich. But as I said, the menu is extensive, so maybe some of their other offerings hit the spot. The green beans sure were good.
My friend Dixon from Greenville, Mississippi, joined me at Hutchen’s for lunch. The good pork sandwich was a decent quantity of tender, moist pulled pork with a moderate smoky flavor on a hamburger bun. The mild sauce is composed of vinegar, water, ketchup, sugar, mustard, garlic salt, pickling spice, onions, and lemons. I know because they list the ingredients on the bottles they sell. Dixon and I dug into a half rack of meaty spareribs. They weren’t very smoky, and I’m pretty sure they boil or steam them (which pretty much guarantees “fall-apart tender”). They were lightly dry rubbed. I imagine there are people who would like these ribs a lot—those who favor very soft ribs with a light smoking that requires sauce to yield flavor. Dixon and I both rated them as mediocre. Dixon said, “The only mistake not made with the ribs is that they’re not dry. They’re moist but rather flavorless.” I’d eat them over franchise fast food any day, but they didn’t come close to ranking with my favorite ribs on my Kentucky barbecue safari.
Recommendation: get a pork sandwich and a side of fried okra, Cajun fries, or green beans and enjoy the old-school drive-in atmosphere. If you go there at night, the neon sign above the roof with “HUTCHENS” in green, a pig in orange, and “Drive-In” in hot pink will take you back to the 1950s.
Open: Monday–Saturday, 6:00 a.m.–8:00 p.m.
601 North Main Street; 270-527-9424
This barbecue joint with an intimate eat-in area stands across the road from the Coldwater Methodist Church and just down the road from the Coldwater Baptist Church on Highway 121 in a small rural community. It’s primarily a catering operation, but Gary and Sandy Barnes keep the place open on weekends because Gary is usually there cooking anyway. I noted a sign by the menu on the wall saying, “This business is for sale,” but Gary’s barbecue is so good that I have to feature Coldwater anyway, just in case they remain in business for several more years. They’ve been at the Coldwater location since 2004.
Gary does a lot of catering for Murray State University and churches in the area. A huge stack of hickory wood lies out back of the small restaurant. Gary says he thinks western Kentucky has such fine barbecue because the land provides so much hickory. On his huge custom-built unit he smokes whole shoulders by shoveling burnt coals underneath, “basically the same way they do at the Fancy Farm picnic,” Gary said, “putting the shoulders on in the morning and letting them cook that night and then taking them off early the next morning. So it’s twenty-four hours they’re on there, but really the last six to eight hours they’re not doing much cooking.” The St. Louis–cut spareribs, ham, and turkey are smoked on a rotisserie unit—a big revolving drum with shelves in it. The chopped pork has a sweet, smoky flavor, and the tomato/ vinegar sauce with cayenne flecks and a hint of mustard doesn’t overwhelm the meat. The meat is tender and moist with nice pieces of fat mixed in, on a lightly toasted bun.
Gary said one key to a successful barbecue joint is knowing how to hold the meat once it comes off the pit. “The one thing different I see in these places is if you get it when it comes right off the pit it’s good, but they don’t know how to handle it after that. You can’t throw it away, and if you serve it and it’s crap, then there you go. You just can’t put ’em in the oven to warm ’em, and that’s what a lot of people try to do. You need to get moisture back into the meat to reconstitute it.”
Gary said the popular gas cookers have a tendency to dry the meat because people are cooking at 275–300° and it cooks the fat off. “When they [the Boston butts or shoulders] come off the gas they’re hot and warm and juicy and really good,” he said, “but you let ’em cool down overnight and next day you try to fire them up again, there’s no moisture there—they’ve lost it. But people don’t care, though. I’ve been in this business a long time. People don’t care. They’re looking at the price of it, the convenience of it, and they let the quality slide.”
He responded, “The vast majority don’t. I could get a gas cooker and turn it out and probably do a lot better [financially]. But you are giving up the quality. Ours is the very intensive old-style barbecue.”
Gary used to own a place called Coldwater Bar-B-Q Two closer to Murray, the very first place I ate at back in 2009 when I started my Kentucky barbecue tour. They’ve since closed. I was disappointed about this, because I ate some of the best brisket of my life there, thinly sliced and served with au jus, very different from Texas brisket I’ve tried. I asked why they closed, and Gary, echoing other barbecue folks, said, “I couldn’t keep help. Me and Sandy just couldn’t handle it. Nobody shows up for work. We just decided just to do only what we can do ourselves. Our catering business has grown. We served twelve hundred back in the summer in a catering job.”
Coldwater will do catering at any time, and for now you can stop by there on weekends to get some real barbecue and homemade pies.
When I spoke with Gary in May 2012, he said they were considering moving their operation to Murray and getting that awesome brisket back on the menu.
Open: Thursday–Saturday, 10:00 a.m.–6:00 p.m. 8284 Highway 121 North; 270-489-2199
Bad Bob’s BBQ & Grill #5
When I first ate at Bad Bob’s, I didn’t realize it was a franchise. The building is pretty small, and inside there was a lunch crowd eating at small tables with blue-and-white checkered tablecloths. The original Bad Bob’s is in west Tennessee, and now they have over twenty restaurants in places as far as New York, Texas, and Florida. Bad Bob’s franchises serve Memphis-style dry-rubbed ribs.
When I visited in 2009, Tony Baylis, head cook at Bad Bob’s #5 in Murray, had been tending the meats for seven years. I met him out back of the restaurant, where he was tending baby back ribs. He puts glaze on the ribs and smokes them at 250–275° for four hours. He said, “When I take ’em off they just peel right off the bone.” Tony says he’s the only head cook at a Bad Bob’s franchise who does ribs outside on a rotisserie smoker. All the other places use a “smoker oven” to cook the ribs inside the restaurant. “I like the outside cooker; it gives it more of an outside flavor,” Tony said.
He cooks ribs over charcoal with added smoke from hickory chips. Inside the kitchen area, Tony loads Boston butts into a “Fast Eddy’s by Cookshack” smoker oven, thirty-two butts per cooker, and gets a smoke flavor by adding wood chips to the bottom. He sets the temperature at 219° and cooks them for nine hours and forty-five minutes. The advantage, of course, is that the butts cook overnight and are ready in the morning. He then holds them at a temperature of 140° until serving time. The dry rub he uses on the meat comes from the company, as does the unusual sauce flavored with raspberry preserves.
When I asked Mr. Baylis what he recommended, he said ribs, so I got a plate of them. The ribs were real tender with a good smoke flavor. The sweet raspberry sauce is one of the odder barbecue flavors I’ve tried, right up there with the thin blackberry sauce served with ribs at Staxx in Frankfort. My friend John Glass, who tasted the leftover ribs later that evening, called the raspberry barbecue sauce “wrong.” I think it’s worth a try, this deviation from barbecue sauce orthodoxy.
Bad Bob’s offers all-you-can-eat ribs on Tuesdays and all-you-can-eat pulled pork daily. They also smoke half chickens and bologna, and serve their barbecue on top of stuffed potatoes, nachos, and cheese fries.
Open: Monday–Saturday, 10:00 a.m.–8:00 p.m.
806 Chestnut Street; 270-767-0054
I thought Brothers might be a franchise since there’s a restaurant of the same name in Madisonville, but this Brothers has no affiliation with the other. The name isn’t the most original, but the enthusiastic young men running this place have created unconventional versions of barbecue standards. You can eat in at Brothers, sitting at one of two tables (I took the one by the window looking out onto the street), but most customers get takeout. It’s a pleasant shack atmosphere: concrete block walls painted clean white, laminate floors that look like wood planks, and a long ordering counter with used corrugated roofing tin as paneling, all of which gives the place a good funky feel. Daily specials and the regular menu are scribbled on white boards hanging from the ceiling. The Thursday-Friday special in September 2011 was a bacon-wrapped hot dog. Lucky for my cholesterol, I visited them on a Saturday when the special was smoked chicken wings (scrumptious). On Tuesdays and Thursdays they served up stuffed smoked cheeseburgers—two hamburger patties molded around a slice of American cheese (like the famous Jucy Lucy burger of Minneapolis), smoked on the bottom portion of the smoker to get a crust on the bottom side, topped with cheese that melts before being served. Can I get an amen?
