The folks at the Kentucky Tourism Council (or Chamber of Commerce or whoever did the naming) got it partly wrong when coining such a description for this eight-county region. Sure, Bill Monroe, father of bluegrass, hails from here. But the counties in the “Western Waterlands” region could as easily claim the barbecue title. Still, you can smack your lips on plenty of scrumptious smoked meats in this region, and I’m here to lead you to some of the best places.
Several big steel cylindrical tanks sit outside of this grocery store/takeout barbecue joint near the banks of the Ohio River. Smoke puffed from chimneys rising out of the tanks as I talked with Dennis “Bubba” Girten, master smoker, while he pulled fat from whole smoked hams and tended beautiful racks of spareribs. It was mid-September, the sun blazed down on Uniontown, and when Bubba lifted the two hinged doors on one of the tanks, the juicy hams reflected the sunlight. I saw a halo around one of them.
Bubba wore black rubber gloves to pull off the already-smoked exterior fat and skin. He then shook black pepper on the hams liberally after the extra fat was removed, so that the pepper soaked into the meat as the hams continued to smoke and the newly exposed fat browned. The hams smoke for about eight hours and are fully cooked when Bubba gets them from Farm Boy Foodservice in Evansville, Indiana. Ribs smoke for six to seven hours with a mixture of hickory, pecan, sassafras, and oak. Bubba said a friend flew in from Seattle with another fellow who’d never eaten mutton, and three days later they flew back to the Northwest with 150 pounds of mutton on the airplane.
Side Dish: Ode to Catholic Church Fund-raisers
If you are lucky as I was, you’ll roll into a community like Uniontown on a day when they are doing a church picnic. On a mid-September afternoon, I watched a few local fellers smoking seventy-eight hundred pounds of mutton on long cinderblock pits stacked three blocks high and topped with wire fencing.
When I expressed my surprise at the huge amount of meat, a man said, “It’ll be gone by 8:00 tonight.” They have a dining hall where you can have all-you-can-eat mutton for $9, or you can buy sandwiches or by the pound. In the morning early, they sell the ribs and the necks off the pit (since both cook up quicker than the thicker parts of the sheep).
I said, “Mutton ribs are pretty lean, ain’t they?” and a fellow said, “Lean on the meat, but they’re fatty as hell.” The men guessed they lost 40 percent of the original weight during the cooking process by rendering the fat and through evaporation. The mutton cooks overnight for a total of about sixteen hours, the pit watchers basting the meats with dip to prevent dehydration during the long smoking. They treated me to a piece of mutton off the pit, and it was plumb wonderful.
“It’s got a mineral, gamy flavor don’t it?” said Raymond Hammond, one of the pit tenders. “It’s a lot of work and a lot of fun. It’s a homecoming thing. Mark your calendar—we do it every year, the Saturday after Labor Day.”
And that evening I sat around on hay bales on the grounds of St. Agnes Catholic Church and ate mutton, watching people milling about, talking and sipping and sampling the scrumptious results of that long cooking. I know I’m going back. That mutton was so good as to reaffirm one’s belief in the Fabulous Unknown.
Time: 4:30 p.m., first Saturday after Labor Day
Place: St. Agnes Catholic Church, 504 Mulberry Street, Union-town; 270-822-4416
I didn’t get to try the ribs because they were sold out, and the racks on the smoker wouldn’t be done until a couple hours later, so I settled for two sandwiches, pork and mutton, and ate them at a plastic picnic table underneath a small gazebo. I sipped a cold beverage, savored the sandwiches, and watched Bubba sweat out there in the intense afternoon heat. The pulled-pork sandwich was wet, tender, and intensely smoky. A thin “dip” was on the meat when the sandwich came to me. The wetness distinguished this style from the pork I found around Paducah and farther west. While I dislike a heavy sauce that disguises the meat, this thin dip tasted real good on the sandwich. The chipped mutton tasted like mutton is supposed to taste—gamy, tangy, and smoky.
One microregional specialty available at Uniontown Food Mart is chipped ham—what we call “city ham” (as opposed to salty country ham), smoked and chopped up with spices on it. Most ham consumed in the USA is city ham, so I’ll bet folks from all around would enjoy this sandwich. I’m not sure if I’d call it barbecue, though, since the hams are already cooked when they hit the smoker. Let’s just call it what it is: a smoked, chipped city ham sandwich. The Uniontown Food Mart barbecue menu also includes pork burgers, boneless pork chops, and whole chickens.
Bubba was born and raised in Uniontown. His sister married one of the Peak boys from the established Peak Bros. restaurant down the road. During high school he spent a summer with his sister and brother-in-law, and the latter, disapproving of Bubba lying around on the couch, said one day, “My dad’s got something for you to do.” He started a painting job for the Peaks, and three hours later they said, “You know how to chip mutton?” and Bubba said, “Naw,” so an old black man took him inside and showed him how. Next thing Bubba knew, he was cooking and doing it all. Bubba does the smoking for Uniontown Food Mart seven days a week.
I said, “When do you rest?”
Chicken Dip
This delicious dip is courtesy of a pitman at St. Agnes, whose name I unfortunately failed to get.
2 46-ounce cans of tomato juice
2 sticks butter
1 cup apple cider vinegar
Black pepper and salt to taste
1 tablespoon of sugar
1 cup French’s mustard
2 tablespoons cayenne pepper
Don’t dip chicken until chicken is almost done, or you’ll burn the dip.
He replied, “I go home at night.”
Bubba said he’d do the smoking but wouldn’t make a sauce, because “it would make the Peaks mad if I did.” Family secrets and all. They trained him. He’d be stealing their recipe.
Bubba directed me to a big picnic down the road at St. Agnes Catholic Church, so instead of lingering around for the ribs, I went to check it out.
By the way, just a skip down the road from Uniontown Food Mart, you can park by the Ohio River and watch the water roll.
Open: Monday–Friday, 6:00 a.m.–9:00 p.m.; Saturday, 7:00 a.m.–9:00 p.m.; Sunday, 8:00 a.m.–8:00 p.m.
330 Mill Street; 270-822-5005
I’m wary of alluding to pop technology—which is often about speed and trendiness—in a book about something as old-fashioned as barbecue, which is about taking your time and durability—but these are the times we live in. If you are on Facebook, you can look up Peak Bros. BBQ and see photos of people having a fabulous time there celebrating Derby Day, Mardi Gras, and University of Kentucky basketball games: women dancing on the bar Coyote Ugly style; a bartender loaded down with Mardi Gras beads; women wearing elaborate Derby Day hats.
You Can Rely on Divine Providence to Help You Find a Church Picnic
But blessedly, the Diocese of Owensboro—the Catholic Church of Western Kentucky—makes it easier, publishing a schedule of the annual picnics in its monthly newsletter, the Western Kentucky Catholic. You can access it online— http://rcdok.org/ministries/communications/WKC_online.php—and search the archives electronically. The picnic schedule is published in the April edition.
The annual picnic weekends are pretty stable—Immaculate Conception in Hawesville, for instance, holds its picnic on the third Saturday in September. Most picnics occur on Saturday afternoons, a few on Sundays. To find out the precise day and time of a church’s picnic, call the church office. They’ll be glad to help you—and glad to have you come eat. As Bill Glenn told me at Owensboro’s International Bar-B-Q Festival while stirring a vat of burgoo for Our Lady of Lourdes’ cooking team: “God’s on everybody’s side, and he likes barbecue.”
But Peak Bros. is also a family dining place. I’m reminded of pubs in Ireland, where all sorts gather. Men drink pints at the bar. Families—young kids, parents, grandparents—dine at the tables. A band plucks instruments in the corner.
When I ate at Peak Bros. on a Saturday afternoon around 3:00, the place was quiet—not the party atmosphere revealed in the photos. In short, if you desire a party atmosphere with your barbecue, venture into Peak Bros. in the evenings. They have a full bar. If you desire a “family atmosphere” and don’t mind neon beer signs on the walls, go there for lunch or an early dinner. The bar/lounge area is separated from the restaurant.
The appetizer menu is extensive. They have “onion pedals” [sic] and cheddar cheese balls and deep-fried spicy dill pickles. Plates include mutton, pork, ham, and beef, sliced and chipped. A combo plate includes a bit of all of these meats, or you can get a sandwich. They also serve steaks and fried chicken. Sides include beans, slaw, spicy fried sweet potatoes, onion rings, and steak fries.
I started with burgoo: spicy and flavorful with chunks of corn, onion, potato, and meat. The spareribs were tender and wet, with a thin dip sauce on them. My personal preference is for less tender “naked” ribs that haven’t been wrapped in foil or boiled, but they had a good smoky flavor. I tried a little bit of all the meats, which were coated in the same thin, vinegary Peak Bros. sauce that was on the ribs. The sauce worked better with the pork and mutton than with the other meats. The brisket had a thin smoke ring, was moderately tender, and tasted a bit like roast beef. It was good. The chopped mutton was real good, with the appropriate mutton whanginess. The chipped pork was smoky and very vinegary. If you like vinegar and smoke, get the chipped pork! The ham was tender city ham with some sauce on it. The sliced pork was lean, dry, and mildly smoky. It reminded me of a sliced pork loin, which lacks the fat of shoulders, and I found out later that they smoke fresh whole hams instead of fattier shoulders and butts—hence the leanness (and dryness).
In summary, my favorite meats were the mutton and chipped pork (loved it). Smoking fresh hams instead of shoulders makes pulling the pork difficult because of the lesser fat content. The “chipped” style comes out of necessity from the leaner hams. The sliced beef comes off the brisket. The sliced mutton comes from smoked mutton hams; chipped mutton comes from mutton ribs, shoulders, and necks. They use many different hardwoods for smoking.
Peak Bros. has burned twice, the first time in 1976. The current building is new, and nice quilts hang from ductwork along the ceilings. There’s a letter on the wall from Ladybird Johnson, thanking the Peaks for a barbecue ham back in the 1960s. Earle C. Clements, who served as a senator and then governor of Kentucky, sent the Johnsons a Peak Bros. barbecue ham—a fully cooked, bone-in city ham.
The new restaurant has a huge brick and mortar pit in the kitchen, rising from the floor and disappearing into the ceiling, with big, sliding steel doors to access the meat. They keep the fires burning with chunks of hardwood from a big pile stacked near the pits.
I asked Irene Rich, whose father and uncle opened Peak Bros. back in 1948, if there was anything else memorable she could tell me about the restaurant. She thought a few moments and said, “We’re a survivor,” referring to how, like a phoenix from the ashes, they’ve bounced back from two devastating fires.
Open: Tuesday–Thursday, 10:00 a.m.–10:00 p.m.; Friday–Saturday, 8:00 a.m.–10:00 p.m.; Sunday, 8:00 a.m.–3:00 p.m.
