I stopped at the fire department in Winchester, Kentucky, east of Lexington in Clark County, to get recommendations for barbecue places in the area. A fireman, whose name I never got, talked to me awhile about barbecue in the mountains. This fellow, originally from Morehead in Rowan County, said mountain people were smoking whole hogs regularly and having big parties where they smoke lots of meats. He has a custom cooker he built himself—a “redneck rig” he called it—assembled from various found items, including a food warmer from a restaurant, and it has lots of racks in it for laying meat, and there’s a hook in it for hanging a side of hog. He said grocery stores in the area, like the Kroger in Morehead, sell out of brisket because it’s in such high demand from locals. In short, he said there’s plenty of meat smoking happening in the mountains—just not at established restaurants.
I had to beat the bushes a bit to come up with the small list that follows. I’ve not read any authoritative study that explains why barbecue is deeply entrenched in western Kentucky but hard to find (I’m talking places selling it to the public) in the eastern part of the state. I’ve known for a long time that self-sufficient mountain dwellers kept and killed hogs. Linda Garland Page and Eliot Wigginton’s The Foxfire Book of Appalachian Cookery lists all kinds of recipes for pig parts, things like head cheese and scrapple, and how to cook the “rooter” (snout), chitlins (intestines), brain, and other “nasty bits” (shout-out to Anthony Bourdain), but there’s very little mention of barbecue. “Backbones and Ribs” can be “stewed like chicken parts or barbecued or canned.” Well, there’s one mention of barbecue. There’s even a recipe for barbecue sauce in the cookbook with more vinegar than ketchup, which looks good to me. But the one “barbecue” recipe in the book calls for pouring barbecue sauce over chicken, covering it in foil, and baking it until tender. I know people in the upper Midwest whose idea of barbecue is very similar to that— baked or crock-potted meat.
In another book, Appalachian Home Cooking: History, Culture, and Recipes, Mark F. Sohn, a professor at Pikeville College, gives a recipe for “Country-Style Barbecued Ribs.” Most of the recipe is a tomato-based barbecue sauce that’s poured over the ribs before they are tenderized in a “slow cooker” for five to nine hours. I’ll bet they’re tasty, but I just can’t call meat that doesn’t touch smoke “barbecue.”
My hunch is that resourceful mountain people needed to preserve their hogs for longtime consumption, not just blow it all on one decadent barbecue, while wealthy landowners in the flatter lands of western Kentucky could afford to kill a whole hog and have it barbecued for a picnic. Or maybe the Catholics, who have been cooking up sheep and hogs at Fancy Farm for 130 years and took root in the western parts of the state, have something to do with it. I’m going to keep looking for answers.
Adam Ferguson, the young owner/operator of Pop’s, named it after his “grand-father-in-law” (his wife’s grandfather). A Floridian by rearing, Adam moved to Kentucky “to get away from the hustle and bustle” of Orlando. His father was from eastern Kentucky, and when Adam visited when he was younger he really liked it. “My wife and I just wanted a change,” he said, “so we told my parents we were moving to Kentucky. They got excited and they moved too. I miss the water back home, but I don’t miss Florida.”
He smokes butts for sixteen to eighteen hours on a homemade cooker made from an 850-gallon propane tank—the kind my grandparents used out in the country to heat their home. Pops—“I’ve known him since I was probably five years old,” Adam said—made the smoker for him as a birthday present. “He had no idea I’d open a restaurant with it. I thought Pop’s was catchier than Adam, so we named it Pop’s. He’s always been real nice to me. He taught me quite a bit about barbecue.”
The meats at Pop’s come with some natural juices, but there’s a truly hot (and one mild) table sauce available. The meats are so good they don’t need sauce, though. “I wrap my shoulders after they are about halfway done to keep them from drying out,” Adam said. “Some barbecue guys are totally anti-wrap. I use blended hickory and white oak. I tell the guys who cut my wood to only cut dead standing. There’s not quite enough hickory around here to supply 100 percent hickory, plus I’ve always used a lot of oak—especially down in Florida there’s not a whole lot of hickory. We actually use orange wood down there too—it gives real good flavor.”
“What do you think white oak gives the meat?”
“I think it’s mellower than hickory. I prefer that to the real strong flavor. Your hardcore barbecue people probably like it stronger toward the smoky side. I shoot for the middle of the road and try to please everybody.”
Pop’s is Adam’s first food-service adventure, and he says the business is doing real good. In addition to barbecue, they sell a lot of catfish. He also does pork loin, brisket, and baby back ribs. He smokes the whole brisket and slices it to order. He also sells a lot of thin-sliced smoked turkey breast. On Saturday nights they do “wood-fired prime rib.” “We cut our own steaks. We do sirloin, New York strips, and rib eye.”
Adam ran a produce department for a Super Target before coming to Kentucky. He noticed the lack of barbecue in the Morehead area, and one morning on the way to church they passed a building. Adam told his wife, “That would be a good place for a barbecue restaurant.” The following week they drove by and there was a sign out front: “For sale or lease.” So they started up the business. Pop’s is truly a family affair. Adam’s mom, Lori, was running the hostess station/cash register and checking on customers while I plowed through a load of diligently prepared food.
Adam brings his Florida ways to Appalachia in the form of seafood. “We do jumbo tiger shrimp and scallops. Every once in a while I get lobster. I’ve gotten two-and-a-half-pound Dungeness crabs in. I just try to fill what’s missing in the area.”