Josh “Flash” Flaspoehler and Ron “Archie” Gladden are the brains behind Brothers. They chose the name because Josh’s brother, Jon Flaspoehler, helped finance this barbecue venture. Josh and Ron practiced their craft for six months before opening up. They had contests with each other to see who could make the best ribs, brisket, and so forth. Ron’s St. Louis–style ribs and spice rub got on the menu, and Josh’s jazzy creations round it out. They currently smoke sixteen Boston butts every day of business. At the top of their takeout menu, they state: “In order to provide you with the freshest BBQ, Brothers smokes limited quantities of BBQ daily. All items are sold on a first come first serve, so come early or call ahead!” The butts smoke twelve hours the first day, then sit in pans with apple juice overnight in the refrigerator, and are finished the next day with four more hours of smoking. They don’t use any rubs on the butts—just pure meat with the hint of apple juice. A “Big Bro” sandwich gets you one-third of a pound of this well-cared-for meat. It’s very tender with a good smoke flavor. All the meats get indirect heat except for the chicken wings and leg quarters.
I tried their “beer butt” chicken—a whole chicken smoked indirectly with a can of beer inside the cavity for moisture and flavor, pulled for sandwiches. The sweet, malty flavor of the beer came through in the flesh, very pleasant even though I prefer chicken on the bone. They barbecued half chickens for a while, but quarter chickens sold better, so they’ve scratched the halves from the menu. They also custom cook deer and turkeys during hunting season and hams during the holidays. During Thanksgiving 2010, they served three hundred hungry people at Ron’s banquet facility; local churches and the Salvation Army sponsored the meal, and Ron and Josh did the cooking and staffing.
I tried such barbecue standards as brisket, pulled pork, pulled chicken, and the less typical smoked wings—my favorite of these, as the odor of smoke was intense and the wings were glazed with a tasty peppery sauce. They must be popular, because while I was eating, a big man walked in and ordered wings, and I remarked, “These wings are gooooood,” and the man said, “Most of the times I get here they don’t have ’em—they sell out before I get here.” The rich, creamy potato casserole was a good accompaniment to the meats, and the brisket baked beans were also very good. The red potato salad contained big chunks of potato in a dill sauce, and the barbecue sauces were different from any I’ve had—very peppery, thin, and tangy with spices mixed in that I couldn’t put my finger on. Josh told me one was his version of a North Carolina sauce, but because he hadn’t been down to Tarheel country to try the real thing he created something that tastes peculiar—a twisted version of the original vinegar sauce. The cold, creamy dilled potato salad balanced nicely with the vinegar-peppery heat of Josh’s hot sauce. In a world that’s too easily standardized, I enjoyed these off-center tweaks on traditional flavors.
Brothers Barbecue’s Red Potato Salad
Josh “Flash” Flaspoehler explains, “We love the way the coolness of this dill potato salad goes perfectly with our ‘Big Bro’ sandwich with lots of our homemade hot barbecue sauce.”
¼ cup white vinegar
½ cup sweet pickle juice
½ cup yellow mustard
3 cups mayonnaise
3 tablespoons dill weed
1 teaspoon onion powder
1 tablespoon ground black pepper
1 tablespoon celery salt
½ cup white sugar
5 pounds red potatoes, chopped and boiled
8–10 sweet gherkin pickles, chopped
Whisk first 9 ingredients together for the dressing. Add cooked potatoes and chopped pickles and mix well. Refrigerate a few hours for flavors to blend.
Brothers Barbecue’s Mild Barbecue Sauce
Flash says, “Our mild is a very basic sauce, and that’s what we love about it. It really lets the meat be the star. We especially love it smoked onto our burnt ends. I apply a glaze of the mild sauce during the last hour of smoking, and it creates a deeper, richer flavor.”
64 ounces ketchup
1½ cups white sugar
4 tablespoons chili powder
2 tablespoons garlic powder
2 cups white wine
3 tablespoons black pepper
Whisk ingredients together until well blended. Refrigerate overnight for flavors to meld.
Most of the meats come without sauce except for the brisket sandwich, which is six ounces off the fattier end of a brisket chopped up (if you want your meat naked, order the sliced brisket sandwich, which they cut from the leaner part of the brisket). The sliced brisket was tender with a mild smoke flavor. They also sell the regional oddity of BBQ bologna, a four-hour smoked bologna roll served in a thick slice on a sandwich. The bacon-wrapped hot dog is a big hot dog with two thick-cut slices wrapped around and smoked for an hour and a half and glazed with their sweet heat sauce (Josh’s creation— his homage to the Big Dipper, a burger joint in his hometown of Owensboro that deep-fries hot dogs). Josh says that smoking bacon makes the fat creamy, but you want to eat the dogs when they are fresh off the smoker.
The food was fun and very good, and I enjoyed talking with these young barbecue visionaries. I wonder what they’ll come up with next. You should visit and find out.
Open: Tuesday–Saturday, 10:00 a.m.–7:00 p.m.
401 Sycamore Street; 270-761-PORK
1415 ½ Main Street; 270-761-7677
I was taking a peek at the woodpile behind this restaurant around the lunch hour on a Saturday morning and was caught spying by two young fellows who happened to be the primary pitmen for this popular Murray State University hangout. So I parked the Ranger, jumped out, and struck up a conversation. Bundles of hickory slabs were stacked up behind a huge trailer holding two barrel smokers with several big smokestacks and a rusted firebox on the end for cooking down wood. The whole thing looked ominous, industrial and powerful, like the medieval ironclad dark knight of barbecue cookers. Or maybe the Darth Vader of cookers.
Hickman County native Darren Yates opened the Keg in Murray in 2002. There’s an original Keg pub in Fulton, owned by Darren’s business partner, that’s been open longer. Craig Bagby smokes brisket and ribs, and Brandon Christopher—all of nineteen years old in fall 2011—barbecues whole pork shoulders and says he intends to do it until he can’t do it any longer. Shoulders cook for twelve to fourteen hours, the ribs for three to four, and brisket for sixteen over hickory and mesquite. St. Louis–style ribs, ham, and turkey smoke on a rotisserie unit, and the shoulders cook on the flat pit. They burn down the wood to coals in the firebox and shovel them underneath the shoulders, and into the rotisserie they throw full chunks of wood for indirect smoking.
The restaurant has concrete floors in a sports-bar atmosphere, with several televisions mounted on the wall showing sporting events, Murray State athletic uniforms decorating the walls, many tables, and warm attractive wood paneling for walls. A big boar head hangs from a wall. The young woman who served me said it could get pretty rowdy on weekends with live bands and sports crowds. They have a full bar on one side of the restaurant with domestic beers on tap, and in a room off the side are three pool tables. So the restaurant can hold lots of people, and I expect it does get loud when the university crowd rolls in. One whole wall was decorated with fraternity paddles.
When I ate during the Saturday lunch hour, however, the place was peaceful. I ordered a brisket plate with slaw and beans and a side of pulled pork. Seven big pieces of brisket were piled onto the plate, steaming hot and smelling wonderful. The baked beans were piping hot, with lots of onion, green pepper, and chunks of pork inside, a little sweet and tangy at the same time. The brisket was rich and had grill marks on it. There was close to a pound of it on the platter. The meat was sauced with a sweet peppery concoction reminding me of A-1 steak sauce, very different from other sauces I’ve tried. The smoke and sweet sauce filled my mouth and nostrils at the same time—just a very different (but good) flavor experience. In a way, these pieces of fatty sliced brisket (the brisket here is served with plenty of fat marbled in, not just the lean meaty part) delivered a flavor a lot like grilled steak. I liked it, but it was much different from brisket I’ve had in Texas. Take this as a warning: if you expect Texas-styled naked brisket, you might be surprised. But if you want a mouthful of tender meat reminiscent of grilled steak and coated in a savory sweet sauce, then you’ll probably enjoy this plenty.