6353 U.S. Highway 60 West; 270-389-0267
In June, the W C. Handy Blues and Barbecue Festival happens in the Ohio River town of Henderson. Blues music takes center stage, with local and national bands playing every night from Wednesday to Saturday. The free festival opens with a Taste of Henderson Barbecue, where you can sample smoked meats from local teams. If you plan well, you can get your music and barbecue on in Owensboro in May, in Henderson in June, and in Danville and Paducah in September. I love these small Kentucky towns and their joie de vivre.
Barbecue has been sold at Thomason’s for over fifty years. When I visited in December 2011, I spoke with current owner Frank Gibson, who’s been running the show for eighteen years. Frank said they’ve changed very little except for a few modern updates, like adding a steam table to hold the smoked meats in order to serve customers more quickly. “We’ve had days we’ve had three hundred customers in eight hours,” he said, and serving the meat right off the pit “just takes forever.” They’ve got one or two people pulling meat off the bones all day. The pulled pork comes from butts, and they cook the hams, shoulders, and ribs of whole sheep many hours before pulling the fat away to serve their lean pulled mutton.
“Just barbecue’s all we do—you want a hamburger, don’t come here!” Frank said, laughing. “Do what you do well, you know!” Frank said the beans are “one of our biggest-moving items,” and that on some days, like holidays, “we’ve knocked over nine hundred pounds [of beans] in one day.” They’ve sold bean sandwiches at festivals. Frank said they’re a good profitable item. “You need one of those,” he said. These beans have been rated best in the South by one publication. The beans are baked in an oven with smoked meat and some of Frank’s secret-recipe dip sauce mixed in.
Like several mom-and-pop barbecue joints with minimal indoor seating, Thomason’s is a place where you can eat and listen in on conversations from many local folks coming in to get takeout orders—and they were really rolling in the door at 11:00 a.m. just a few days before Christmas. It’s a cozy joint with just six booths, brown paneling on the walls, a display of loaf breads next to a little counter ordering area, and a cold-drink machine. Windows letting in natural light look out onto Atkinson Street.
This little joint has been reviewed in Jane and Michael Stern’s Roadfood and in Gourmet magazine. The Sterns praised the delicious barbecue beans, calling them “rich and smoky, laced with shreds of meat and so vividly spiced you could make a meal of them,” and the beans that came with my sampler plate were surely some of the best I’ve ever eaten—silky and savory, with smokiness from the added meat. Rounding out the plate was pulled pork, pulled mutton, a pork sparerib, slaw, two slices of rye bread (chosen from white, wheat, rye, or bun), and sliced dill pickles and onions. The meats were all swimming in a tangy thin dip that the Sterns call “sauce with natural, au jus character.”
Frank said their vinegar dip doesn’t have Worcestershire sauce in it. “Ours has got a lot more spices in it,” he said. “I’ve seen customers get done with a sandwich and then drink the rest of the dip, you know what I mean?” he said, again laughing. “Soppin’ it up.”
The meats are cooked in an indoor masonry pit fired by hickory wood. Frank showed me the “warmer” behind the ordering counter: a steel door pulled upward by a cable to reveal the blackened doors of the interior pits. In the old days, the cooked meats were held in this warming area off the main fire pit and meats were taken from there and pulled to order. In the kitchen area, Frank opened the heavy door to the pit and, wearing heavy rubber gloves, fished deep inside the rectangular opening with the long pitchfork. He skewered a whole smoked turkey, beautifully browned, and pulled it out long enough for me to snap a photo. He showed me a hunk of mutton ribs and a mutton neck. “Some people just cook the mutton hams,” he said. “We do the whole thing, buddy.”
“See, there’s hardly any fire in there at all,” Frank said, looking into the narrow opening of the pit. “The firebricks get hot and you don’t have to turn the meat.” The coals are added from the outside and lay about four feet underneath the meat. “Grease is just raining in the pits all day,” he said.
He said the EPA has complained about the smoke, but there’s nothing they can do about it because it’s food. I said that was good advertising. “Sometimes we just roll the smoke out of here, just fog the whole road out there.”
I asked how long they cook the butts. “According to how big they are,” Frank said. “Generally at least five hours. Usually five to eight hours.” They cook at about 300–325°. “Usually the slower you cook ’em, the less shrinkage you have. Little ones sometimes take longer than a big one. You just don’t know.”
“How do you gauge when they’re done?” I asked.
“We use a pitchfork on the pit, and we got an extra tine we cut off, and when it goes in like hot butter it’s done. If it goes in there and tugs, it’s not done.”
Of the sample platter, my traveling companion Todd Chappel and I raved about the pulled mutton and the intense flavor of “chip”—the smoky bark of mutton and pork butts (mostly mutton), chopped fine and soaked in dip to soften the hard pieces. “We usually sell out of that,” Frank said. The excellent rib meat pinched right off the bone. The first bite I tried was a chewy end piece, but the rest of the rib was tender with a good smokiness.
In addition to the lean pulled mutton, fabulous beans, and flavor-packed chipped mutton, you can try chopped beef brisket with the fat pulled out (listed on the menu as “beef”). “Twenty years ago people liked fat in their barbecue, but not anymore,” Frank said. “The bulk of the people now don’t want fat in it.”
On the wall-mounted menu you’ll also see ham and turkey. The turkey is a whole precooked turkey breast smoked about two hours, and the ham is a boneless Farmland pit ham. A turkey or ham plate will get you slices of these tasty smoked meats ladled with dip upon request. Frank said he sells a lot of turkey to women. The turkey was tender, juicy, and moderately smoky—very tasty. But we loved the pulled mutton and the “chip” the most.
Note: bring cash—no credit cards accepted.
Open: Tuesday–Friday, 10:00 a.m.–6:00 p.m.; Saturday, 10:00 a.m.–4:00 p.m.
701 Atkinson Street; 270-826-0654
Located in a residential area, J & B blends in with the neighboring homes except for the sign out front. A house trailer sits across the road. J & B distinguishes itself from other barbecue places in this locality by grilling chickens and pork chops on an open pit—a style common to the south-central Kentucky counties of Barren, Monroe, and Cumberland, but a rare find in this closed-pit region that includes the cities of Henderson, Owensboro, and most of far-western Kentucky.
The J and the B are John Klein and Barry Burton, childhood friends, now middle-aged men, who cook and fish together. Barry’s father was a fund-raiser for several Henderson charities—churches, schools, and sporting events—and the primary method of fund-raising was selling barbecued chickens. “We’d have five hundred to six hundred chickens every Saturday morning from the time I was twelve years old to twenty-five,” Barry said. “If these groups didn’t have enough help to work the pits, Dad would call me and my brother—get us out of bed—to go down and help. That’s where we were taught the art of cooking chickens on an open pit—cooking over charcoal and wood, cooking slow, never getting in a hurry. I was thirteen to fourteen years old working a pit of 120 chickens every Saturday, every summer, of my childhood. So there was no watching Tom and Jerry and Underdog. It was all fund-raisers; Dad never took a penny for it.”
Barry worked for Peabody Coal for twenty-three years before “retiring” into barbecue. John worked for twenty-seven years with the City of Henderson’s gas department. “When I walked away from the mines, he retired,” Barry said of John, noting that John’s role as president of the booster club at Holy Name of Jesus Catholic Church in Henderson had given him plenty of opportunities to cook food for large numbers of people. They’d done some cooking contests together over the years. Barry told John, “I could always go back to coal mining—let’s try it,” and so the J & B Barbecue partnership was born. They first served carryout for two years from a little backroom of a hardware store and catered events for the coal mines, the Dana Corporation, Alcan (an aluminum smelter), and the hospital. Then the corner lot came up for sale and Barry said to John, “Do you want to take it another step?” In 2005, they bought the lot, built the restaurant, and business has increased 15–20 percent each year.
“We kinda look at it as a team sport,” Barry said. “I’m not the boss. Don’t like nothin’ that goes with that term and John doesn’t either. If we keep the girls happy, we’re thrilled. You want that peace-of-mind atmosphere when you’re hustlin’ and bustlin’.” “The girls” includes Barry’s sister, who runs the kitchen “and pretty much runs us,” Barry said. “We try to keep our help happy. We pay ’em well. If they want to take their kids to Holiday World, we let ’em off. If they come in and don’t want to be here, you’re gonna have to pay for it.”
Twenty chatty patrons occupied every table in the dining area at 11:30 a.m. The atmosphere is homey, with red checkered tablecloths and window treatments, a University of Kentucky flag in the corner, a flat-screened television mounted near the ceiling, and a quilt hanging on the wall with four squares displaying happy anthropomorphic pigs picnicking and barbecuing. One panel reminds me of American Gothic, except the pigs are holding meat instead of a pitchfork.
Meals come on Styrofoam plates, and sweet tea comes in a Styrofoam cup. I ordered the sampler plate with a quarter open-pit chicken, one meaty sparerib, and a serving of pulled pork. I also tried the pulled mutton, which is chopped into rough pieces and served swimming in a tangy dip. I loved the mutton. It was my favorite of the meats, packing the most intense flavor (it’s also the item they smoke the longest). The chicken was a breast/wing portion, and even though it was white meat (which can dry out easily), the breast meat was tender and appropriately smoky. While cooking the chickens on the open pit, the J & B team bastes them with a dip of vinegar, butter, pickling spice, salt, and pepper. The pulled pork, already sauced, was very tender with a medium smoke flavor and a delicious sauce that didn’t totally mask the flavor of pork. The big sparerib was nicely peppered, and the fattier top part was real good. The table sauce seems a bit thicker than other local dips, with a kiss of brown sugar and garlic. The potato salad was chunks of red-skinned potatoes, chopped celery, mayo, and mustard. The smoked baked beans were seasoned with onions, green pepper, and pieces of meat.
Overall, the sampler plate was a lot of food for a fair price and of high quality. I prefer more smokiness of meats and less sauce on pulled pork, but considering my personal dislike of heavily sauced meats, it’s saying something that I actually liked this sauced pulled pork a lot. They also serve a charbroiled rib eye on a toasted hoagie bun, grilled burgers, and both ham and turkey smoked over wild cherry wood. When I return, I’ll order the delectable spareribs and mutton and try to save some room for the banana pudding.
Out back, Barry showed me the two Backwoods Smokers—resembling industrial refrigerators—they use to cook ribs, Boston butts, hams, briskets, and John’s award-winning smoked meatloaf (available as a catering item). The Backwoods Smokers hold a low temperature. “It’ll take four and a half to five hours to cook twenty-seven slabs of ribs at 180–185,” Barry explained. “We got a ten-gallon water pan we keep underneath the meat.” They fuel the cookers with Kingsford charcoal and seasoned wild cherry. Mutton quarters are slow-cooked with hickory wood on a separate big barrel unit for twenty hours. No surprise that I favored the mutton over the other meats, as I, unlike John, prefer full smoke flavor. John can detect subtle changes in their sauce and doesn’t like the strong flavors of intense wood smoke.
