The small town of Burkesville, seat of Cumberland County, lies on the highway to Dale Hollow Lake. The curvy drive on the John Muir Highway down to Dale Hollow is beautiful: cattle and hay rolls in the fields, good stands of hardwoods, rustic barns with quilt patterns painted on them, and modest-sized country homes. The Kingsford charcoal plant near Summer Shade and a few lumber companies testify to the importance of trees in this area. I’ll bet that many locals don’t know why this is called the John Muir Highway. Well, the little bearded tree hugger walked from Indiana to Florida in 1867 and passed through this part of Kentucky. Muir describes his adventures in journals published posthumously in 1916 as A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf, a classic of southern nature writing.
Outside Summer Shade—one of the nicest town names I’ve ever encountered—I drove past a home with plastic deer in the front yard. Christmas wreaths and red bows decorated these deer, very sissy. Just east of Summer Shade, I passed one of many signs erected by Evangelist Dewey Cooper. This one read: WARNING: JESÚS IS COMING—ARE YOU READY? Such signs appear regularly along roadsides in this region, very much a part of my cultural upbringing. Southeast of Summer Shade, the land changes dramatically and starts to look more like eastern Kentucky. Many homes are heated with wood, smoke rising from the chimneys. Roads twist and snake through the substantial hills, and the old crumbling barns remind you of a time when tobacco crops paid the mortgages in this small-scale farming region.
At one point, Dale Hollow reservoir held the world-record smallmouth bass. I’ve passed through Burkesville several times en route to Dale Hollow, but until December 2011 had never laid eyes on Capps BBQ because it lies on the north side of town. Look for a small cement-block building painted red with one picnic table outside. Inside, another small table sits near the ordering counter. This place is mainly takeout.
On the cold day I visited, Mr. Willard Capps, a gray-bearded man wearing woodsy camouflage coveralls, was grilling pork chops in a covered garage area offside the shack. Smoke rose from an old steel cooking box with a heavy hinged lid on it. He’s been selling meat in Burkesville for thirteen years, with shoulder being his biggest seller.
I’d just butchered two hogs earlier that week, so Willard and I talked hogs for a while. He said that back in the day, his daddy didn’t want to kill a hog until it weighed about 600 pounds. Our biggest hog, named Red Bud, weighed 444 pounds at slaughter time. Willard said that if you want to cure hog meat, you need some age and fat on it. “A little 225-pound hog ain’t big enough for me to do what I want to do with it.” He went on, “People used to didn’t waste nothing about a hog. I remember my mama made that souse meat? Ever part was just about used.”
Willard cooks with Kingsford charcoal and said he can’t tell the difference between it and fresh wood coals. But he admitted that he could taste gas when people grilled over it. He basted the pork chops with sauce as they sizzled.
Willard said he started barbecuing on the riverbank, ever since he was big enough to get out to fish and hunt. “I barbecued about everything they is to be barbecued. Even tried frog legs one time. They didn’t turn out too good.”
“What’s the strangest thing you ever grilled?”
“Probably groundhog.”
“I’ve done that,” I said. “Mine didn’t turn out too well.”
“It’s too lean. Rabbit’s too lean, too.”
“I bet if you wrapped bacon around there it might work.”
“That’d probably turn out alright.”
Willard said he’d sold grilled bologna awhile, but that the profit margin was much higher from selling a shoulder sandwich.
“You ever try any rainbow trout on a grill?” he asked.
“Yeah,” I said. “White River in Arkansas. Cooked them right up at the campsite.”
“They’re good. Flake right off the bone.”
The menu is simple: shoulder, pork chops, shredded pork, chicken, hot dogs, hamburgers, and the standard sides: slaw, baked beans, and potato salad. The thin-sliced shoulder and pork chops were good. Willard’s dip sauce made with colored vinegar was sweeter than some I’ve tried.