The pulled pork had a deep smoky flavor, tender and moist, with a pleasant saltiness. It was some of the best I’ve ever had. The salty bark was delicious and the interior pieces were smoky and juicy. Several good sauces sit on the table, but no sauces are needed on this fabulous pork. In addition to pork and brisket, they offer the dry-rubbed spareribs, smoked half chickens, hickory-smoked turkey breast, and thick-sliced smoked ham. They even get a little wild, with their pulled-pork quesadilla, and there’s a big list of side dishes, including fried okra and beer-battered onion rings. Sometimes they run a special of two-inch-thick pit-cooked pork chops, and the Keg also serves Cajun food. Darren’s best friend in college went to Tulane’s law school. Darren visited him frequently and was inspired by Louisiana cuisine.
So for a sports-bar atmosphere with great barbecue and an extensive menu of Cajun offerings (po’ boys, étouffée, blackened fish and shrimp, oysters), come to the Keg. Look for the cartoon pig riding a horse painted under the banner “Go Racers” in the front window.
Open: Monday–Saturday, 11:00 a.m.–12:00 a.m.
1051 North Sixteenth Street (across the road from the Murray State University football stadium); 270-762-0040
Marc Hatcher takes pride in his barbecue, and he’s a jack-of-all-trades, having welded together a quarter-inch steel smoker that holds a whopping 128 Boston butts. He also built his own barbecue shack south of Murray, in the area where he grew up. Marc said his building was strong, with hurricane straps on it, and when I said, “You’re not expecting hurricanes here in Calloway County, are you?” he replied, “It’s built like I build my barbecue. If you move it, it ain’t going to wiggle.”
Marc ran a lawn-care business for twenty-two years, so he’s got a ready source of hickory for his all-wood cooking. A big pile of it lies out back of the double-smokestack cooker, which should be smoking about any time you drive by, since Marc is open 10:00 a.m.–10:00 p.m. every day of the week. “I come in at 8:00 and don’t leave till 2:00 in the morning,” he said.
Although Marc’s been barbecuing as a hobby for years on weekends, Pit Stop just opened in the summer of 2011. I wonder how long he’ll be able to handle those long daily hours, but hearing Marc’s passion for his work makes me think it will be a long time before he burns out. He told me he’d keep barbecuing until “they turn me like this”—and he gave me two thumbs up to represent two feet sticking up in the dirt.
Marc was out of beef brisket when I stopped by on a Saturday afternoon. He said the brisket is a three-day process, and he’s got people “coming around like crazy,” some driving all the way from Illinois to get it. The St. Louis–style spareribs with cooked-on sauce were soft, tender, and very flavorful throughout—a little too soft for my preferences, but still delicious. My favorite, though, was the pulled-pork sandwich, a big pile of incredibly smoky pork on a hamburger bun with a golden buttery sheen on top. At present, Marc is selling fifteen cases of butts (at eights butts per case; you can do the math) and six to eight cases of ribs a week, and business is growing all the time. “We’ve been so busy here, you can’t get away,” he said.
Usually when I ask people what kind of wood they use, they say “hickory” but seldom specify the type. Marc was the first to say a particular species of hickory—“Only scalybark hickory,” he said. “I’ve got tight-bark but I only use that as a bed of coals. Tight-bark isn’t as sweet a wood as the scalybark. You’ve got more of a nuttier flavor—it’s more of a sweeter hickory. A lot of people tell me there’s no difference. Well, I’ve burnt a lot of wood—I’ve done a lot of ribs and stuff, and there’s just a big difference.”
I asked Marc how long he smoked the butts, and he said, “It all depends on your heat and moisture in the smoker. Anywhere between eight and eighteen hours.” Marc ruined about fifteen to twenty briskets before “working the bugs out” and learning to cook them right. The sauce is the same way—trial and error. The hot sauce “doesn’t kick you till the end.” He buys fresh habaneros by the case and cooks them down with his sauce. The hot sauce is sweet and has great bite to it.
In September 2011, menu items included pulled pork, BBQ bologna, BBQ chicken, pork ribs, and brisket, but “coming soon” they’ll have hamburgers because “people are begging us for them,” Marc said. “My main thing is the barbecue, but you got people squealing for fries and burgers, so what are you going to do? We’re about old-fashioned barbecue. A lot of older people are coming in because of that—not this ten-minute cooking. If it ain’t right, it don’t go out that [service] window.”
Marc’s firebox is four foot deep by eight foot long, with three doors for access. “I can throw in big chunks, logs, whatever I need,” he said. He burns whole wood, going against conventional western Kentucky style, which burns the wood down to coals before shoveling them underneath the meat. “You gotta get that flavor off as soon as you throw that log in there. When you use your coals up, most of the flavor is already gone, because when the wood starts smokin’, there’s your flavor.” He added, “I’d rather have a green piece of wood that’s just been knocked down to a two-year-old stick. It’s got more flavor to it.”
When I bit into the pulled-pork sandwich and tasted that intense smokiness, especially of the barky pieces I requested, I knew what Marc was talking about. This is barbecue to make wood lovers swoon. Forgive the obscure reference, but Scotch whiskey lovers will understand this comparison: most pulled pork I’ve tried across the state is like a Highland whisky, good and smooth. Marc’s Pit Stop pork is like Islay malt: pungent and extremely robust and smoky. I loved the meat on the buttery bun.
Marc is a big guy with a soft-spoken demeanor, and I watched him greet all his customers who stopped in. He takes a lot of pride in his work. “We’re going to the top somewhere,” he said.
Open: Monday–Sunday, 10:00 a.m.–10:00 p.m.
2393 State Route 121 South; 270-759-7001
Oh, Lord. It’s hard for me to restrain my enthusiasm for this place and the man who makes the magic happen. Mr. Cy Quarles, seventy-two years young in September 2012, has been smoking the best pulled pork I’ve ever tasted for a good long time. He and his wife, Jan, happily married for fifty years, have been in business near Kentucky Lake for over a decade.
Side Dish: Poor Trigg County
I was driving in the Land between the Lakes area on the lookout for a barbecue joint, and I’d just crossed the bridge over Lake Barkley (an impoundment of Cumberland River) when I saw a sign for barbecue. I didn’t see a woodpile, didn’t smell smoke. I went around behind the place and saw a man readying his fishing boat for a day on the lake. I asked him about barbecue, and he said that Preacher’s Barbecue in Cadiz had closed, and another place in Cadiz had closed. He said when he wanted good barbecue he drove over to Hopkinsville to eat at the Woodshed.
His wife came out of the house and said Bar B Que Shack on Pembroke Road was good. The man said he also drives down to Murray to eat at Coldwater Bar-B-Q. He also mentioned Knoth’s over in Grand Rivers.
I started to feel sorry for this man for living in a barbecue-impoverished county, but the more I got to thinking, the more I thought, Well, hell-fire! At least he has several really good places within thirty minutes of his home. When I lived in the upper Midwest for a spell, I couldn’t find any excellent barbecue. So I felt less sorry for him then, but then thought what an oddity Trigg County is, near the eastern edge of this barbecue hotbed and yet lacking its own barbecue establishment.
Pork, pork everywhere, nor any bite to eat. At least locally. Poor Trigg County.
Mr. Quarles smokes whole pork shoulders for twenty-two to twenty-four hours—salting them down before putting them on old-fashioned masonry pits. Pre-salting gets the salt down into the meat and also works as a protective coating. Cy educated me on how to cook with wood without making the meat bitter. You cook slow, he said, and if you’re cooking slow enough you’ll get drippings about one and a half inches long and blunt at the end clinging to the grate underneath the meat.