“If we run into a little bit of apple wood or peach wood, we’ll use it,” Barry said. “I don’t know what it is about the fruit woods, but it allows the moisture to stay into the meats.” Their friend David Alexander manages Cardinal Farms, a huge peach orchard in Henderson County that trims trees twice per year. J & B gets the wood trimmings in return for feeding the orchard crew. I love that tradition of swapping labor; it reminds me of how farmers harvested tobacco crops in years past. You help me and I’ll help you. No money has to exchange hands.
J & B Barbecue’s Basting Dip
1 gallon dark vinegar
2 gallons water
8 ounces salt
8 ounces black pepper
Pickling spice
Cover liquid mixture with a layer of mixed pickling spice and bring to a boil. Remove from heat and add one stick of butter. Good for basting open-pit chickens.
The local underground coal mines are the staple of their catering business, Barry said. I watched two men cook some of the 650 rib eye steaks to be served to miners that afternoon. Barry said he was lucky to walk away from the mines, because after twenty-three years he’d already had one back surgery. “I was awful fortunate to have the job when I had it,” Barry said. “Great benefits. I didn’t realize I’d miss the benefits as much—it was a union mine—but I was just as thankful to walk away. I got a lot of friends my age and younger that are having trouble—knee replacements, shoulder surgeries. Lost quite a few to different types of cancers that I guess they picked up underground. I’m pretty fortunate to walk away from it and try something new. I can always go back.”
I’d be real surprised if Barry ever works in mining again. They’ve got great help at the restaurant, fine food, and a loyal customer base. There’s just a really good vibe at J & B. I understand why on their menu they include the motto “Where Friends Gather Round.”
Open: Tuesday–Friday, 10:30 a.m.–6:00 p.m.; Saturday, 10:30 a.m.–1:00 p.m.
48 South Holloway Street; 270-830-0033
Between Hanson and Slaughters on Highway 41, an old red caboose from the L & N railroad stands beside someone’s house trailer. Good Ole Boys is a roadside shack just north of it. My friend Cristin and I arrived at noon on a Saturday and pulled into an empty gravel lot, but that changed soon after as dozens of locals came in for lunch. I saw lots of hamburgers and fries carried from the kitchen to seated customers.
Good Ole Boys epitomizes utilitarian dining: a big open room with wood-topped tables and pull-up chairs, old diner booths, and fluorescent lighting—very different from Hanson Market down the road, with its intentional cuteness. Good Ole Boys seems appropriately named—a place where local farmers and hunters gather to spin yarns. But I saw women and kids eating in, too.
We tried spareribs, shredded pork, sliced brisket, and mutton. Ham and smoked deli-style turkey breast are also on the menu, served as “trays” with bread, pickles, and onions, or as plates with two standard side dishes. The baked beans are the only homemade side. The pork, in the local style, comes heavily sauced. Pulled and chopped mutton come from whole sheep quarters. Spareribs cook for three hours and are then wrapped and put in the cooler to hold before serving. While I can’t recommend the rubbery beef (from the brisket flat) or sauced pulled pork, I totally enjoyed the smokiness of the chopped mutton and the peppery dry rubbed ribs with their distinctive spices and well-smoked flavor. Cristin, a Simpson County gal, felt the same way. We both thought the mutton meat has a pungency that can shine through a sauce, but that the pork from Boston butts doesn’t hold up to a heavy sauce. I’m sure locals feel differently or they wouldn’t be serving pork this way.
I appreciated eating barbecue off a real glass plate—a rare find in barbecueland.
Owner Chuck Wells, a native of Hanson, has been running this country shack since 1991. He smokes on old-fashioned firebrick pits with split hickory and oak all day, then wraps the meats and lets the fire go out, for about fourteen to fifteen hours total smoking. The meats, sitting four to five feet above the flames, take on that distinctive real pit flavor. “I don’t leave unless the fire is almost gone,” Chuck said. “We wrap the meats and leave it in the firebrick and it stays warm for hours.”
Way out in the country like it is, Good Ole Boys survives on local traffic—folks from Slaughters, Hanson, and sometimes people driving up from Madisonville. Chuck said he’ll probably stick with it for another few years, but after twenty years he’s about ready for something else.
I like the plain country style of Good Ole Boys—the gravel parking lot, the old dog who wandered up to me outside, the blackboard hanging on the wall with dessert names scribbled in chalk, the way customers talked to each other between tables like familiar friends—and I’d gladly return for the spicy ribs and mutton. Speaking of desserts, you might want to save some room for the homemade banana pudding and s’mores pie.
Open: Tuesday–Saturday, 6:00 a.m.–4:30 p.m.
9715 Hanson Road, Highway 41 (three miles north of Hanson); 270-322-8370
Drive into downtown Hanson (established 1873)—a strip of shops housed in old brick buildings near the train tracks—and you just might say, “Cuuuuuuute,” as I did. There’s an antique store, a bookstore, and an advertisement for Holsum Bread (“It’s Batter Whipped”) painted big as a billboard on the side of a building. Fans of quaint America come hither.
The Hanson Market is likewise cute, an old country-store atmosphere a block away from downtown that serves deli sandwiches, burgers, and barbecue. A sign near the road said:
CRAZY WEATHER
DON’T KNOW WHAT TO DO
TRY OUR BBQ
IT’S ALWAYS TRUE!
The barbecue offerings are pulled pork, ribs, half chickens, pork tenderloin, loaded baked potatoes topped with barbecue, and a barbecue burrito. I ate a pork sandwich, a slice of tenderloin, and a half chicken. Folks in Hopkins County seem to like their pork sauced. This sandwich will satisfy those who like saucy meats—shredded pork mixed with a tangy-sugary sauce, served with pickles and onions. I preferred the chicken, smoky and darkly colored from the caramelized sugars of the sauce.
While eating, you can feast your eyes on the knick-knacks hanging all around the walls. The whole market, outside and in, is built from pretty wood boards. A cathedral ceiling creates an open feel. Floors are red and white checked tile. Farming implements, like mule harnesses, tractor seats, and a rusty crosscut saw, decorate the walls. A great belt buckle collection is mounted in a frame; my traveling companion Cristin got a real kick out of that. One buckle, testifying to the importance of coal mining in this area, reads, “King Coal Knife Club, Madisonville, KY,” and features a miner next to a pile of coal and an underground chute for hauling the ore out on train tracks. A mummified Harper’s country ham hangs from a center post in the store under a sign stating, “I SPENT MOST OF MY MONEY ON BEER AND WOMEN—THE REST I JUST WASTED!”
Carlis Oakley, in business since 1999, cooks on a homemade natural gas unit made from a kerosene tank, using hickory and oak wood for smoke. Carlis likes using the bark of the wood. “You get a lot more smoke results out of the bark,” he said.
The smoker is now enclosed in a building beside the restaurant. “We used to cook outside and that was a nightmare,” Carlis said.
Carlis learned his sauce recipe from his mother, who used to work for two Hopkins County barbecue restaurants in the 1960s. Carlis said his spareribs are awesome, but he was out of them the Saturday morning we visited. The sauced pork from Boston butts is available every day. Tenderloins, ribs, and half chickens are cooked on Friday, and leftovers are served on Saturday—hence the shortage of ribs. He uses Swift pork from Hampton Meats in Hopkinsville.
Cristin said, “If you can make a day-old chicken taste that good, you’re doin’ somethin’.” Amen to that.
I think my mama would like the homegrown cuteness of Hanson Market and the nostalgic feel of the old town. I can imagine weekend road trippers stopping by for a bite and then browsing in the bookshop or antique store down the road.
Open: Monday–Friday, 7:00 a.m.–5:00 p.m.; Saturday, 10:00 a.m.–4:00 p.m.
45 Veterans Drive; 270-322-8288
Captain Kevin R. Cotton has two jobs involving fire. By day, he’s a fire prevention officer at the Madisonville Fire Department. While off duty, he caters barbecue. His restaurant serves the public and does a whole lot of charity work, serving free meals to homeless folks in Madisonville and Nashville. I’ve noted elsewhere the connections between God and barbecue, having met several pit masters who also preach the gospel, and others who hold positions in a church. Brother’s is located in a strip mall owned by the huge Covenant Community Church. Captain Cotton, a member of the church, spreads the spirit though his barbecue-focused charity work.
The inside of Brother’s is about as slick as the outside, clean like a fast-food restaurant, with orange walls and modern ceiling fans and a well-lit ordering counter. Two Van Gogh prints decorate the walls, and the advertising—for instance, the photos on the ordering menu—has the airbrushed appearance of professional marketing. The advertising doesn’t make me hungry for barbecue, because the photos look more like what I’d expect from a city deli.
“I think it’s been proven that warm colors like red and orange increase the appetite, so painting a restaurant orange could possibly make people eat more. And that’s pretty clever,” Cristin Lanham said. She said the overall feeling of Brother’s was “cute.” I was glad Cristin could join me on this Saturday road trip. She’s got opinions, and she ain’t afeared of sharing them.
Cristin (a landscaper, Renaissance lady, and full-time mom) and I shared a combination plate with a half chicken, three big pork spareribs, smoked pork, baked beans, mac and cheese, and a roll. We also tried the brisket. Neither of us liked the mushy, sauced pulled pork from hams (instead of shoulders) cooked on a Southern Pride gas unit. The baked beans, Cristin said, “taste like Bush’s baked beans from Southern Foods,” and the macaroni was coated in a Velveeta-like cheese. Nothing distinctive about these side dishes. We did like the good ribs, however—full spareribs with the tips still on, tender with some smoke flavor and minimal doctoring (just ribs, salt, and smoke). The chicken, dusted with a tasty dry rub, was tender and mildly smoked. We also liked the thin-sliced, dry-rubbed brisket, which we rated as the best thing on the plate, proving yet again that chicken, ribs, and brisket are much more forgiving of gas cookers than are pork butts and shoulders. I also liked the sweet and tangy, black-peppery, tomato-based hot table sauce.
Talking about the bread, Cristin said, “Sister Schubert’s, isn’t it?”
I said, “I don’t know what it is, but I do like the roll, which is better than most breads I’ve had at barbecue places.”
“Sister Schubert’s,” she said with authority.
“That’s what it is—a Sister Schubert’s roll. That’s good. They’re made in Horse Cave.”
“That’s my birthplace!” I said. “No wonder they’re so good.”
Later on, Cristin asked Ruth, the general manager, if they made the rolls, and Ruth said, “No, they’re Sister Schubert’s.”
I said to Cristin, “You were right on, girl!”
“I get that from my daddy. I’m going to have to brag on myself when I get home.”