Open: Wednesday–Friday, 10:00 a.m.–7:00 p.m. (a bit longer in summer)
920 North Main Street; 270-864-9429
Located in a cinderblock building with vinyl-siding facade, not far off the town square in a residential neighborhood, Hamilton’s is the real deal. Smoke blows from a big steel exhaust chimney jutting from the side of the building. A screened porch with tables for semi-outdoor dining runs along the front. From inside the porch, you can see a sign that says “Alpine Motel” on top of a nearby hill. “Alpine” might be a bit of exaggeration, as Burkesville is hardly mountain country, but the town does have the flavor of an eastern Kentucky town, tucked as it is within the foothills of the Appalachians known as the Cumberland Plateau. Just a little bit east of Burkesville, heading toward Albany on Highway 90, the hills grow longer and steeper, and before long you get to Harper Mountain, one of the westernmost mountains in this lake region of south-central Kentucky. Keep heading east and the mountains start popping up all over the place and get taller and taller.
Inside, the menu mounted high on the wall lists sandwiches and plates. Choices are, simply, meats cooked on the open pit you can view from the ordering counter. Seeing the long, rectangular iron grates elevated to belly level and enclosed by concrete blocks and bricks, with a bed of coals underneath and slices of shoulder, half chickens, and a whole pork tenderloin browned from the smoke got my stomach juices rumbling. In addition to these meats, they sell pork chops, shredded pork, hot dogs, and ribs. No side dishes are listed on the menu, but I spied the words “apple pie.” And sure enough, right there on the counter lay homemade fried apple pies wrapped up in plastic foil, just begging me to take a couple home.
Not seeing any sides on the menu, I chose a shoulder sandwich. Elisa, traveling with me on this day, said, “Let’s try the tenderloin. I’m curious,” and I agreed, even though I was suspicious about tenderloin because it’s a very lean meat and dries out easily. I watched a big bearded man wearing jean shorts and a reversed ball cap slice thick pieces off the whole tenderloin. He said, “You want ’em dipped?” and I replied, “Dip ’em good.”
This man, who, I later learned, is Norman Hamilton, went about his work with a sense of cheerfulness. He served up our sandwiches at the counter and said, “Anything else?” and Elisa asked for a plastic bottle of cold sweetened tea from the cooler behind the counter just because his cheerfulness made her want to spend more money.
We took the sandwiches outside and sat at a plastic table on the porch. A long counter runs along the front of the porch, and you can sit there and look out upon the Cumberland County Maintenance Garage. I unwrapped the aluminum foil to reveal the beautiful shoulder sandwich, two slices of browned and still-moist shoulder nestled between two slices of white bread. Some beads of amber grease clung to the foil. The shoulder pieces, thicker than the norm, were hot off the hickory pits. You could really taste the smoked meat, as it wasn’t overwhelmed by a sauce.
Elisa popped the top of a Styrofoam takeout box, and inside the pork tenderloin sandwich looked much the same, except the tenderloin was two pieces of lean pork sliced one-inch thick with a slim band of tasty browned fat on the edges, drizzled with a tangy vinegar-based sauce. I took a piece of tenderloin and bit into it, and my bias against that lean cut of meat was shot all to hell. It was juicy, tender, laced with moderate smoke, and bursting with flavor from the seasonings and dip sauce.
As we pondered the popularity of tenderloin on menus in this region, Elisa posited that tenderloin, like chicken, might be favored by women who want a leaner cut of meat. We’d been told recently by Gerald Judd at Mama Lou’s in Uno that a lot of women don’t like barbecue, and that was why he served breast of chicken.
As we finished our sandwiches, a man eating inside when we arrived came out onto the porch and said, “Good food here, isn’t it?” I agreed, remarking it was my first time. He said, “If you get a plate, you better take part of it home with ye. They give you three big pieces of shoulder or tenderloin and big sides. It’s as good as there is around.” The sides, I learned, are beans, slaw, and potato salad.
The dining area of the restaurant exudes the aura of a barbecue shack. In the men’s restroom, the floors are uneven, and vinyl contact paper looking like wood is pasted to the floor. The sitting area is furnished with old vinyl booths and plastic tables with folding chairs; the floors are concrete, and the walls are painted cinderblocks and paneling. Big fans cool the room. On the walls hang pictures of the Tuskegee Institute National Historic Site and Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
Customers kept filing in through the front door, ordering food, and then moving to the dining room to eat it. Norman talked with me between filling orders. Norman and his wife, Pat, have been in the same location since 1979, when they bought the building. They opened the restaurant part-time for a while (Norman had a full-time job at a factory in Glasgow), but then had to close for six years after Pat was burned in a fire. People still called them at home asking when they would open again. Norman decided to retire from the factory at age fifty and do barbecue full-time. He credits Pat for making things work. “It’s been a business when she started running it,” he said. “When I was running it I played a lot of softball. I opened whenever I got ready to barbecue, because I had a job, and mostly then it was on Saturdays and Sundays. And people started out, ‘Well, he’s got good barbecue but he’s never open.’” Pat brought steadiness to the business. Now they are open consistently three days a week.