I call these meatsicles. If the cooking is too hot, the meatsicles will burn off.
Cy shovels fresh coals under the meat every hour. He, or the man he’s training to help him, tends the pits through the night.
I said, “When do you sleep?”
He smiled and said, “I didn’t used to until I got this boy to help me.”
The hoggy sandwich at Mr. BBQ takes the pork sandwich to a spiritual place. Cy loads a hoagie bun with a full half pound of his salty-smoky tender pulled pork. The bun is quality bread that he toasts after brushing with garlic butter. The sandwich is unbelievably fabulous. The meat by itself is all you need, but the garlicky bun actually complements this perfect pork. You bite into the sandwich and first the smoke and salt hit you, followed by the odor and taste of garlic. It’s like the fine wine of barbecue sandwiches. For a change of pace you can drizzle on some of Cy’s peppery vinegary sauce. When the ingredients settle in the clear glass bottles that hold the sauce, the various ingredients—oil, vinegar, spices—settle into pretty multicolored layers. The last time I ate this sandwich I said, “I’m so happy,” and broke into giggles and started ooooohing and aaaaaahing and Oh Lording.
If you want to try Cy’s ribs, you’ll need to visit late on a Friday afternoon when he’s taking them off the pit. To use Cy’s language, “A hot rib off the pit is something to holler about.” The tender ribs have a mahogany color and emit a smoky flavor similar to that of the pulled pork, because the ribs smoke for seven to seven and a half hours. Unlike some barbecue places that slather a thick tomato sauce onto ribs, Cy drizzles his with a thin vinegar sauce.
“Good fresh meat is the trick to barbecuing,” he said. “And it’s got to be fresh.” He gets his meat from Smith Poultry in Hardin, about twenty-five miles away. Cy has meat special cut and wrapped in paper. “I won’t cook anything that’s wrapped in plastic,” he said. “Plastic ruins barbecue. I can look at a piece of meat and tell you if it’s been plastic wrapped. It looks like it’s been frozen, and when the blood starts cooking out of it, it will be foamy and bubbly. The fresh meat won’t. I rather just have it straight out of the cooler.”
I love everything Mr. Quarles puts on the table. The side dishes are all homemade recipes, “pretty much what grandma used to cook,” Cy said. The fried okra is crunchy and savory. The potato salad is creamy, with a distinct onion flavor, different than any I’ve had in my life. He smokes chickens for seven hours, and the meat plumb falls off the bones and remains moist after all those hours on the pit.
Mr. BBQ is located two hours west of my home, and I’ve stopped by there on five random occasions. The first time I ate there was on a Sunday late morning. I ate a hoggy sandwich for breakfast. Mr. Quarles has been there every time, watching over his place, and I’ve seen Jan there several times, too. She told me that although Cy has trained a younger man to tend the barbecue pits, Cy still does it 75 percent of the time. She said he’s worked hard this past winter (2011–12) to fortify his woodpile. Cooking meats as he does on old masonry pits takes a lot of wood.
I encourage you to get to Mr. BBQ while you can, because Cy said he’s ready to do some more fishing and less pit tending.
A note about ambience: after you load up on a hoggy sandwich and other delights from Mr. BBQ, you can drive down the road a short piece and look at the sailboats on Kentucky Lake—an impoundment of the Tennessee River—and in your post-barbecue glow gaze out at the water and know that, at least in this moment, the world is good. And if you have any interest in wooing someone, you might want to take them there after dining. The sailboats are a romantic sight, and when you got your Mr. BBQ goggles on, the possibility for love increases considerably.
Open: Monday–Thursday, Sunday, 6:00 a.m.–2:00 p.m.; Friday–Saturday, 6:00 a.m.–8:00 p.m.
Winter hours: Monday–Sunday, 6:00 a.m.–2:00 p.m. (depending on weather)
270 Dover Road; 270-362-4445
Knoth’s has received plenty of acclaim over the years. On the wall in the restaurant hang various framed newspaper clippings with praising headlines: “Knoth’s Barbecue Named ‘Restaurant of the Year’ ”; “Knoth’s Means Barbecue in a Big Way”; “Just the Best! Knoth’s Is Smokin Pork All Summer Long.”
When you walk in the side door at Knoth’s, there’s a small counter with barstools and a larger dining room beyond. In June 2009, I sat at the counter and ordered a pulled-pork sandwich. The meat was super tender and mildly smoky. The mild sauce was mustardy and sweet. The hot sauce had a lot of black pepper in it. The slaw was crispy and sweet with some mustard in it.
Mr. Hugh Knoth spoke with me about the history of the place. His parents started the restaurant in 1965. They have the same menu now as they did forty-five years ago. Hugh also emphasized the freshness of their meat and the old-fashioned cooking methods. He learned to cook from his father, who learned to cook from a man in “Old Kuttawa,” a place that is now underneath the waters of Lake Barkley. Hugh has been doing barbecue since 1975.
“We haven’t changed a thing,” he said. “We have a limited menu, and it takes a lot of work.” Mrs. Knoth added that they’ve lasted so long because they are closed during the cold winter months, giving them time to rest up before the next barbecue season.
Out back in the barbecue pits I spoke with Chris Espino, who had been cooking at Knoth’s for eight years. He was born in Los Angeles but moved to Kentucky and started learning the craft of slow cooking from Hugh. He tended the pits as we talked, taking a long-handled shovel and scooping coals from where the wood burned down underneath an outdoor chimney and bringing the coals inside and opening a steel fire door and sliding the coals in the bottom, a few feet below the meat. Dozens of whole pork shoulders soaked up the smoke.
Chris said, “When I come here I don’t know nothing of barbecue place.”
I said, “I thought there’s a tradition of barbacoa in Mexico.”
“But it’s different.”
“Cooking the heads of cows and stuff like that?”
“Yeah, we eat all—the tail, the eyes, the tongue.”
At Knoth’s, whole pork shoulders smoke for twelve hours—first at 275° for two and a half hours, after which the shoulders are turned and cooked at 300° for an additional ten hours. The shoulders are held at 150° overnight until they are served the next day. Chris said trucks come in two times per week with fresh pork, and the meat goes directly from the delivery truck to the pits. They also smoke beef briskets.
It won’t take you long to ponder the menu at Knoth’s. You can get a pork or beef plate, pork or beef sandwich, fries and slaw, cold drinks and coffee. You can top it off with a milkshake or ice-cream cone.
Land between the Lakes Sweet and Tangy Pulled-Pork Sauce
Knoth’s Bar-B-Que near Grand Rivers developed a sweet, yellow-orange-colored sauce that complements pulled pork (and ribs and chicken) well. A couple of other barbecue places with roots in the Land between the Lakes region—J. J. McBrewster’s and Sarah’s Corner Cafe, both in Lexington—have sauces that taste similar. I’d never ask the folks to give away their sauce secrets, but tinkering in the Berry test kitchen yielded a sauce that’s a close cousin.
3 cups white vinegar
1 stick butter
1¼ cups ketchup
1 cup prepared mustard
½ cup water
1 tablespoon salt
2 cups white sugar
1 teaspoon black pepper
¼ teaspoon cayenne pepper
Heat wet ingredients over low heat, whisking to break up clumps of mustard. Add dry ingredients after well blended. Heat and stir until slightly thickened, 10-20 minutes. Adjust the pepper to taste. Yields about 1½ quarts.