The brisket is a new addition at Brother’s, and I hope they keep it on the menu. If I return, that’s what I’ll get—a brisket sandwich, or a pile of brisket with one of those good rolls.
After we finished eating, we spoke with Captain Cotton, who pulled up in his catering van outside, just back from serving meals to some of the hungry people of Madisonville. He’s also catered to bellies on the opposite side of the financial spectrum, driving his van all the way to the state capitol in Frankfort to feed state senators, representatives, and the governor’s office. One of the senators, Jerry Rhoads (representing District 6 of Hopkins, Muhlenberg, and Ohio counties), pays for the catering. “Senator Rhoads wants to promote western Kentucky,” Captain Cotton explained, “so that’s how he does it.”
Captain Cotton has also catered a wedding in Dallas, Texas. When I expressed surprise that someone living in Texas would order barbecue all the way from Kentucky, Kevin said, “They were here, they liked it, wanted it, called and asked if we would do it, so we did.” People in Colorado also have him ship barbecue to them.
I asked, “What’s the biggest item in demand?”
“Ribs. And this might shock you too, but Texas wants brisket.”
I’m not surprised by these choices, since the ribs and brisket were my favorites at Brother’s. But still—Texas? Listen up, Travel Channel and Food Network. Next time you do a show on “America’s Best Barbecue,” you know where to find us.
Open: Monday–Thursday, 10:00 a.m.–8:00 p.m.; Friday–Saturday, 10:00 a.m.–9:00 p.m.
1055 North Main Street; 270-821-1222
Here it is, folks—my favorite place for barbecue in the Madisonville area. When I visited in January 2012, Dave Webb had only been open a few months. When I tried his great food, it was further confirmation that I’d done right by including places that have been in business for fewer than five years. Dave deserves your patronage. He serves creative homemade side dishes and some of the best dry-rubbed ribs I’ve ever eaten.
Sidekick Cristin Lanham and I arrived at Dave’s Sticky Pig after a full day of barbecue tripping in the Madisonville area. We’d already tried Hanson Market, Good Ole Boys, and Brother’s. First thing we noted when pulling into the parking lot was the real smoke and meat aroma enveloping the exterior of the restaurant, and out back we spied big chunks of barked hickory stacked up near some cool-looking cylindrical iron tank cookers with a firebox on the side. We entered the converted Baskin-Robbins with high hopes.
We weren’t disappointed. I spoke with Dave, told him my business, and he made us a sampler with little tastes of many things on the menu. Here’s the rundown. Cristin and I tried pork ribs, pulled pork, brisket, smoked ham, potato salad, mac and cheese, slaw, burgoo, banana pudding, and bread pudding. The pork (from whole shoulders cooked sixteen to eighteen hours on the smoker) was finely chopped and fluffy—and thankfully served without sauce (the other Madisonville-area barbecue places sauce pulled pork pretty heavily). It was a bit dry and not as smoky as I like, but it was still the best I had in the Madisonville-Hanson-Slaughters area. The brisket was thinly sliced with big ribbons of unrendered fat. While I like whole brisket (as opposed to the leaner flat), I wasn’t so fond of this preparation, which made the fat far too visible. In my now-seasoned opinion, fat is great and palatable when it melts into the meat, but large hunks of it are a turn off, even for a fat lover like me. The leaner parts of the brisket were tasty, but I had to pick through lots of fat. The sliced ham was good, like much of the ham I’ve had in western Kentucky. Dave takes a fully cooked smoked ham and peels the skin off, applies dry-rub spices and wet mustard, and then smokes it. Sometimes they apply a maple syrup glaze near the end of the smoking.
And now to the excellent stuff! The St. Louis–style ribs. Ooooooh, the ribs. I’ve eaten some great dry-rubbed ribs in Memphis, the city that made them famous, and Dave Webb and company deliver something similar: fabulous, tender, dry-rubbed ribs that taste so good you don’t need a sauce. Cristin and I both loved them. The side dishes are also excellent. The potato salad is creamy red-skinned potatoes mixed with diced green peppers and dill weed.
“That tater salad is right,” Cristin said. (And yes, Dear Reader, she surely did say “tater.” The word slides from my mouth, naturally enough, ever now and then as well.)
The mac and cheese was better than most because of the addition of chipped ham and lots of butter. I really liked the slaw, a crispy vinegar slaw with some sweetness and plenty of pepper. The burgoo was chunky, like a rich stew. The baked beans, Cristin said, “are about the best I’ve ever had.” I liked them plenty as well. “They taste like smoked maple syrup,” Cristin said. She then ordered a pint of beans to take home to her daddy.
About the banana pudding, Cristin, a savvy country girl, said, “I ain’t had banana puddin’ that good since church potluck. When church used to have potluck.” Dave said it took him about two hours to make the banana pudding. We both liked the dense bread pudding, with some raisins in it, also. Only a bourbon sauce could make it better.
“We don’t have gas anywhere in the restaurant,” Dave said. “We use 80 percent hickory and about 20 percent oak. We try to get the bark off the wood, because bark will leave a bitter smoke taste.” Dave found a stave mill that strips the bark from wood to make whiskey barrels, and he also saws large hickory trees into disks that, when split, become debarked.
“Cooking at home I’ve ruined a lot of meat by making it too bitter,” Dave said. “Some people like a lot of strong smoke. It’s very gender biased. Women do not approve of nearly as much smoke most of the time as men do.”
Dave’s son Ben, tending the smokers that day, said, “My wife won’t eat much of anything we cook here. She says, ‘I don’t want to eat a camp fire.’ A little bit of smoke is too much for her.”
I said, “I’m a fan of smoke.”
“Me too,” Dave said, and Cristin agreed.
Dave retired from working fast food (Backyard Burgers) and fine dining (the #9 Steakhouse) for a whole three weeks. “I was bored to death. I was driving to Hopkinsville to the Woodshed for barbecue, and I thought, ‘I can do better than that. I’m just going to find me a little place and open up.’”
Dave has traveled extensively and tried barbecue from all over the South, and he’s concocted a sextet of sauces from different regions, including a Memphis Mild, a Carolina Pepper Sauce, a Texas Tomato, and an Auburn Orange, on the table for your sampling pleasure. My favorite by far was Dave’s own Sticky Pig sauce, made with Sam Adams beer, labeled as “tart and spicy without being too hot or too sweet.” I also liked Dave’s Alabama White sauce (not on the table because its mayonnaise base requires refrigeration), a good accompaniment to chicken. Thanks to Big Bob Gibson’s in Decatur for spreading that recipe around.
Dave’s Sticky Pig’s Sweet and Sour Slaw
Dave says, “I love to take motorcycle road trips. I started in Madisonville and wanted to make it to Macon, Georgia, in two days but there were too many barbeque joints along the way. I’m usually not a fan of slaw on my pulled-pork sandwiches but I ate what the locals liked and discovered something similar to this slaw all along the way. They called it ‘barbeque slaw’ or ‘hot slaw’ and it tasted great on a sandwich. The original recipe came from a joint southeast of Atlanta, handwritten by a pit master with years of experience. I added some sugar and cut the spices a little to make it a little smoother when eaten without the meat. I don’t usually put slaw on my sandwich but when I do, I love this version.”
6½ ounces apple cider vinegar
5 teaspoons spicy brown mustard
3 tablespoons white sugar
6½ ounces brown sugar
1 tablespoon coarse black pepper
½ cup chopped celery
½ cup chopped onion
¼ cup diced green pepper
1-pound package slaw mix, either chopped or shredded.
Mix all ingredients except slaw mix together and refrigerate until well chilled. Add the slaw mix and stir well to blend. Serve with a slotted spoon to avoid getting too much vinegar.
I’m sorry Dave didn’t have mutton when we visited, because he soaks it in a solution of cider vinegar, Worcestershire sauce, allspice, salt, 7UP, and lemon juice to rehydrate and tenderize it before smoking the front and back quarters. Dave says the long marinating in the acidic liquid breaks down muscle stringiness. Young sheep you marinate three days; sheep over sixty pounds you marinate four days. After smoking mutton quarters for sixteen hours, Dave removes most of the fat and mixes all of the lean together for his pulled mutton.
Dave’s Sticky Pig’s Baked Beans
Dave Webb reports: “Baked beans are the most popular side dish in our restaurant because they’re delicious! It’s my recipe and I like simple recipes. We have cooked them in the oven in the past but cooking overnight on the smoker makes a big difference. I like baked beans but I can’t deal with runny beans right out of a can. I don’t want my beans to taste like barbeque sauce and I don’t want them too sweet. We cook a lot of dried beans with a ham bone and smoked jowl at Dave’s Sticky Pig, but this recipe works great with any canned baked bean or even pork and beans. There’s enough flavor going into these beans to make any canned bean taste great.”
1 cup onion, diced
½ cup green bell peppers, diced
6 cups beans
¼ cup prepared yellow mustard
¼ cup maple syrup
¼ cup light brown sugar
4 teaspoons granulated garlic
¼ cup of a sweet barbeque sauce
1 tablespoon lemon juice
2 cups smoked pork or beef brisket. Dice into ¼-inch pieces. Use bark from pork and briskets if available.
Preheat oven to 350° F. In a large casserole dish, mix onion, peppers, pork, beans, mustard, maple syrup, brown sugar, barbeque sauce, lemon juice, and garlic. Bake, covered, for 50 minutes. Stir and bake uncovered for 20 more minutes.
A preferred method is this: Place on smoker uncovered and cook about 12 hours at around 225°. We’ve experimented with liquid smoke but it isn’t the same. These beans will come off the smoker with a crust of intense smoke flavor on top. Stir well and let it rest at least an hour, then stir again before serving.
I said, “Not much profit in mutton, is there?”
Dave’s Sticky Pig’s Banana Pudding
“My grandmother made great banana pudding from scratch. As she got older, she didn’t cook very often but we still expected Granny’s banana pudding on Sundays and holidays. She’d try to slip in the boxed pudding from time to time because custard is a little labor intensive for a senior citizen, but my older brother could always tell the difference. This isn’t my grandmother’s recipe. Like most older cooks, she never measured anything. This is the best my memory could do to match the taste of her custard. The cinnamon and nutmeg addition came from a customer’s suggestion based on her grandmother’s recipe. I saw her crying as she was leaving the restaurant after having our banana pudding and followed her out to see what was wrong. She said her grandmother had passed on a few years ago and she never expected to have pudding as good as her grandmother’s pudding and ours brought back sweet memories of her grandmother.”
2½ cups sugar
2½ cups whole milk
½ cup sifted cornstarch
4 eggs
1 ounce sifted flour
⅛ teaspoon cinnamon
¼ teaspoon nutmeg
1 ounce butter
1 ounce real vanilla extract
5 medium bananas, sliced
1 tablespoon lemon juice
1 (13.3-ounce bag) vanilla wafers
Use fully ripe bananas and refrigerate them before slicing to help them hold their shape. Slice the bananas into ½-inch slices and toss with the lemon juice to coat them completely. Refrigerate. Drain lemon juice before using bananas in pudding.