Norman suggested he might be ready to retire from barbecue before long, and he looked over to his granddaughter Logan and said, “She could take this business to the next level.” I saw a little embarrassed smile cross the fifteen-year-old’s face. More people walked in and ordered their Saturday night dinners. I thanked Norman, and he invited us to come back again with a big smile and a handshake.
Watching Norman turning pieces of shoulder and saucing meats, smelling the rich odor of browning shoulder and the sizzle of fat on coals, and seeing those half chickens and whole pork tenderloin laid out on the grates—I couldn’t help myself and ordered a half chicken and one of those fried pies to go. Norman filled my order and rang me up and thanked us again. I dug into the barbecued chicken outside, sitting on the bedrails of the Ford Ranger. The chicken was good, tasting of smoke and dip sauce, nothing more. It had cooked longer than I like, but that’s the nature of chicken and ribs. If you get them at the perfect time, then you are in for a divine experience. If they sit a while, well, you’ll get meat that’s drier than it should be. I did like the chicken, though. But my favorite was the pork tenderloin (to my surprise) and the shoulder.
If Logan doesn’t take up the barbecue heritage from her grandparents I sure hope somebody does. The Hamiltons cook low and slow, the meats are excellent, and the place pleases my penchant for homey shack atmosphere. The steady stream of customers confirmed the talk I’d heard about how good it was, but I didn’t really need more proof than my taste buds, which said, “More please!” We drove away and cracked open that apple pie—we were not far down the road before we wished we’d purchased two of them.
I returned to Hamilton’s in December 2011 to try that tasty tenderloin again, along with two more homemade pies, and I spoke with Pat awhile. She sliced the tenderloin right off the pit, so the meat retained the juiciness. One of Pat’s customer’s—a big guy wearing a Hamilton’s BBQ cap and chewing on a toothpick, his little daughter at his side—testified, “Ain’t much no better than what you’re gonna eat right here. I cook myself and I’ma tell you somethin’. It’s in ye sauce, and it ain’t get much better than what’s right here.”
The man, Henry Pruitt, said he’d eaten all of the barbecue in the area— and that everybody used the same meat, but Norman’s sauce was just superior to all others. “It’s in the sauce. You can take two beautiful women and put ’em side by side—what makes that woman, though?”
“It’s subjective,” I said.
“It’s the attitude! It’s how she presents herself. One is going to be better than the other because of her attitude. Am I right or wrong? It’s the same thing about this right here. Put two good cooks on that grill right there, one of them’s going to be better than the other because of the sauce.”
I asked what Norman did differently with his sauce.
Henry said, “I don’t know, brother. I wish I did. I can drank the sauce. It’s in the sauce.”
Open: Their sign says, “Usually open at 9:00 a.m. Thursday, Friday, Saturday”
211 Hill Street; 270-864-9446
South of Burkesville, on the main road to Tennessee, this joint adds deep-fried side dishes, a spicy slaw, and a super-hot ghost chili sauce (upon special request) to the typical grilled meats found in this part of the world. I tried the pulled pork, sliced pork shoulder, and half chicken. I can’t recommend the pulled pork, because it’s the same pre-sauced stuff that most barbecue places in this region sell, often called “shredded” on menus. I wasn’t too fond of the chicken, either, as I found it overcooked (the bone pulled right out from the meat, as if stewed) and too saucy. If you like chicken falling-apart tender with sauce on it, however, you’ll probably like the chicken here. It’s tasty—just not my preferred style.