Open: Monday–Thursday, 11:00 a.m.–7:00 p.m.; Friday–Saturday, 11:00 a.m.–8:00 p.m. (March–November only)
728 U.S. Highway 62 (west of Barkley dam); 270-362-8580
Between Princeton and Marion on Highway 91, my love for Kentucky landscapes wells up in me as it often does when I’m passing through beautiful agricultural country. Newly cut corn and soybean fields and rolls of hay and grazing beef cattle and an old lady push mowing her yard on a sunny, cool fall day, a mixture of flat fields and long gradual hills, and the closer you get to the Ohio River the hillier it gets. I passed a sign for a community called Mexico and another for the Busted Knee Garage.
Marion, the seat of Crittenden County, has a cute town square with some businesses around it. A couple of miles northeast of Marion, Hickory Heaven, in business since October 2006, offers delicious beef brisket, good pork ribs, distinctive-tasting barbecued chicken, some awesome smoked peppered ham, and a good pork sandwich with mild smokiness. The hot sauce is thin, tangy, peppery, and sweet, and the mild sauce may even be more tangy than the hot. Both suited my personal tastes very well.
Rosa Orr, who runs the restaurant with her husband, Robert, and daughter Carmen, whips up several homemade side dishes and a wide selection of pies to round out your meal. Rosa said, “I make everything homemade but the fried food. Not too many people—not that I brag—make very good vinegar slaw. But people love my vinegar slaw. A doctor comes here every two weeks with his wife and mother-in-law and always gets chicken, vinegar slaw, and baked beans.” Rosa also makes a family-recipe, mayo-based potato salad—and that’s real mayonnaise, not salad dressing, which is the way I like it.
Rosa grew up in Lima, Peru, and even though she’s lived in Kentucky for nearly forty years, since she was sixteen, she hasn’t picked up much of the regional accent. She met Robert in South America when he played guitar and trombone with a navy show band. They came back to Kentucky to be close to the Orr family. Rosa and I talked about the tough economic times, and she said Robert drives a school bus to help pay for her health insurance.
A long wall of stacked wood runs in front of the big cylindrical tank cooker behind the restaurant. Robert barbecues only with hickory when it’s available and sometimes adds a bit of white oak to extend the hickory supply. “We use only fresh meats. We pat out our own hamburgers. We don’t freeze nothing,” Rosa said.
The brisket was some of the best I’ve ever had. You get more than three-quarters of a pound on a plate. Rosa said a native Texan stopped by and said he couldn’t believe how tender the brisket was. When I asked how long she cooked the brisket, Rosa laughed and said, “That’s a secret.”
The spareribs were very tender, with a good sweet flavor. A plate gets you more than three-quarters of a pound of ribs. I prefer ribs with a bit more chew, but lovers of fall-off-the-bone ribs will like these. They currently serve half chickens, but Rosa said she’s considering quarter chickens in the future. The tender chicken had a far-out flavor. Rosa said, “We wanted something that wouldn’t taste like ordinary chicken.” She hinted that lemon pepper was part of the difference that lends to the slightly sour taste.
Rosa said they smoke whole pork shoulders because “the other ones [hams] are more stringy and the shoulders give more fat in it and give them more taste.” The pork shoulders can be pulled or chopped to order. Rosa explained, “I usually pull it and chop some because I don’t like long pieces on my plate and ladies, they usually don’t like those big long pieces. So usually I chop it, but some people want it pulled, [so] I pull it for [them]. If they don’t tell me anything, I just chop it. Sometime they like it little bitty.” One woman who comes in regularly specifies, “I want burned and I want fat,” and Rosa pulls to order. The large pork sandwich I ordered had about one-third of a pound of moist meat on a bun brushed with butter and toasted.
You’ll also find regional items like smoked ham and smoked bologna on the menu. Rosa said she could custom-pull a whole ham in seven minutes. The smoked peppered ham was very good. “People order whole bunches for Christmas, Thanksgiving, and Fourth of July,” she said. Rosa said smoking a sugar-cured ham is tricky because you have to know how much heat and smoke to add or you’ll burn the thing. The ham soaked up lots of smoke, and I love the peppery flavor. Previously I’d eaten smoked city ham in Graves County and wasn’t crazy about it, but I loved the taste of this tender, juicy, peppery ham at Hickory Heaven. It’s the only place in Crittenden County where you can get ham like this.
For dessert, you can get lemon pie, coconut pie, cherry cheesecake, and many others. Rosa likes to cook and knows what makes food delicious. Hickory Heaven is a fine family-owned barbecue destination. If it were closer to my home, I’d patronize it regularly, especially for that excellent beef brisket and the homemade sides and pies.
Open: Wednesday–Saturday, 11:00 a.m.–7:00 p.m.; Sunday, 11:00 a.m.–6:00 p.m.
1890 U.S. Highway 60 East; 270-965-0200
Michael Redd was outside tending the pits when I visited one Friday morning in September 2009. If there were a barbecue comic book—and there should be—Michael Redd could be a superhero. First, there’s his name, sounding like something out of a Quentin Tarantino flick (remember Reservoir Dogs, with Mr. Blue, Mr. Brown, Mr. Pink?). Second, he just looks badass—barbed wire tattooed around his right bicep and a black patch over one eye, buzz-cut hair and a shadowy reddish beard. The man left an impression on me, in part because he looks like he could kick butt in a fight, but also because he explained his meat-smoking methods so patiently and so well.
Mr. Redd, a lifelong resident of Caldwell County, has been smoking meats off and on his whole life. In big outdoor fireboxes, he was burning hickory slabs down to coals and bringing them inside the smoking garage to shovel them underneath the meat in the old-fashioned style. He prefers green wood because it has more moisture and the larger coals add steam to the meat. If the heat gets too hot, you lose meat because the outside of the shoulders will get too crusty, he said. Green wood helps prevent that. He puts whole pork shoulders on the pits between 10:00 and 11:00 a.m. and lets them cook until 7:00–9:00 a.m. the next morning—so, doing the math, shoulders smoke between twenty and twenty-three hours. Workers hand-pull the shoulders in the store. He smokes half chickens, slabs of ribs, and briskets. He browns the briskets an hour on each side and then wraps them in foil and lets them self-baste for several hours. Inside the store, they slice the briskets on request. Heaton purchases meat from Hampton Meat Processing down the road in Hopkinsville. Because of increasing customer demand, they’ve added some pits over the years. They get lots of traffic off I-24.
I asked Mr. Redd, “Any idea why barbecue’s such a tradition in this part of the world?”
He answered, “I think it’s because since we were a border state, we had slavery but we also had a lot of poor whites. It was the cuts of meats that you could get, the best and easiest way to do it. You could put it on in the morning, work your farm all day, and come in and have a pretty consistent cut of meat. That way you wouldn’t have to be in a hurry. It’d be there waiting for you.”
After talking with Michael a while, I felt comfortable enough to ask what happened with his eye. He said, “I had a cornea transplant. It was a 99 percent chance it would take and 1 percent it wouldn’t. Welcome to the 1 percent. Too bad it wasn’t the lottery.”
Don’t expect a frilly dining experience at Heaton BBQ, which is actually inside a Marathon gas station. You order barbecue at the same counter where you pay for gasoline. The menu has hamburgers and cheeseburgers in addition to the barbecue offerings. The real good pulled-pork shoulder was moist and tender, with a delicate smokiness, and the sauce tastes of ketchup, sweetness, and pepper. The barky pieces had a pronounced smokiness that I loved. More bark, please! They were sold out of ribs on the Sunday afternoon I ate there. The meat in the brisket sandwich was thinly sliced with a distinctive fat layer. They slice it up to order and heat it on a flat top. If you like fat, as I do, you’ll probably be happy with the flavor, but it wasn’t like Texas brisket, which is usually sliced thicker. The brisket had a rich, good aroma, but I couldn’t get over how the steaming in foil and thin slicing and reheating gave it the texture and aroma of bacon. Not that there’s anything wrong with bacon! I’m just saying that it was different from the “naked” briskets I’ve eaten down in Texas.