Make a double boiler, fitting a smaller saucepan snugly inside a large one. Place water in the large saucepan and set stove to medium-high heat. You will have to add water to the larger saucepan a few times during the cooking process.
In a saucepan, combine milk with sugar and cornstarch. Stir occasionally until sugar is fully dissolved and the custard seems to thicken slightly, about 20 minutes.
Measure the flour, cinnamon, and nutmeg into a sifter. Sifting these three items together before adding them to the milk helps mix them.
Using a whisk, lightly beat eggs in a mixing bowl. Temper the eggs with about a cup of the hot custard by stirring them briskly with the whisk while slowly pouring the custard into them. The outside of the mixing bowl should be warm to the touch before you add the contents to the saucepan of custard. Add the eggs, then add sifted cinnamon, nutmeg, and flour to custard pot and cook about 30 to 45 more minutes in the double boiler, stirring occasionally. The custard will really thicken up as it cooks. When it seems as thick as it’s going to get, remove from heat and add vanilla and butter.
Pour a layer of pudding mixture in the bottom of a casserole dish large enough to hold the wet ingredients, and add a layer of whole vanilla wafers followed by a layer of half the bananas. Repeat as many times as necessary to use all the ingredients. Top with crumbled vanilla wafers.
Dave said the cost of mutton is almost triple the cost of pork. He noted that while pork and beef are marbled, mutton is more likely to have big chunks of fat in it.
As we left, Cristin summed it up like this: “I’d take a special trip here to get ribs, baked beans, slaw, and tater salad. And that nanner puddin’.” I agree with her 100 percent, and I’m betting that Dave’s mutton is fabulous, too.
Dave’s Sticky Pig’s Signature Sauce
Dave’s confession: “My friend Roger and I used to stay up all night on summer holiday weekends, drinking, smoking meat, and experimenting with barbeque sauces and techniques. We made thin sauces, thick sauces, hot sauces, and sweet sauces. We used beer, whiskey, tequila, jelly, juice, applesauce, peanut butter—and pretty much anything we had around that we couldn’t put on the smoker and didn’t want to drink. It took a few years for us to decide that excessive alcohol ruins the chef, the meat, and the barbeque sauce, and we had a lot of misadventures together while feeding our friends and family. This is the sauce I settled on as my personal favorite, not too sweet or hot but spicy enough to complement the meat. Everyone seems to look for something different in a barbeque sauce, but this one was universally liked. I think it goes best with pulled pork.”
8 cups tomato sauce
4 cups red wine vinegar
1 ounce Louisiana-style hot sauce, not Tabasco or anything super hot
4 teaspoons olive oil
1 tablespoon granulated garlic
1 tablespoon allspice
1 tablespoon onion powder
1 tablespoon coarse ground black pepper
1 tablespoon kosher salt
5
cups sugar
1 bottle Sam Adams Boston lager
1½ teaspoons cornstarch
Mix the cornstarch in a splash of water to dissolve it. Place all the ingredients in a large stockpot and bring to a boil, stirring frequently. Reduce the heat and simmer, uncovered, for an hour or until sauce thickens. Do not start timing the hour until sauce has come to a full boil and you’ve turned the heat down! Keep stirring during the simmer step to prevent sticking and blend the flavors. Remove from the heat, cover, and allow to cool slowly to room temperature. Refrigerate after cooling.
Open: Monday, 11:00 a.m.–3:00 p.m.; Tuesday–Saturday, 11:00 a.m.–8:00 p.m.; Sunday, 11:00 a.m.–3:00 p.m.
206 Madison Square Drive; 270-326-5100
Since 1979, on the second weekend in May, the streets of this river town look like an optimistic vision of hell on the Friday night of the barbecue fest, when cooking teams, most of them from regional churches, fire up their pits in the blocked-off streets, burning down hickory and sassafras to coals before loading wire grates with thousands of pounds of mutton, chickens, and pork. I say “optimistic” because you won’t hear anguished cries erupting from tortured people, but rather good-natured talking and the popping of aluminum can tabs as the teams settle in for a long night of tending the meats that they’ll serve to the populace the next afternoon. The City of Owensboro brings in sand for the teams to use as a pit base to protect the asphalt. Teams construct pre-made panels of steel poles and steel sheets (like the kind you’d put on a barn roof) to hold the heat in the pits, and they pile the sand eight inches high the entire length of the pits, which stretch up and down the streets. They fire up the wood on top of the sand, and when it burns down to coals load on the meat. I saw men flipping twenty dozen half chickens at a time, with one man on each side of the pits grabbing hold of a metal frame made from rebar and mesh fencing and, with a top and bottom frame, flipping the whole thing over to keep the cooking even. And there’s lots of basting of meats with long-handled mops dipped into special sops, often a blend of water, Worcestershire sauce, vinegar, lemon juice, black pepper, brown sugar, and spices.
I get excited about the Owensboro festival every May. Just shutting down the streets of a town is reason enough to smile—blocking off traffic, allowing people to walk freely without fear of being run down by a car. The streets are lined with booth after booth of food vendors and barbecue teams. You can buy snacks from the vendors, but the main reason for coming, besides the pleasure of walking among the wonderful aroma of smoking meats, is to purchase the goods at the end of the long day of cooking. About 4:00 or so on Saturday afternoon, people start forming lines beside the setups of their favorite barbecue teams, and the early lucky ones—anyone who gets there before the food runs out—can purchase gallons of burgoo and pounds of mutton, smoked chickens, and pork. Folks take them home for eating and freezing for later eating. The monies paid go to support charities.
I’ve taken home a whole smoked mutton shoulder from the barbecue festival and left it in my freezer for a special occasion, and also a gallon of burgoo, that Kentucky version of the Brunswick stew—a concoction with lots of meats and vegetables cooked down for many hours to a rich, steaming, creamy brew, complex and tangy, with layered flavors. And I’ve hung out with the teams and watched them practicing their craft.
I spoke with Jerry Morris of Whitesville, the team chief of St. Mary’s of the Woods cooking team. Coincidentally, the owner of Tony’s Bar-B-Que Barn near Lawrenceburg is from Whitesville—a good chance he knows Mr. Morris, although I forgot to ask. Tony had told me he’d learned the barbecue trade by osmosis from growing up in Whitesville, where they barbecue “all the time.” Meeting Jerry confirmed that.
Some teams decrease their pit-tending duties by boiling meats to tenderize them—which really is cheating, in my opinion—but St. Mary’s of the Woods (my favorite team name, appealing to my inner tree hugger) doesn’t boil. They put whole sheep on the pits at midnight and cook until done the next afternoon. They flip the meat every thirty minutes. Talk about labor intensive. When done, they take a meat saw to cut the mutton into half-inch slices and sell it by weight. St. Mary’s of the Woods was grand champion in 2005. Every team appoints a judge who tastes and rates barbecue from all the teams in a blind judging process.
Many teams smoke with both hickory and sassafras. Owensboro is home to the world’s largest sassafras tree—a three-hundred-year-old wonder. I love sassafras. I have several trees in my fencerows at home and often cut off a green branch to add to the smoker when cooking whole chickens and Boston butts. The spicy wood gives off a distinctive pungent smoke.
I asked Jerry if the big ice storm of 2009 gave them lots of sassafras, and he said, “No, I’d rather have it green, so I’d rather go out and cut it just before I get ready to use it.” He pointed to his pit and said, “This pit here has being going since 8:30 yesterday morning. I put hickory logs that big around and they done burnt up on me. It’s been burning for twenty-six hours.” The caretakers of the pits keep vigilant watch through the many hours of cooking, standing by with water hoses ready to tame the flames that flare up when rendered fat drips down onto the coals.
In 2009, Jerry had been cooking at this festival for seventeen years. I asked him if all the cooking teams were Catholic, and he said, “No, sir. There’s Crooked Creek and maybe one more that ain’t Catholic, but they’re good ole boys.”
St. Mary’s of the Woods cooked eleven hundred pounds of pork, one thousand pounds of mutton, three hundred chickens, and one kettle of burgoo; it was a two-day job. He said they’d gross about $11,000 for their charity, Trinity High School, to help students with tuition.
I also talked with Bob Newman from northern Kentucky, who’d moved to Owensboro and had been cooking with Blessed Mother Catholic Church’s team for twenty-eight years. They actually mix some pork into their chopped mutton sandwich. These fellows have been cooking together since 1982, raising money for the church. He said sometimes a new guy or two would come on board, but mostly it was the same guys cooking year after year. I asked how different cooking styles were among teams, and Bob said a lot different, especially for the secretive dip recipes. Everyone has a job. One guy is in charge of chicken, another takes care of mutton, another burgoo, and they get their own crews together to prepare the food. They smoke with hickory and sassafras, the standard among the teams. The Blessed Mother team cooked four hundred chickens, twelve hundred pounds of mutton, five hundred pounds of Boston butts, and five hundred gallons of burgoo, and once the selling starts on Saturday afternoon “it will be gone in thirty minutes,” Bob said. They were grand champion at the festival in 2008. The Blessed Mother church picnic is held in early August at 601 East Twenty-third Street in Owensboro.
Around the block, I spoke with Bill Glenn, who stirred a seventy-five-gallon vat of burgoo for Our Lady of Lourdes’s cooking team. Bill is a Kansas City Barbecue Society master judge, a title that involves taking a course to become a judge, judging at thirty-five events, after which you have to get a score of at least 80 percent on a test. Bill scored 92 percent; his wife, who also judges, beat him with a score of 95 percent. Following their love of barbecue, they have judged at as many as thirteen contests in a year. Smoke from the wood-fired burgoo vats enveloped us as we talked, and my eyes watered, and Bill said, “You want to step back a bit? I’m used to the smoke by now.” Lourdes has been cooking at the contest since it started about forty years ago. He said many teams mop mutton with a vinegar or lemon dip, enhancing mutton’s earthy flavors.
Bill gave me a brief history of mutton cooking, which he said you only found around Owensboro and areas nearby. Back in the 1800s sheep were plentiful in the area, and hence the cheapest meat. Now their mutton comes from a packing plant in Indiana, and the animals are pastured in other states, so now mutton is the most expensive meat they buy. Mutton also has a lot of shrinkage. He said you put ten pounds of mutton on the pit and you’d probably get four pounds of cooked meat and bone after the fat cooks off; on the other hand, ten pounds of pork will yield about eight pounds of cooked meat. So if you have to pay more for mutton, that’s a good part of the reason.