On the upside, the shoulder sandwich at Hot Rod is a great food deal: $3 got me three slices of shoulder, dipped hot upon request, with white bread. The aroma of the dip—the way it flared my nostrils with a distinctive vinegary tang—reminded me of eating hot chicken wings. I also like the Hot Rod slaw, a mayo slaw with barbecue baste (dip) mixed in.
Deep-fried offerings are strangely absent at barbecue joints in south-central Kentucky. Baked beans, slaw, and potato salad are expected, but it’s rare to find fried items such as corn nuggets, buffalo chips, onion petals, mac and cheese wedges (fried macaroni and cheese!), and fried pickles. Hot Rod has them. Even though I’m not usually wowed by food-service frozen things, it’s hard not to like buffalo chips—waffle fries dusted with “buffalo” spices.
I appreciate how the young folks who opened this place in April 2011 are doing something a little different from other barbecue places in the region. The dining room is spanking-new clean and decorated in an automotive motif. NASCAR played on the television. Aluminum diamond plate—the shining metal often seen on truck toolboxes, bed liners, bumpers, and trim—runs along the bottom of the cement-block walls, which are painted brick red above.
Chad Pruitt and his older brother Jimmy, owners, and Todd Cash, head cook, are the men behind the Hot Rod. They burn down hickory wood and shovel coals under the meats through a trap door from the outside, so they don’t ever have to bring ash into the kitchen. Todd was a fry cook before he and Chad decided to open the restaurant, and he brought his frying savvy with him to the new venture. When I expressed my preference for unsauced pulled pork, Chad said when they first opened they weren’t saucing the pork, but locals wanted it sauced, so they changed to suit the local tastes. Todd admitted that he too prefers pulled pork sans sauce, but “We couldn’t give it away without the sauce on it.”
This is interesting—yet another connection between these south-central Kentucky counties and Appalachia, where they also want their pork heavily sauced. (You can get the pork pulled from Boston butts without sauce upon request.)
I asked, “How are the fried pickles going over?”
Chad said, “The more people try the fried pickles down here, the more who loves ’em. But it’s hard to get ’em to eat it. That’s what we’re trying to do— something a little different than everybody down here. Just got to give it time.”
I should mention that Hot Rod recycles cans. In the wasteful Styro-foam-filled world of barbecue takeout, that’s a pleasant surprise.
After closing down for a winter holiday, Hot Rod opened in spring 2012 for their second season. On the phone they said they’d made improvements since I visited during their early weeks of operation. I’m glad they’ve survived a year in these tough economic times, and I look forward to trying them again.
Open: Thursday, 11:00 a.m.–6:00 p.m.; Friday–Saturday, 11:00 a.m.–8:00 p.m.; Sunday, 11:00 a.m.–6:00 p.m. (closes sometimes during winter—call ahead)
3830 Celina Road; 270-433-9696
Brad Simmons, headman of Lucky Dog BBQ catering based in Danville and organizer of the first-ever Kentucky State BBQ Festival in fall 2011, told me that he was living in a “barbecue wasteland” in central-east Kentucky. I know what he means. If you draw a line straight down the map from LaGrange (northeast of Louisville near the Ohio River) to Burkesville (down next to Tennessee on the Cumberland River), you’ve pretty much marked the line between Barbecue Dreamland and Barbecue Wasteland. Just look how thick the first part of this book is, with barbecue places galore in the western part of the state, but tapering off—with pockets of barbecue riches, like around Louisville—the farther east you venture. Consider the Green River Lake area. Joe Barbee’s Breast and Butts Que in Columbia is currently the only game in the region, and Joe’s good barbecue is available only on the first and third weekends of each month from March to December. No wonder people in Columbia drive all the way down to Tompkinsville to eat at Red Barn for their open-pit grilled meats. Monroe County has five barbecue joints. Cumberland County to the east has four. Clinton County to the east has zero. Russell County to the north of Clinton: zero. Adair County bordering Russell County to the west: one. And here it is, the current sole offering of barbecue around Green River Lake.
Joe Barbee used to cook on the Kansas City Barbecue Society competition circuit, until his then girlfriend twisted his arm to get off the road and open his own barbecue place. “She hated KCBS. Hated the people, didn’t like anything about it.” So he quit the circuit and opened his own place on April 1, 2005. That date was prophetic, as Joe was fooled by this woman—she wiped out his bank account. Joe had to borrow money to pay his suppliers. Joe says he moped around a couple of weeks, but then his daughter Susan Barbee-Harvey said, “Look, if this place means that much to you, I’ll help you out some, but I can only do it a couple of weekends a month.”