Patti and Russell Heaton have served barbecue here since 1996. Russell tended the pits for eight years before training others to do the labor-intensive work. They’ve been featured in Garden & Gun magazine. So get some meats, sit down in a plastic booth, and listen to the bell dinging whenever a car drives up to a fuel pump outside—and be thankful that Michael Redd and pit masters like him are still tending meats in those hot, smoking pits.
Open: Monday–Sunday, 6:00 a.m.–9:00 p.m.
495 Marion Road (in the Marathon gas station); 270-365-3102
I was heading west on the Wendell H. Ford Western Kentucky Parkway bound for the Seventeenth Ever Barbecue on the River festivities in Paducah, when I pulled off at the Princeton exit in search of Jewell’s, a place I’d learned about from Jane and Michael Stern’s Roadfood, a coast-to-coast guide to local eateries. Accolades from such well-known food lovers are bound to bring in some customers such as myself who will drive a goodly piece off the interstate for fine barbecue. I’d been meaning to get there for a couple of years, ever since visiting Heaton’s just up the road on an earlier trip. Jewell’s was closed then, and this time around I wanted to get there for the lunch hour, since they close early on weekdays.
Highway 62 west of Princeton was busy during this Friday lunchtime, and cars riding my bumper pushed me forward at a quicker pace than I like when I’m looking around a new place. This caused me to pass right by Jewell’s and drive on down the road a few miles before stopping at an automotive body shop to ask for directions. I backtracked and found the small, tan-colored cinderblock building just off the highway, on the left when you’re headed east, just before you hit the commercial district. A couple of cars were parked outside. I saw the pits out back and whole slabs of hickory on a wagon bed.
Inside, I walked to the counter and a woman named Denise handed me a menu and told me to take a seat, so I chose one of three booths against the wall. The meats on offer were pork and bologna. I knew I’d be eating all day, so I chose “pork on garlic,” pulled pork between buttered and toasted white bread with a hot sauce drizzled on top by request. Pickles and onions are optional. The sandwich came sliced in two triangles on a plastic plate. The pork was moderately smoky, and the overall affect of the meat, garlic toast, and sauce was delicious. I wished, though, that the sandwich had more meat. It was a smallish amount, probably about a quarter pound. The sauce tingled my lips and tongue with specks of cracked black pepper. The Sterns, in a story for Gourmet, describe this sauce as “rich and red, with a compelling citrus zest.” The occasional barky pieces were superb, reminding me of the best pulled pork I’d eaten in western Kentucky at such places as Mr. BBQ, Carr’s Barn, Prince’s, and the Woodshed. I enjoyed the sandwich very much, but if I were hungry the $4 pork on garlic toast would put only a small dent in my appetite, whereas the whopper hoggy sandwich from Mr. BBQ gets you a full half pound of pork for a bit more money. I’d gladly pay a little extra for a larger sandwich.
Ten people were eating, relaxing, talking, and smoking in the one-room dining area. Farming implements—horseshoes, an old ax, a mule yoke, a pitchfork—hang from the brown paneling walls, along with other nostalgic items like a back scratcher made with a turkey leg and a weathered baseball bat and catcher’s mitt. I enjoyed looking at tobacco-raising tools, like worn wooden pegs for setting tobacco back in the days before tractors and mechanical tobacco setters. My father and I used to “peg” tobacco in the springtime with such tools as these, which meant we walked down every row a week after planting the young tobacco seedlings in the earth with the machine setter and plunged that wooden peg into the soil, dropped in a plant, and closed the earth around it. It was the kind of work that gets adults down in the back. This homage to tobacco culture at Jewell’s included long-handled tobacco knives for cutting the plants during late summer and also a twist of dried tobacco, just in case you missed the point of these tools.
After eating I went to the counter to pay and asked Denise how long they smoke the shoulders, and she said the owner was sitting over in the corner and I could talk to him. This was Lowell Jewell, the same fellow interviewed by the Sterns in Roadfood. They quote Lowell as saying, “I watch the food shows on TV when they go all over the place looking for barbecue. And I’m saying, ‘Why don’t you come to western Kentucky and eat the real thing?’”
True to form, Lowell was easygoing and open to talking in his thick Caldwell County twang. The Jewell family has been in Caldwell County all their lives. I complimented him on the use of garlic toast on the sandwich, noting how unusual that was, and he said, “We even have it on cornbread. More Yankees—or northerners—eat that than the local crew. We have a lot of people traveling through, that’s the only reason we have it on the menu. We’d never heard of it, but we had a group come in and they want cornbread, so I saw that it was popular and put it on the menu. It does sell.”
“But not with the local folks.”
“Naw, naw. Course we eat cornbread every meal, so it’s not as big a delicacy for us. But out-of-staters, they love it. And coleslaw. They want coleslaw on it. It’s not bad. Ours is a mayonnaise slaw, not vinegar, so it goes pretty good.”
I asked about the history of Jewell’s barbecue, and Lowell motioned over at the man at the next table and said, “Dad started in the backyard at home with a little pit, and he was a coal miner at the time and the mine shut down, and everybody told us we should open this place, and we opened in 1984. Been going ever since. I been in Food and Wine magazine, Gourmet magazine, and of course up on the road trip.” He gestured to the wall where Jane and Michael Stern’s Roadfood review hangs. He then pointed to the nearby television and said, “I watch this all the time. They go to Texas. They go to North Carolina. They go everywhere but Kentucky for barbecue.”
I said, “That’s right. That’s why I’m writing this book. We’re neglected.”
“Yeah, we’re overlooked in every way,” Lowell agreed. “The only recognition we get is Moonlite” (the famous restaurant in Owensboro). “Our barbecue is cooked the old-fashioned way—no gas, no nuthin’. Hickory smoke only. That’s it. We don’t put any rubs. The only time the sauce hits it is when it comes through that ordering window. And if you don’t want sauce, tell me, and you’ll have nothing but pure barbecue.”
Lowell puts the whole shoulders on the pits at 8:00–9:00 one morning and they come off the next day. “It’s a twenty-four-hour process,” he said. “We start out skin side down and flip ’em two or three times throughout the day and keep the heat under ’em.”
Lowell said all their side dishes are homemade: coleslaw, macaroni salad, baked beans, white beans, cornbread—“all that’s fresh made.” Talking about the great variety of barbecue desires from county to county in western Kentucky, Lowell said, “You can go to this county and everybody wants pork. You go to Lyon County, they want pork, chicken, ham, more variety. You go to Christian County, which is another joining county, they want mutton. Madisonville likes mutton, but we can’t sell it here. This is pork territory, Caldwell County.” They sometimes smoke chickens for a change, and they sell well. I’d noted earlier that chicken was on the menu but crossed off with a black marker. Lowell spoke of chicken with a hint of derision in his voice: “It got to where everybody was like, chicken chicken, every day chicken. And usually when you come to a barbecue place you like pork. Our pork is our staff.”
We got into a discussion about gas-fired cookers, and Lowell asked me if I’d tasted gas on the meat at a particular restaurant, and when I said no, he observed, “They cover it up better than most.” He added, “If you love barbecue—like when we clean our pits our regulars will say, ‘You cleaned your pits,’ ’cause they know. It don’t have that great barbecue flavor—it’s good, but it’s not that great barbecue flavor that they’re used to. It’s like an iron skillet— better seasoned, the better it is.”
Jewell’s is a family affair. Lowell’s mom opens for breakfast; his sister helps out when they need her; and his nieces wait tables.
When I asked him, “How long you intend to keep doing this?” Lowell smiled and said, “As long as the public keeps comin’.”
Open: Monday–Friday, 5:30 a.m.–2:00 p.m.; Saturday, 5:30 a.m.–10:00 p.m.