The Lourdes team cooks three to four times per year. Bill said there’s a church picnic about every weekend from late May until September. He invited me to join them at any time to help with the cooking.
Dee’s Diner is proof that our Yankee cousins can cook barbecue. Dorothy “Dee” Harper and her brother Chuck Lemetti hail from southside Chicago near Comiskey Park, White Sox territory—a fact they don’t try to hide, with their offerings of Chicago beef sandwiches. You also know as soon as you strike up a conversation with Dee, Chuck, or Denise (who’s married to Chuck) that these folks lived for a long time in the upper Midwest. Their voices pack that Chicago punch I became familiar with when living up near there in the early years of the 2000s. They all moved down because Dee’s husband was from Owensboro. “We moved here five years ago,” Denise said. “It’s laid back, kicked back, relaxed. I love it here.”
Dee’s occupies the building that was George’s Bar-B-Q, an Owensboro establishment since 1955, and still serves barbecue using those recipes and the old pits. The original sign still stands out front. The atmosphere is old-school diner, with well-used cushioned booths, plastic tables, brown paneling harkening back to the 1970s, and a cathedral ceiling painted a shade of deep pink. The floor is brown tile. Low-volume country music filled the dining room. Fans dangle from the ceilings, and there’s a salad bar. A sign on the wall advertises a fried Twinkie for $1.50.
Dee and Chuck took over the restaurant on March 10, 2010. I’d passed through Owensboro in August of that year and, because I had two dogs in the back of my Ranger, pulled up to the drive-through. I got a pound of mutton off the pits. Mike, the pit master who worked for George’s for many years and now works for Dee’s, saw the dogs and gave me two big mutton bones with meat clinging to them. I drove on up the highway, savoring slices of tender mutton, while the dogs tore into the bones in the bed of the truck. That was my first taste of Dee’s after it changed hands from George’s.
Dee’s is famous for breakfasts, and Dee’s motto is “If you leave hungry, it’s your fault.” They offer, for instance, a twelve-egg omelet that hardly fits on a plate. Denise told me, “The next time you’re around here and you don’t want barbecue, I suggest the Italian beef, da works. It’s amazing. We even have a combo with the Italian sausage in it. My husband is Italian, so . . .” I asked Denise if she was a hunter, because she was sporting a hunting jacket in woodsy camo, and she said, “No, I just like it.”
I said, “It gives you some kind of southern legitimacy, doesn’t it? Until you open your mouth!”
And Denise laughed with me and said, “Yeah, right? And they’re like, ‘I like your accent,’ and I look at southern people like, ‘You’re the one with the accent, you know?’” Denise’s twelve-year-old granddaughter has picked up Kentucky talk quickly.
I like how Dee’s extensive menu allows you to choose mutton parts from the whole sheep: chopped mutton, hindquarter, loin, shoulder, or ribs. Chopped pork, sliced pork, pork ribs, half chicken, whole chicken, sliced beef, and burgoo. To balance the meats, they have a diabetic or heart-healthy menu.
I cast aside the heart-healthy menu and chose fatty mutton ribs and a pulled mutton sandwich from the pit, with a side of fried okra. They came with George’s traditional dip and also Dee Harper’s own barbecue sauce creation. “Here a lot of people prefer that dip,” Dee said, “but the younger generation prefers a barbecue sauce. So I just serve both.”
Dee does all the cooking and recipes. She wants to segue into baby back ribs, prime rib, and smoked pot roasts eventually while retaining the traditional barbecue offerings. She said the first year of Dee’s Diner she worked sixteen hours every day because she didn’t want to relinquish food control to anyone else. “I sign it like an artist,” she said. “Every plate that goes out has got my signature on it.”
The mutton ribs were luscious, pure unadulterated musky flavor and plenty of melt-in-your-mouth fat to go along with the leaner parts. Beware: these ribs aren’t for the fat-phobic. The crispy outsides delivered a good crunch and merged with the buttery-soft fat. The okra was perfectly fried, and the thin peppery dip was so good that my chum Todd said, “I could just drink it.” Dee’s special barbecue sauce—the one she made to satisfy those who don’t like the traditional regional dip—has, I think, essences of fruit. The pulled mutton was a bit dry but had a good flavor, and the dip—which is different than any dip I’ve tried—added tasty moisture. A list of side dishes was scribbled on a white board on the wall, along with the daily specials. The Tuesday I visited, you could get—in addition to barbecue—a plate lunch of country-fried steak, meatloaf, or sausage and kraut with three sides and bread for $4.99 plus tax. Sides included mashed potatoes, peas, pinto beans, baked apples, okra, mixed greens, mac and cheese, and broccoli-rice casserole.
Dee keeps the mutton on the menu because people want it, even though she admitted that she’s lucky if she breaks even on it. After losing the bones, fat, legs, and other nonmeaty parts of the whole sheep she buys, she ends up with only 30 percent servable mutton. Dee said mutton would be profitable only if you sold a lot of it, had a high turnover. At the end of the day, Dee takes the mutton she hasn’t sold, bones it out, and grinds it into meat for her chopped mutton and burgoo. She also uses pork and beef brisket in her burgoo recipe.
“Burgoo sells,” she said, especially in the summer months. Dee’s burgoo is chunky and not as greasy as some I’ve tried. She tries keeping extra fat out of her chopped mutton and burgoo. “I like the taste of fat,” she said, “but I don’t want to eat it. I want to eat the meat next to the fat but not the fat itself. Maybe that’s why I’m losing more [mutton weight] than everyone else, but I just won’t do it.”
I enjoyed Dee’s business acumen and passion for food and compassion for her customers. Talking about the delicious mutton ribs—one of the most expensive menu items—Dee said, “Things are slow. People don’t have that kind of money [to afford mutton ribs]. You can tell by their breakfasts, what they order versus what they normally order. It’s going to take the economy a long time to bounce back. People are having to adjust. People are still going to enjoy themselves, going out to dinner, but they’re not going to treat their whole family to mutton ribs, you know?”
I’m glad these Chicagoans have adopted Kentucky. They’re offering good home-cooked food at very reasonable prices and keeping the mutton tradition going along with their uncommon (to the area) Chicago sandwiches and whopper breakfasts. They smoke with hickory and sassafras on the old pits. When Chuck showed me the pits, we walked though the kitchen, where a young man was peeling potatoes for the breakfast home fries. You got to respect the use of real potatoes. I’ll get back there eventually for one of those Chicago beef sandwiches recommended by Denise, and when hungry for barbecue and feeling flush, I’ll go for those great mutton ribs, the superb dip, and the burgoo.
Open: Monday–Wednesday, 5:00 a.m.–3:00 p.m.; Thursday–Saturday, 5:00 a.m.–8:00 p.m.; Sunday, 5:00 a.m.–3:00 p.m
1362 East Fourth Street; 270-686-0022
Moonlite, one of the gutbustingest restaurants around, hardly needs an introduction. When I’ve wanted to pig out over the years—I mean really gorge myself on a ridiculous amount of food—this is where I’ve pilgrimaged. The most famous barbecue restaurant in Kentucky—certainly getting more press than all the others, having been written up in Gourmet, Southern Living, and USA Today (to name a few)—Moonlite has been serving up hickory-cooked meats since the 1950s. In 1963, Pappy and Catherine Bosley, a husband-wife team who’d been working for local distilleries, took over the restaurant, and Moonlite remains a Bosley family business, now employing over 120 people working in various departments. The restaurant seats 350 people, and they have a U.S.D.A.-inspected processing plant (the nine thousand pounds of mutton cooked up at the Fancy Farm picnic in 2011 came from Moonlite’s plant). They have a catering department and a wholesale division for placing their barbecue and sauces in stores in a four-state region. Recently, when in Leitchfield, Kentucky, looking for Bland’s One Stop Barbecue (and not finding it), I stopped at a convenience store with a BBQ sign out front. The young woman at the counter told me they had Moonlite barbecue. So the long fingers of Moonlite’s empire extended to this tiny berg over one hour’s drive southeast. Impressive product placement. Sure, it’s big and famous, but Moonlite is still a quality local establishment. It would be a mistake to lump it in with Famous Dave’s and Smokey Bones.
Mutton—an adult sheep at least one year old, either a female or castrated male—is Owensboro’s claim to barbecue fame. You just can’t find barbecued mutton much outside this region, and Owensboro cooks up more mutton than any other city. Moonlite alone sells about ten thousand pounds of it weekly. Old sheep equals tough meat until you slow cook the stuff over hickory for a long time, tenderizing those muscles and rendering the fat. The cooks at Moonlite pour a thin vinegar-based dip on the meat several times during the long cooking to keep it from drying out. The beef brisket is sliced thickly and has a good bark on it. You can get “chopped” mutton, which is like a finely pulverized, rich and tangy meat paste, but I much prefer to taste the pure meat and fat of the pulled mutton. Thankfully, all the meats are served without sauce (except for the sauce-simmered chopped mutton). Moonlite’s distinctive orange-colored regular sauce (I often spy it on grocery store shelves in Kentucky) is available in squirt bottles at the table.
The well-stocked buffet is the reason I went to Moonlite as a college student, and a few years back, when attending the barbecue festival in May, I ate there again with friends, including Keita Shinoda, a native of Chiba, Japan, who works in Kentucky and has a penchant for eating and blogging about eating. Keita loved Moonlite. I imagine I know why: Moonlite is like the wide-open frontier of America—just about everything about it is big, quite the opposite from Japanese restaurants with their small portions and immaculate presentation. At the Moonlite buffet, especially at dinner when they go all out, you’ll see piles of mutton, pork, ribs, beef, and chicken, plus all kinds of southern side dishes like green beans, mac and cheese, broccoli casserole (very cheesy), beans and ham, mashed potatoes, and burgoo. They also have abundant sweetening, including pies (lemon icebox, peanut butter, pecan, coconut) and carrot cake. Keita’s a man of modest dimensions, probably weighs 130 pounds wet, and I saw him polish off three plates of food during our hour of gorging. Oh, Moonlite also serves country ham on the buffet. Moonlite cooks their meats for up to twelve hours, and everything is good.
The buffet isn’t the only thing going at Moonlite—you can also get sandwiches and plates, eat in or carry out, including a sampler plate of beef, mutton, and pork. But honestly, with the minimal price difference, you might as well experience the wide-open frontier of the buffet and try a bit of everything, loosen your belt, and let out a long sigh. You’ve reached the Land of Plenty.
Open: Monday–Thursday, 9:00 a.m.–9:00 p.m.; Friday–Saturday, 9:00 a.m.–9:30 p.m.; Sunday, 10:00 a.m.–3:00 p.m.
2840 West Parrish Avenue; 270-684-8143
I’ve stopped by Old Hickory many times over the years when traveling from south-central Kentucky to points north. Owensboro, like Henderson and Louisville, is one of those river towns you need to pass through if you want to cross into Hoosierland, where I lived for a while.