“She’s the reason we’re all here,” Joe said, giving Susan a sideways hug.
Breast and Butts (B & B) is a family operation that focuses on quality. “We prep the meats just like at a contest,” Joe said. “We wash everything. We use our own rubs. We let the meat sit a while before putting it on the cooker. We use an Ole Hickory cooker. It’s the most dependable. The cookers are a lot smarter than the people running them,” he noted, talking about the barbecue competition circuit, where a bunch of inebriated guys are apt to open the cooker doors far too often to peek at the meat, letting heat out and screwing up the process. “Just let it alone,” Joe said.
I ate a sampler platter that came with one slice of dry-rubbed boneless shoulder, a few bones of baby back ribs, a chicken breast/wing, pulled pork from Boston butt, one of Ol Joe’s Ky. wings (a smoked ham shank), potato salad, baked beans, and slaw. I also tucked away a good portion of a huge “loaded BBQ potato.” All meats were tender and flavorful, with the ham shank ranking highest on my flavor/tenderness scale. Joe’s take on sliced shoulder, using a dry rub instead of vinegar baste, sets him apart from the Monroe County style to the south (I liked it, but prefer the grilled vinegar-dipped shoulder of Monroe County to Joe’s shoulder pieces, which cook, like everything else, on the gas-fired rotisserie). The beans are excellent. Because of the lack of deep smoking that I prefer, this is barbecue that benefits from the addition of sauces. Two of them were available at the table: Ol Joe’s Original (a sweet and tangy tomato-based sauce with pepper kick) and Ol Joe’s Mustard Barbecue sauce (like the original, with added mustard seed). Joe’s distinguished cowboy visage—blue jean shirt, full-brimmed hat, and a wizened face with full mustache that puts me in mind of the actor Sam Elliott—graces the bottles. I imagine Joe as a ladies’ man—a tall drink of Kentucky water.
When I entered B & B on a Friday afternoon around 3:00, a group of middle-aged men talked and laughed at a nearby table. As I worked on that sampler platter and big potato, several other folks came in to dine, including a woman from Michigan who teaches at the local Lindsey Wilson College. She likes B & B so much that she was loading up with it to take back to her family in the North for the holidays.
The atmosphere is welcoming: a big open dining room with long folding tables decorated in plastic tablecloths (a Christmas candy-cane design in December), metal folding chairs, tiled floor, and, best of all, walls decorated with over one hundred framed black-and-white photos of local history—some of it Joe Barbee’s family history. For example, there’s a weathered advertisement for the Columbia & Campbellsville Stage Line, J. B. Barbee, proprietor. There’s memorabilia, such as aprons from Joe’s five years on the Kansas City Barbecue Society contest circuit. He competed at the prestigious Jack Daniels Invitational in 2004 and 2005. And then there’s plenty of funny stuff to catch the eye, like the mounted rabbit with deer antlers (a jack-alope?) and a sketch of Abe Lincoln and Jeff Davis standing side by side and encircled by the words “Kentucky boys with attitudes.” I spent thirty minutes looking around Joe’s restaurant and still didn’t see everything. It’s like a local history museum.
Joe’s an entrepreneur with the gift of liquid speech. He walked me around the restaurant, telling stories about people in the old black-and-white photos. “This man here’s from Adair County,” Joe said, pointing to a photo. “He won the national fiddle contest.”
Joe’s history in barbecue goes back to his youth. “I was raised on Tennessee-line barbecue.” In the late 1950s and early ’60s, Joe went down to Dale Hollow reservoir for fishing and houseboating and got his first taste of grilled sliced pork shoulder. “Mercy. I’d never eaten steak that was that good. Then when I got married and had kids, I’d get up on Sunday morning and drive to Pea Ridge and buy Ruth Willis’s barbecue and bring it back and have it in the oven for Sunday lunch when we got out of church. I raised my kids on it.”