1240 U.S. Highway 62 West; 270-365-5415
The Trail of Tears Intertribal Pow-Wow, happening each year the first full weekend after Labor Day—featuring Native American dancing and storytelling along with vendors selling foods, crafts, clothes, and music—is a good reason to make the drive to Hopkinsville. I enjoy sitting in the stands by the dancing circle, eating a piece of fry bread and watching colorfully clothed and feathered dancers compete in various styles—my favorite being the electrifying Fancy Dance performed mostly by young men and boys as they keep time with powerful war drums and fast drums and varied tempos, and the dancer must move according to the beat and strike a pose when the drum beats stop.
Hopkinsville was also home to the “psychic counselor and healer” (from a marker near his grave) Edgar Cayce. The Pennyroyal Area Museum, located in the old post office building downtown, displays Cayce’s Bible along with other exhibits on the Black Patch Tobacco Wars, Jefferson Davis, pioneer home furnishings, old quilts, and old license plates.
And yes, Hoptowners love their barbecue, judging by the several great barbecue joints in Christian County, and it’s one of the last places in southern Kentucky where you’ll find mutton and burgoo as you head eastward.
Some barbecue places get all the press (Moonlite in Owensboro, for instance). Others languish in obscurity, often for good reason. And then you have places like Bar B Que Shack—a gem of a barbecue joint whose praises should be sung but that isn’t well known outside its locality. The Shack took me by surprise with its high-quality long-smoked pork and mutton and delicious burgoo and hot slaw.
Elisa Berry’s Smoky Greens
I’ve been eating messes of greens since I was a knee-high rube and have never tired of them. My wife, Elisa, makes some of the best I’ve ever had. Of course I’m biased, but I also have good taste. This recipe was inspired by the “soul greens” of Smoketown USA in Louisville. Elisa took the vegetarian-friendly Smoketown greens and carnivored them up a bit, to the delight of my taste buds. I like adding the sliced boiled eggs, something my mama always did when we ate greens at home.
4 ounces dried black-eyed peas (you can use a 15-ounce can of them, or if you’re lucky get them fresh)
1 smoked ham hock (or bacon or other smoked meat/bone)
3 bunches of greens, mixed (whatever you like—I often use collards, mustard greens, and kale)
1 can (15 ounces) diced stewed tomatoes
2 cubes chicken bouillon
Salt and pepper to taste
Hard-cooked eggs, sliced
Strip the leaves of greens, removing the largest, toughest stems. In a stockpot big enough to hold the fresh greens, add enough water to cover the ham hock. Bring to a boil and add dried peas and ham hock. Reduce heat to a slow boil and cook about 30 minutes, until peas are partially cooked but still firm. (If you use fresh or canned beans you may want to wait until later to add them, so they don’t get too mushy.)
Add greens, the full can of stewed tomatoes with liquid, and enough water to just cover the greens. Bring to a boil. As the water gets hot, add bouillon and salt and pepper to taste. Cover and reduce to a simmer. Cook for 1 hour. When the greens are nearly ready, pull out the ham hock, let it cool, and then pull any meat off and put it in the pot. Serve with vinegar or Tabasco sauce. Garnish with slices of hard-cooked egg.
I walked into the Shack on a Friday afternoon and was greeted by one of several women who were running the place, mostly working the drive-through window at the back. The atmosphere is utilitarian, so the experience is like eating in a well-lit, open, clean garage. Walls and ceiling are corrugated metal, and floors are cement. Fluorescent lighting bathes the plastic-topped tables in a seating space that probably holds fifty to sixty customers. I was excited about the possibilities for great barbecue because I spied huge slabs of hickory piled up out back and smelled the smoke. The white board menu listed pulled pork, mutton, ribs, pork chops, and chicken; white beans, baked beans, green beans, potato salad, slaw, burgoo, and hot slaw; pies (pecan, chess, French coconut, and fudge) and peach cobbler. I chose a mutton sandwich on cornbread with hot slaw and burgoo for sides.
The hoecakes were hot, sweet, and fresh, and the chopped mutton has plenty of tasty fat mixed in and a deep smoky flavor from real pit cooking. The hot sauce is a tomato-vinegar-cayenne concoction, a nice complement to the mutton. I appreciated that the finely chopped mutton isn’t sauced as it is in Owensboro when you get “chopped.” This was simply meat, fat, and smoke. I loved it. The woman who rang up my bill said people wanted mutton and were willing to pay the higher price (compared to pork and chicken). Because the mutton was so good, I ordered a pound of pork pulled from their long-smoked whole shoulders to take home with me. The pork could use some salt, but the meat was very good: deeply smoked, extremely moist, and flaky tender. On hoecakes with the hot sauce, it would be mighty fine. I loved the crunchy hot slaw, which reminded me of Korean kimchee without the sourness of kimchee fermentation—finely chopped cabbage with a red hot sauce mixed in, leaving a nice afterglow of heat on the tongue. One of the workers told me that many locals get slaw on their pork sandwiches. The burgoo was a chunky stew of green beans, corn, cubed potatoes, black-eyed peas, green peas, meat, black pepper, and tomatoes—much thicker than burgoo I’ve eaten at Moonlite and Old Hickory Bar-B-Q in Owensboro, the burgoo capital.
Out back, I talked with James Baucum, who’s worked the pits for a year, and Carlos from Chiapas, Mexico, the main cook for five years, as long as the Shack has been open in its current location. The pits are well-insulated, heavy-duty block rectangles with heavy lids weighed down by big rocks. Thick smoke hung in the garage, smelling wonderful. The whole shoulders cook at 200° for twenty-four hours or longer. They burn down hickory and oak slabs to coals in a huge steel barrel and shovel them underneath the meat. They cook spareribs in the mornings. James said if the temperature drops to 175°, they shovel more coals underneath to get the pit temperature back up to 200–225°, about every one and a half to two hours. When the mutton quarters are half done, they wrap them in foil to save the juices (“It dries out a lot quicker than pork does,” James explained). Chickens and pork chops are cooked on a pellet cooker that feeds hickory pellets on it gradually. Pork chops cook for only one and a half to two hours.
I said, “You know, James, there aren’t many people in Kentucky cooking whole shoulders for twenty-four hours.”
“That right? You can taste that smoke all the way through, can’t you?”
Carlos and I talked a while about the beauty of tongue tacos with cilantro and onion and good tortillas.
The skinny on the Shack: for my taste bud leanings, I favor the burgoo, the hot slaw, pulled pork on hoecakes with hot sauce, and a mutton sandwich on hoecakes with hot sauce. I wonder if the people of Hopkinsville realize how lucky they are.
Open: Wednesday–Saturday, 10:00 a.m.–varying closing times, like 4:00 p.m. on Wednesday
4687 Pembroke Road; 270-475-4844
A little over twenty-four hours after I stopped at a barbecue joint in western Kentucky and paid $4 for a sandwich with a minimal amount of meat, I arrived at Woodshed and paid $3.50 for a sandwich that had serious loft, probably two inches of shredded pork heaped up on a regular hamburger bun. The meat was smoky and flaky with pieces of crispy bark. No sauce came on the sandwich, and I loved it.
I walked in and sat at the front counter and struck up a talk with two waitresses. I said I liked smoky flavor, and what did they recommend? One said she liked the chicken without the sauce because you could tell that it comes from the pit; the other said she liked the chicken with the sauce because it had more flavor. They said the chicken, mutton, and pork all come from the same pit. They serve baby back ribs on Saturday only. The ribs came with baked potato, salad, green beans, and a yeast roll. Homemade sides include the baked beans and burgoo. A plate comes with a meat and three sides. The green beans are doctored up with a bit of country ham.
Even though it was baby back Saturday, I opted for the pork sandwich, and it was wonderful. They smoke whole shoulders overnight. Pickle and onion are optional on the sandwich. The meat was tender and very smoky. This wasn’t “wet” barbecue but rather dry in the best way possible—flaky but still moist meat. The sauce is a sweet, thin tomato sauce with some vinegar and flecks of pepper. The pork, with its salty-smoky flavor, reminded me of the best I’ve eaten in western Kentucky. Shoulders are cooked out back every day except Sunday. They put the whole shoulders and mutton quarters on the pits at 10:00 a.m.–noon and take them off early the next morning.