I’d heard of Old Hickory since the early 1990s, when I made road trips from Bowling Green to Owensboro to stuff myself—along with a carload of other young male college students—at Moonlite Bar-B-Q Inn’s unlimited buffet (hard to resist for people on a tight budget). At the time, I could eat and eat without swelling in the midsection permanently, and Moonlite was the place to load up. Still is. But even while we gorged upon piles of meats at Moonlite, one big voice from a big man, Tommy Smith, told us we could get better barbecue nearby at Old Hickory. We told him to shut up and kept eating.
Now, as white hairs sprout from my cheekbones, Old Hickory is my go-to place when in Owensboro. I’ve gotten takeout from there more times than I can recall, and I’ve eaten in a couple of times. If you like mutton—and I love mutton, if cooked right—you’ll be hard pressed to find any better than what Old Hickory serves.
This place has a family atmosphere, with country music playing, a hearth and fireplace in the dining room, and old black-and-white photos on the wall of people and town scenes. They proudly display their long history of fine barbecue in Owensboro, with family roots going back to 1918, when Charles “Pappy” Foreman started cooking mutton. In 1954 the family named the business Old Hickory.
I get mutton “off the pit.” It costs a bit extra, but it’s worth the pocket change to savor the texture and flavors of slow-smoked sheep—akin to the texture of prime rib, with a gamy, musky flavor. Chopped mutton is finely ground and heavily sauced, and while it tastes good, the pure essence of mutton is masked by the sauce. Order some mutton off the pit. If you don’t like it, then you don’t like mutton, because this is the way you can really taste the full-on flavor of the meat. It’s an acquired taste for many.
Other than mutton, I’ve eaten the pork ribs at Old Hickory, and they are also some of the best I’ve ever had. During summer 2011, I stopped in with my friend Greg Brown, a native of Oklahoma. We arrived at 10:30 a.m. on a Wednesday, and the meats greeted us behind a glass case as we entered. Slabs of mahogany-colored pork ribs glistened under a lamp. Beautiful. I ordered one pound of mutton, sliced, and a woman took a whole fresh mutton shoulder and sliced it with a huge band saw, layering the pieces on an aluminum tray. I asked for it sauced, so she drizzled a thin brown mutton dip over the top of the steaming hot meat. We also got spareribs, which got the saw treatment like the mutton. The woman asked if we wanted them in half for easy road eating. I said, “Sure, why not?” And she did with that saw what’s impossible to do with a knife or cleaver—slice across the bone to give us smaller portions of the thick meaty spareribs. The first bite from a meaty rib tip was a little dry, but then I bit into a piece with fat and it was juicy and full of smoky peppery flavor. The spicy sauce added a mild vinegar tang.
The mutton was sliced a quarter inch thick. Greg, a mutton virgin until this day, said it was spongy—a texture softer than pork or beef—and rich with ribbons of fat that melted quickly in the mouth. Greg’s a picky eater. He’d just spent a weekend at my home, and I put him through the trials of Sichuan-style hot pot, sushi rolls, and cornbread salad. He’s a meat-and-taters kind of guy—and not strange meat, either. Greg said that he’d eaten lamb before and didn’t like it, but he did like the mutton. Despite the gaminess, the effect was delicate, he said. That mutton was tender and savory without smacking you with gamy funk (which I tend to like, being a fan of stinky bleu cheeses like Stilton, anchovies, and other funky flavors).
At other times at Old Hickory, I’ve had a mutton sandwich off the pit, which contains the same tender thick slices of meat, rich with a modest smokiness, with just a taste of sauce, heaped on a regular untoasted (and superfluous) bun. The mutton was less smoky than what I’ve eaten at Catholic church fund-raisers in the region, but it was still delicious. The sauce appears to be Worcestershire based and not as vinegary as other mutton sauces I’ve sampled.
My most recent trip to Old Hickory was in May 2012 when I was in town for the International Bar-B-Q Festival. I’d never interviewed anyone there, and knowing they’d be slammed that day I called ahead and scheduled a meeting with a young manager, Keith Cook, who gave me a tour of the kitchen area and detached main pit room. Inside the huge kitchen and prep area they cook chickens and ribs on a gas-fed Ole Hickory rotisserie cooker with an end firebox that burns hickory wood. Chickens cook at 275° for three and a half to four hours. Keith then took me outside and over to another building that houses two huge pits made from firebrick and steel (with sliding steel doors for accessing the meats). On these twenty-year-old pits, fired by hickory logs, the pit masters tend many pounds of mutton, Boston butts, beef briskets, boneless city hams, and boneless turkey breasts. A large band saw located near the pits is used to cut the whole sheep into manageable parts when they get a shipment. They load the pits with raw meat one morning and take it off the next morning. “We’re cooking fourteen sheep and forty-eight butts today,” Keith told me.
Pit master Gary Sandefur said he sops the meat every two hours with a dip of salt, pepper, vinegar, Worcestershire, and allspice. He has to rotate the meats, bringing the back to the front and moving the front to the back of the pits, to “get an even cook on everything.” Gary fishes the meats from the back of the deep pits with long pitchforks. He said, “I tell you what—after you do so many of ’em, they start getting a little heavy. Some of ’em are pretty good-sized sheep coming in here.” A big sheep might have a thirty-pound hindquarter. Gary looks strong as an ox, well muscled from all that lifting of heavy meats. He confirmed that his ancestry was Scots-Irish, and I joked that he’d fit in well at the strength competitions at Highland Games, like those held in Glasgow, Kentucky, every June.
I said, “The boneless ham thing is something I’ve only seen in western Kentucky. Any idea where that came from, this tradition of smoking up city hams?”
Keith said, “Anything smoked, everybody’ll eat it. They want that barbecue ham. It’s got that smoke flavor to it; it’s better than sandwich meat you buy at a deli because it’s got so much extra flavor. It’s not full of water. Just add that flavor to it, that smoke.”
Old Hickory offers custom cooking. Near the takeout counter, a menu hangs on the wall listing prices for various cuts of meat. Customers supply the meat, of course. If you want Old Hickory to smoke a ham, deer, or turkey weighing less than sixteen pounds, you’ll pay $10. Over sixteen pounds costs $12. Whole chickens cost $2.50 each.
Gary said he’s smoked a bit of everything. “I’ve done groundhog, coon, ducks, geese, goats, and possum.”
“Did you try any of it?” I asked.
“I try everything that comes off these pits. That’s why I got my carving knife over there.”
I said, “Groundhog’s really lean meat. I cooked one up when I was a kid. Of course I didn’t know what I was doing so it chewed like rubber. How does a groundhog taste after you cook it low and slow?”
“Not as bad as I thought it would,” Gary said. “I thought it’d be a little greasy, but actually it was really good. They eat a lot of tips of soybeans, so they’re more or less like a grain-fed cow, or elk out in the West that are hay fed.”
At Old Hickory, mutton necks, pork butts, and chicken are used to make burgoo. Gary said, “You know most of the people in eastern Kentucky, when they take up burgoo, their burgoo is a lot of squirrels, rabbits, and stuff like that.”
Gary told me, “These pits are fired up every morning. There’s no gas, no torches, no lighter fluid.” He held up a piece of newspaper, rolled it up, and said, “That’s our kindling right here.”
After Old Hickory had a fire recently, they contemplated eliminating the old-fashioned masonry pits because of pressure from the insurance company. “In Indiana you can’t cook over an open flame,” Keith said. “In Kentucky you can. But insurance won’t let us have the pit room attached to the main building. That’s why we built this outside pit room. In order to keep the flavor and keep the name with the flavor, we built it separate instead of switching to rotisserie pits and gas.” That sounds good and honest to me.
Keith said they use two kinds of dips: a vinegar-based cooking dip used to baste meats on the pits and a tomato paste–based finishing dip, which tastes, I think, similar to a thinned-down A-1 steak sauce. The sauce does contain vinegar and Worcestershire sauce.
After speaking with Keith and Gary, I sat down with friends and dug into a combination plate—customer’s choice of any three meats plus two sides. Old Hickory recently switched from untrimmed spareribs to a St. Louis cut, and those ribs were wonderful, tender and smoky. The sliced mutton off the pit was the ultimate in mutton perfection. The brisket—oh, Lord—was tender slices of beef with a deep smoke ring. All meats were drizzled with the brown finishing sauce. I loved the bowl of complexly flavored savory burgoo. The baked beans carried the tangy flavor of barbecue sauce. The only thing that wasn’t magnificent was the mac and cheese, which tasted like home-cooked elbow macaroni mixed with a mild cheese sauce.
I finished the meal with a bowl of decadent banana pudding. My friend George W. (Bill) Little Jr. also got the banana pudding, so I’ll quote his assessment. George said it was “outrageous.”
“What do you mean?”
“Couldn’t be better,” he said. George is over seventy years young. I’ll bet he’s eaten plenty of banana puddings during his life, so I’d call this high praise.
I agree. There was probably a half pound of pudding piled up in that bowl, with vanilla wafers on top—some of them crumbled, some of them whole—with whipped cream on top. Rich, creamy, crunchy.
Well done, Old Hickory, across the board. You deliver some of the best barbecue anywhere for people who relish the taste of meat and smoke.
Open: Monday–Thursday, 9:00 a.m.–9:00 p.m.; Friday–Saturday, 9:00 a.m.–10:00 p.m.
338 Washington Avenue; 270-926-9000
Collectable saucers with scenes from Gone with the Wind printed on them adorn the walls of Ole South, and in the corner—standing on high shelves— are dolls resembling the Butler family (Rhett, Scarlett, daughter) and the hoopskirted Melanie Wilkes with her husband, Ashley, in military uniform. Big lifelike paintings hang on the walls displaying Confederate soldiers in a nostalgic light: men in gray on horseback riding through a snowy landscape above the caption “Onward Christian Soldiers, Fredericksburg, Virginia”; General Robert E. Lee well dressed and noble upon his white horse; and then there’s Vivien Leigh—our favorite Englishwoman southern belle—sitting on the velvet-red steps of her mansion. The Ole South logo models the intermission and closing scene of Gone with the Wind—a lone mature tree in the foreground, a plantation home in the background—conjuring up loyalty to terra (or Tara) and the “good old days” of Dixieland past. There’s even a display of Golden Flake potato chips (“The South’s Original Potato Chip since 1923”). The whole effect of the decor is kitschy and amusing—and yes, potentially insulting to the politically correct.
Jason Shuler, the new owner of Ole South, told me the name of the restaurant came with the purchase—indeed, that the original owner put it into the purchase contract that the restaurant has to keep the name “Ole South” for years before it can be changed. The original owner, Tommy Osborne, catered to Confederate reunions and really played up his fondness for Civil War history and southern mythology. Jason just seems to take it in stride as part of the restaurant package he bought into.