Years later, in the 1990s, Joe spent time in New Orleans learning how to fry turkeys. (He fried ninety-three of them for Thanksgiving 2011.) In 1999, he went to the Kentucky Bourbon Festival in Bardstown and met Bear Woods of Backwoods Barbecue and tried the Kansas City style. Joe loved it. He asked Bear to teach him how to do it. Joe spent the next several years on the circuit, learning the trade while cooking with the J-Mack team from far western Kentucky. “I learned enough to be dangerous.”
By the way, the stuffed potato with pulled pork on top was fabulous. When I go back to Breast and Butts, I’ll get that potato, an order of Ol Joe’s Ky. wings (the smoked ham shanks), and the great baked beans and vinegar slaw.
Open: Seasonally, March–December, every first and third weekend on Friday and Saturday, 10:00 a.m.–8:00 p.m. (open for forty days per year—get it while you can!)
824 Campbellsville Road; 270-384-2360
In June 2012, Susan Mirkhan, owner of J. J. McBrewster’s in Lexington, opened FishTales at Wolf Creek Marina, right on the placid waters of Lake Cumberland. Despite the fishy name, this lakeside restaurant will also feature smoked meats. It’s one of the last places you can get barbecue as you head east in southern Kentucky toward the Cumberland Gap.
Dine with a view of the big lake. Kentucky is beautiful from the Mississippi River to Appalachia, and Lake Cumberland, even though an impoundment, is a lovely jewel among the diamonds.
Open: Tuesday–Saturday, 11:00 a.m.–10:00 p.m.; Sunday, 11:00 a.m.–3:00 p.m.
782 Island Ramp Road; 270-866-3437
Breast and Butts Que’s World-Champion Ribs
Joe Barbee’s got some well-earned opinions about rib smoking, because in 2005 he won first place in ribs at the Jack Daniel’s World Championship Invitational Barbecue down in Lynchburg, Tennessee. (Joe was competing on the J-Mack Cookers team, based in Bardwell, Kentucky.) When Joe offered to tell me how to cook ribs, and I gladly agreed to listen, he rolled out a tale that included hints, tips, and some strong opinions. I’ll try organizing his spiel into an easy-to-follow form.
1. Don’t use baby backs! Use a St. Louis–style rib, because it’s from an older, larger hog and has more fat content with better marbling and flavor. Besides, baby back ribs are strangely curved and have sharp bones that poke through the foil when you wrap them after smoking.
2. Pull the membrane from the underside of the rib. (I find that sliding a butter knife under the membrane in the middle and lifting up allows me to insert a finger underneath to hold the ribs down. I then work the membrane loose and pull up and off.)
3. Shake a dry rub generously and evenly on both sides of the ribs. Joe recommends his own brand, Ol Joe’s Barbecue Rib Rub, available online at www.jpsaucehouse.com. Joe’s rub ingredients include salt, sugar, paprika, spices, dehydrated garlic, and black pepper.
4. Let the rubbed ribs rest at least 2 hours or overnight in the refrigerator.
5. Bring ribs to room temperature, or at least to 50°F. Start your smoker and get the fire up to 250°.
6. Place ribs on the smoker bone side down and cook at 250° for 4½ to 5 hours. When the barometric pressure is low, the ribs will cook quicker. Cool, eh?
7. Joe says the next step is very important. In his words: “Leave it the hell alone.” Don’t be opening the lid to check them every 30 minutes. “The smokers are smarter than we are.” Joe says you want that constant pressure caused by a steady temperature in a closed area.
8. Pull the rack of ribs up after 4½ hours. If it breaks apart, then it’s done.
9. Brush the rack lightly with your favorite rib sauce. Would you believe that Ol Joe recommends his own sauce? You can buy a bottle at Breast and Butts Que in Columbia.
10. Wrap tightly in aluminum foil and put into an insulating plastic or Styrofoam “cooler” (not cooled in this case) to keep the ribs warm. Let them steam and tenderize in the foil for at least 1 hour; 2 is better.
11. Cultivate the Buddhist mind, which means try to quench your desire to tear into those ribs before they are finished doing what needs to be done. “It takes discipline to do this, to wait that long,” Joe says.
12. Take ribs from cooler. Unwrap foil. Get your fingers sticky. Eat up.