I sat in a little nook off the main dining room, a big, open area seating eighty people. There were twenty people eating there at 4:30 on a Saturday afternoon. A television on the wall played college football. People smoked inside. The floors are tile and the tables are simple laminated plastic with scoot-’em-up black chairs. Pies are on display at the counter in the front. Menus are located in slots underneath the table. The Woodshed has a drive-through window. As I ate that sandwich, several people drove up and got their orders. Later, the attentive server talked me into a piece of pie from their multiple options. I took her advice and got the coconut cream. The pork sandwich ranks high on my “best” list, and I also liked the sweet treat at $2 per slice. Other pies include raisin, caramel, chess, chocolate chess, lemon icebox, key lime, pecan, and apple.
Opened in 1984 on the western edge of Hopkinsville by the Mathis family, the Woodshed has a loyal clientele. (Their most famous customer was George W. Bush, who stopped by on the campaign trail back in May of 2000.) Jr. Mathis, the original owner, has retired and his sons run the place now. I told Phil Mathis, who stood at the drive-through window filling orders, that I really enjoyed that sandwich, and he said, “It’s been a winning formula so far.” They get their mutton and pork from Hampton Meat Processing in Hopkinsville, where they do “meat cut fresh daily on site.” That ready source of fresh meat is surely a primary reason why that barbecued pork tasted so good.
“I guess you just call us a family-style restaurant,” Phil said. “Mom and pop is about gone, you know?”
The Woodshed barbecues mutton quarters. Phil said mutton is so expensive, he didn’t know why people didn’t raise it around here. “I believe I’ll start raising mutton—that’s better than tobacco now.” He noted that mutton is a drier meat but better for you than pork. “I take a pill for pork,” he said. “I might have to start taking two!”
Give the Woodshed a try for their generous portions of that long-barbecued pork and mutton, extensive side dishes, and comfortable mom-and-pop atmosphere.
Open: Monday–Saturday, 10:30 a.m.–8:00 p.m.
1821 West Seventh Street; 270-885-8144
On a Friday in early November, I trekked over to Herndon, Kentucky, to tackle the Knockum Hill pork chop. Forget your fork and finicky eating— this is dig your hands in and pull the bones out and separate the fat with your fingers barbecue. This is as close to whole hog as I’ve found in Kentucky. Hillbillies say a snapping turtle has seven kinds of meat in it. This pork hunk is the snapping turtle of barbecue. After eating some of it, I brought it home and weighed it on my kitchen scale—and it still weighed in at two pounds, six ounces (bones and fat included). If you like real barbecue—deeply smoked meat that falls apart at the touch of your fingers and tastes rich and savory— and if you aren’t afraid of bones and some natural fat, then don’t visit the Hopkinsville area without trying this T. Rex of pork chops. It’s baaaaaad (in the good way). I’ve never seen anything like it outside a pig picking.
Knockum Hill is just south of Herndon, a spot in the road with a market, a U.S. Post Office, a Methodist church, and a few houses, surrounded by sprawling cornfields. In the fall, the beauty of the changing leaves and fresh-cut fields and tobacco firing in the curing barns made for pleasant driving. The parking lot of Knockum Hill was full of pickup trucks at Friday noon. The tan metal building with a green roof is flanked by beautiful deciduous woods.
Mr. Oscar Hill, a healthy-looking seventy-five years old in 2011, has been barbecuing for over thirty years, doing it the old-timey western Kentucky way: burning down hickory wood to coals and shoveling those coals underneath meat propped on racks in well-insulated concrete and mortar pits. When I saw the rows of hickory slabs out back of his small restaurant and sniffed the rich aroma of smoke in the air, I anticipated something good. His monstrous pork chop exceeded my expectations; not only was it big, but it was cooked perfectly, with crispy bark on the outside and delicate tender meat on the inside and infused throughout with the sweet, savory hickory smoke. I loved it, wanted to eat the whole thing, but held back because I had to eat at several more places that day. I asked Oscar how long that pork chop had smoked, and he said it was a twenty-hour process. He said many people had tried to duplicate his big chop, but none successfully. The meat dries out quickly when you bust it open, so I recommend bringing a partner and eating it in one sitting. The pork chop costs $11, but two to three people could split it, although Mr. Hill said that some of his big eaters tackle the whole thing. He claims that you can eat the chop with a plastic fork. It’s true, but I just dug in with my fingers, and the meat and fat melted in my mouth. I picked through a rib section and another part containing what appeared to be spinal bones. I’m pretty sure this chop is cut from the loin—it’s like having four untrimmed pork chops in one big hunk. Two table sauces complement the pork, both made from mostly white vinegar, red oil (chili oil?), and cayenne pepper, but this pork is so good that no sauce is necessary.
In addition to the miraculous pork chop (have I mentioned that this pork chop ranks in my top 5 percent of supreme barbecue experiences?), other offerings include pulled pork from Boston butts cooked over fifteen hours, whole and half chickens, and big spareribs. I didn’t try the side dishes (burgoo, potato salad, and slaw), having enough on my plate with the pork chop. Delicious-looking slices of pie are also available, and you can view them inside a refrigerated case by the counter.
Four middle-aged gentlemen in business attire ate and talked at one table; at another table sat a group of six men in hunting camo and work boots; at another several African American guys wearing dungarees; at another, two Fort Campbell soldiers in army fatigues. You can eat inside the thirty-five-seat restaurant decorated with white and green checked plastic tablecloths and green window treatments, or, when the weather is good, outside at a picnic table underneath a big pavilion lit up by fluorescent lighting. Several porch swings hang from the pavilion. When I left that day, I heard what sounded like geese honking in the woods behind, and saw black cattle walking among the trees.
Knockum Hill was opened in 1980 by Oscar’s brother-in-law Will, who still lives next door to the restaurant. Oscar bought the restaurant from Will in 1996. Because he’s been at the business such a long time, Oscar said he’ll sell the place if somebody gives him “the right price” for it. I heard something similar from Cy Quarles at Mr. BBQ up in Grand Rivers. Both of these barbecue experts are near retirement. I’m just saying—get there while the sweet smoke rolls.
Side Dish: The Gospel on Sauces
This I believe: Sauces are superfluous to great barbeque. My friend Bruce Bjorkman, host of the radio show Cooking Outdoors with Mr. Barbecue out of Portland, Oregon, wrote a whole book on barbecue dressings called The Great Barbecue Companion: Mops, Sops, Sauces, and Rubs. I respect Bruce’s research and dedication to barbecue and enjoy reading the recipes in his book, especially the international flavors like harissa (Moroccan spiced red chili paste), Dominican sauce with mango and tamarind, Jamaican jerk rubs, and so forth. But after eating barbecue at 160 places all over Kentucky, I’ve become even more convinced that great barbecue doesn’t need sauce, especially not heavy masking sauces. Two of my favorite joints—Mr. BBQ & More in Grand Rivers and Knockum Hill Bar-B-Q in Herndon—serve up finger-lickin’ luscious pork seasoned simply with salt, wood smoke, and slow cooking. Both places offer very thin vinegar sauces at the table, and I’ll shake a few drops on the pork as a kind of palate shifter to prevent taste bud fatigue, but the meat is just so good you don’t want to overwhelm it with sauce. To me, that’s what great barbecue is about—meat so good you don’t even want a sauce.
That pork chop was the best-tasting meat I’ve had in Kentucky from any cut of pig—which means the best meat, period.
Open: Friday, 9:00 a.m.–6:00 p.m.; Saturday, 9:00 a.m.–3:00 p.m. (doors close at closing hour, so get there sometime before 6:00 or 3:00)
11185 Highway 107 South; 270-271-2957