Located on the southeast side of Owensboro since the 1990s, Ole South is a full-service restaurant with a large open dining room. I can imagine that years ago this place was “out in the country,” as new businesses—a strip-mall atmosphere—have grown up all around it. The exterior resembles a brick ranch-style home—the building was once a food pantry—and the interior, with the big salad bar and buffet, is designed for family dining. The extensive menu includes sandwiches like sliced or chopped mutton and pork, a turkey club, chicken, and barbecue ham. They also smoke whole (untrimmed) pork spareribs and half and quarter chickens. The chopped mutton—which looks pretty much like meat paste—is leftovers from the mutton pulling, pressed through a sausage grinder and sauced. I wasn’t prepared to like it, but I did, especially when I tried it with bread and raw onions. The texture takes some getting used to, but the chopped mutton packs a wallop of flavor. You can get a combo plate with three meats for variety.
The sliced mutton wasn’t ready for serving when I visited at 2:00 p.m.—it was on the masonry pits, smoking with indirect heat for the dinner crowd—so I ordered instead the sliced ham, sliced pork (from Boston butts) drizzled in dip sauce, smoked chicken, potato salad, and barbecue beans. And yes, the chopped mutton.
The hostess with the mostest Tammy—wearing a green elfin hat to celebrate the Christmas season—brought us fresh cups of coffee and plenty of creamers, and on a cold December afternoon Todd Chappel and I tucked in. The ham—which smokes for eight hours—is sliced and served with the brownish-red vinegary dip. The potato salad was a bit sour with dill pickles and onions—one of the best I’ve tried—and the thick beans had mustard undertones; both sides were very satisfying. The half chicken was tender with a medium smoke flavor, complemented by the wonderful dip. The thick-sliced pork was juicy and tender but not fall-apart tender, because these butts are cooked to a lesser internal temperature than pork butts that just flake apart. I loved the barky pieces. All the meats were delicious. It would be hard to pick a favorite. But because this is mutton country, and because I love mutton, I’d tip my hat to the chopped mutton and try the sliced if it were available. The sliced smoked ham with dip is also worth trying—something you won’t find much outside of Owensboro.
“We use hickory and cook all our meats from twenty-four to thirty hours at about 220°,” Jason said. “Our new motto and advertising campaign is ‘We do it longer and better than everybody else.’”
Jason has owned Ole South since 2008; he managed it for six years before that. Jason and pit master Jamie Cook fire the long pits with chunks of hickory loaded into the pit area closest to the exterior door (and the woodpile). They cook chickens and ribs closer to the fire and pork butts and mutton on the farthest end of the pits for long indirect cooking.
Back in the pit area, Jason stirred a forty-gallon drum of dip with a huge ladle. Todd and I found the dip a wonderful accompaniment to the meats, especially the slices of smoked city ham.
Ole South Barbeque’s Mutton Dip
When I visited the pit area of Ole South, I saw Jason Shuler stirring a forty-gallon flame-fired cauldron of mutton dip with a three-foot-long paddle. This dip recipe also requires a big kettle, like a sixteen-quart stockpot. Thanks to Jason for providing this high-volume recipe for Owensboro’s distinctive mutton dip.
1 gallon Worcestershire sauce
1 gallon water
2 tablespoons salt
1 tablespoon black pepper
2 cups white vinegar
1 cup lemon juice
2 pounds brown sugar
5 pounds tomato paste
In a large pot, cook all ingredients until paste dissolves. Use it to baste meats, preferably mutton, periodically throughout the many hours of cooking required to tenderize the muscle tissues. When serving mutton, offer this dip in a bowl on the side for the dipping of individual pieces. Yields about 2½ gallons.
Ole South delivers quirky kitsch, quality barbecue, ample seating in a family-dining atmosphere, and friendly service. They cook old school on those long masonry pits. They also have a barbecue buffet in more intimate surroundings than you’ll find at Moonlite across town, plus banana pudding, peach cobbler, and bread pudding to send you home waddling.
Open: Monday, 6:00 a.m.–2:00 p.m.; Tuesday–Thursday, 6:00 a.m.–8:00 p.m.; Friday–Saturday, 6:00 a.m.–9:00 p.m.; Sunday, 6:00 a.m.–2:00 p.m.
3523 Highway 54 East; 270-926-6464
Suuuuuuuuuu-weeeeeeee! This barbecue joint exudes cuteness, from the funky cartoon pigs painted on the walls to the Polynesian-style grass dangling here and there to the plastic palm tree in the corner of the water closet, right next to a cartoon pig in blue jeans holding its crotch next to the words “Gotta Go!!”
The ladies who run KP’s nailed the fun factor. You can see their sense of humor in the multiple-colored tie-dyed shirts they sell, designed by the same Bowling Green artist, Lori James, who painted the numerous pig scenes on the walls. The front of the 2011 T-shirt design features a big-haired (as in bouffant) pig in tiger-striped bikini and knee boots sitting in a tire swing, above the words “Leave Your Attitude at Home.” The back design shows three female pigs dancing around a table, above the words “Babes Gone WILD!” A mug of beer and mug of coffee are falling from the table, displaced by the pig babes’ wild dancing. The pigs have hourglass figures and wear bikinis, pink lipstick, earrings, high heels, and big hair. Carol Adams, the vegan-feminist author of The Sexual Politics of Meat and The Pornography of Meat, would have a field day with this place.
I visited KP’s with a group of buddies. As soon as we walked in the door, the front lady, Dana, said, “We’re out of brisket.” They were also out of Shock Top ale—it had been a big Friday night, apparently. We shared a sampler platter, which came with a full slab of spareribs, two pork sandwiches, a half chicken, four side dishes, and two dinner rolls. We also got a smoked turkey sandwich, a bologna burger, and a basket of smoked jumbo wings, which come “hot,” “BBQ,” or “naked.” While waiting for the food, my friends watched a Saturday football game on the big-screen television in the large room in the back of the house (KP’s is located in a ranch-style house). The floors are laminate that looks like wood. Tables are thick lacquered wood. Colorful beer signs glow on the walls of this room, which feels like a homey sports bar. On tap they had Miller Light, Bud Light, Shock Top, and Amber Bock. It’s a rare find in Kentucky, especially in a small town—a barbecue place with a beer license.
The meats are all lightly smoked on an Ole Hickory cooker, which Patti Pryor, the owner, keeps in a garage beside the house. Patti opened the doors of the cooker to reveal a rotisserie with racks filled with baby back ribs and rolls of bologna. On the other side of the stainless steel unit is a firebox that holds a blasting flame from natural gas. The flame licked a piece of hickory inside to give the subtle smoke flavor of the meats.
As a lover of smoke, my favorites of the meats were the chicken wings and tender half chicken. The juicy chicken wings, glazed with barbecue sauce or topped with typical buffalo wing hot sauce (or served “naked”), packed the most flavor. Fouad Atalla, one of the guys, said he’d be happy making a meal of a basket of smoked wings. I agree, and I’d add on the tasty side dishes and a piece of pie, all homemade.
Everyone agreed that the “deluxe baked beans,” hash brown casserole, and “tangy coleslaw” were delicious. The beans—a four-bean mixture cooked down in a savory sauce—were as good as I’ve had anywhere. The slaw was crispy slices of cabbage hinting of sweetened vinegar. The hash brown casserole was hot and cheesy. The pork loin sandwich was thinly sliced with very little smoke flavor. The pulled-pork sandwich was similar, except the meat is moister than the loin. The turkey sandwich was moist sliced turkey breast, slightly smoked and served with Jezebel sauce (a tangy sauce of fruit preserves, usually apple, and horseradish). The “bologna burger” was a half-inch-thick slice of smoked bologna served with a hot horseradish mustard sauce. “It’ll clean out your sinuses,” Patti said.
The fellows enjoyed the bologna—I think because most of them hadn’t eaten it in years. Fouad, a plastic surgeon, sliced the sandwich into ten even pieces with a plastic knife. The bologna was tasty. The big spareribs that come with the combo can be ordered naked, wet, or dry rubbed (our choice). The ribs were good. The meat still clung to the bone, and the smoke flavor was second to the chicken. All the food was served on paper in plastic baskets. Sandwiches came on regular untoasted hamburger buns. Tangy, sweet, and hot sauces are on the table—needed to add flavor to the pork sandwiches.
Born and raised in Central City (whose claim to fame is the Everly Brothers), Patti opened KP’s in 1994 as a carryout business two days a week, but the business has grown into its current full sit-down restaurant with televisions and draft beer and party room capacity. Patti said all their sides are “Granny’s recipes,” which doesn’t surprise me (they were really good). During the destructive ice storm of 2009, which knocked out power in communities across the state, Kentucky Utilities set up a big generator at KP’s, and they served sixteen hundred meals daily from two regular home ranges and their barbecue pit. Patti said their pit is now on wheels, ready to meet the needs of people during disasters.
Patti said she’s having fun at the business. “Besides being the Pit Queen, I do all the cookin’.” Her “right hand” is Dana Haney, the public face of KP’s, who takes care of the restaurant management, taking orders, answering phones, and so on. Patti said they laugh a lot when working, and that doesn’t surprise me either. KP’s just has the feeling of a good-time place, a real relaxing atmosphere to meet with friends, maybe watch some sports, and eat some of the tasty food.
I noticed some barbecue oddities on the menu, like “smokehouse quesadillas” (floured tortillas, cheese, and Southwest spices with pork, turkey, or pulled chicken) and “barbeque salad,” which could satisfy dining companions not wanting a full-on meat fest. A sign by the ordering counter also listed Derby pie, key lime pie, fudge nut pie, and blackberry cobbler.
I asked Patti about the fat painted pigs adorning the walls and the skinny female pigs on the T-shirts, and she said, “Babes gone wild! These are the new ones since my divorce. Those are fat pigs on the wall. These are skinny pigs on the T-shirts because we’re down to running weight now.” We all laughed at that.
I said, “Because you’re back on the market now!”
She said, “There you go.”
KP’s is a very short drive off of the Western Kentucky Parkway. Travelers looking for a clean, well-lit, colorful restaurant run by nice ladies who cook up quality homemade side dishes, mildly smoked tender meats, and decadent desserts—and maybe even a salad—should be happy here. We were even lucky enough to be served by a young woman in a cheerleading outfit. How often does that happen?
Lovers of old-fashioned deeply smoked barbecue take note: you won’t find that here. You’ll find fun and some good food. I’d go for a bunch of those chicken wings and several of the side dishes. Oh, and if you’re thirsty for a brew with your barbecue, know that KP’s is one of the few barbecue joints where you can have it.
Open: Thursday–Saturday, 11:00 a.m.–8:00 p.m.
902 West Everly Brothers Blvd.; 270-754-3400