I sampled baby back ribs, smoked pork, sliced beef brisket, a fried catfish fillet, and thin-sliced smoked turkey breast, plus baked beans, slaw, and fried pickled jalapeño pepper slices (hand-breaded at Pop’s) with ranch dressing for dipping. I topped the meal with a ridiculously rich and wonderful Amish fried pie—homemade chocolate pudding stuffed into a pastry shell, fried until crispy and served with two scoops of vanilla ice cream, whipping cream, and chocolate drizzled on top. The dessert alone is worth driving a good piece for. I’m not even a big sweeties guy, but I ate every bit of this pie, and that was on top of the full barbecue plate. Of the rest, the brisket was my favorite—nicely browned and barky on the outside, tender throughout, with an intense flavor from sixteen hours of smoking—and the lightly breaded fried catfish melted in my mouth. The smoked pork was tasty but wet and mushy from the wrapping in foil. The fluffy moistness of the pork would be a great addition to hoecakes. I prefer my pork pulled in larger pieces, but this was still really good, reminding me of Mississippi-style barbecue. It went well with the buttered Texas toast. I also enjoyed the tender and smoky baby back ribs. All the meats had a distinct smoke flavor except for the turkey, which was rather mild. The baked beans were creamy with pork mixed in and the slaw tasted crispy and fresh. Everything was of top quality. The meats didn’t need sauce, but there is a hot barbecue sauce with a true kick at the table.
Pop’s Southern Style Barbecue’s Cheese Potatoes
Adam Ferguson writes, “This dish travels well on a folded beach towel. Wrap with a second towel for long road trips. Stays hot and ready to serve for over an hour. Your family and friends will be looking for you and your old Dutch oven for parties to come.”
#12 size cast-iron Dutch oven
10 pounds russet potatoes, sliced ¼ inch thick
2 ounces bacon grease
1 bulb garlic, chopped
1 pound butter
2½ pounds Velveeta cheese, cubed
1½ ounces salt
1 ounce black pepper
Preheat oven to 375°F. Heat Dutch oven on stovetop and add bacon grease. Add potatoes and garlic to hot grease. Cook until browned and fragrant. Add butter and salt to the Dutch oven. Turn potatoes gently until coated with butter. Put Dutch oven in an oven and bake for 1 hour with lid on. Add Velveeta pepper and fold potatoes without mashing them. Cook for an additional 10 minutes.
Adam uses 100 percent wood. I asked, “What temperatures do you cook at?”
“I usually sear it—hit it about 350—and once it sounds like you’re frying bacon, I put the damper on and pull it back down and let it finish off at 250.”
In addition to barbecue, Pop’s delivers burgers made from “Kentucky-raised certified Black Angus” ground in house. They have a crazy food challenge—a five-pound hamburger.
Adam is really hands-on with his cooking. The brisket I liked so much was the first he’d cooked on a new smoker, and he wasn’t entirely happy with it. “Next time I’ll nail it,” he said, saying the brisket was “a touch dryer than I wanted it to be.” I agreed with his assessment, but the brisket was still nearly perfect.
Pop’s is located near the intersection of Highway 60 and 801 (the road to Cave Run Lake). It’s worth the hour-plus drive from Lexington. Get the brisket and ribs, and do save room for the fried pies made by some local Amish folks. I loved the chocolate version—just absolutely, ridiculously good.
Open: Tuesday–Thursday, 10:30 a.m.–8:30 p.m.; Friday–Saturday, 10:30 a.m.–9:30 p.m.; Sunday, 12:00 p.m.–8:00 p.m.
110 Kentucky Avenue, State Road 801; 606-784-6378
The billboard reads “C. M. Clark’s Pit Stop BBQ.” The C stands for Christian, appropriately named because his parents are missionaries who came to the mountains to do good works, including starting a nondenominational church in the tiny community of Warbranch in Leslie County. Christian followed them to the mountains. He’s originally from a small town in New York State but has lived all over. Perhaps that accounts for Christian’s off-center approach to barbecue and decor. He competes with Big Bubba Buck’s in Munfordville for my Funkiest Shack award. The best part of the funk is the sky-blue school bus outside the shack that Christian has decked out in tables for fair-weather dining. A sign on the bus window says, “Eat in.” Stumps of wood form the base of tables, and Christmas lights dangle from the bus windows. The bus, like the shack, sits in the shadow of a tree-covered mountain.
Inside the shack, which Christian built from the ground up, hang more Christmas lights, including the red chili pepper lights illuminating the ordering counter. An octagonal sign on the wall says, “Stop and pray.” Pit Stop is a barbecue place in progress. Christian is building on a dining room and taking woodworking classes in Paintsville to learn to make solid walnut tables, and he’s acquired booths from a Mexican restaurant in Ohio that he’ll eventually install. His “wallpaper” is rusted metal roofing screwed horizontally to the walls of the dining room. Recycled materials are all over the place. He laid the pretty wood floors himself with lumber from a sawmill down the road. “I’m working with a small budget,” he said. “If I can build it myself, I will.”
He started in April 2009 with a basic smoker and worked some festivals, saved his pennies, and has been gradually building his business into a fun family eatery. He will eventually have karaoke on weekends. He said summer is hopping, with people stopping by for grilled corn and cold ice cream.
Mr. Clark, who earned a restaurant management degree at the age of twenty-five, specializes in chopped lean meats—pork, chicken, brisket, and turkey—and surprising side dishes like smoked sliced red potatoes and garlic/ sesame roasted carrots (sort of hoity-toity for a barbecue joint, especially a rural one). He also smokes spareribs. The meats come sans sauce, and each has been seasoned by a different rub. Four sauces are available at a help-yourself counter. A “Sammich” gets you meat on Texas toast or a bun. The “Trinity” sandwich comes with three different meats. I really liked the cider vinegar bite of the potato salad and loved the candied crust of the spareribs hot off the big barrel smoker outside. The ribs were very tender with big flavor from the dry rub and smoke.
“I want to bring something here that isn’t here,” Christian said. “I want kids and family to come. I want high school kids to come for karaoke competitions on weekends. I sponsor CADA—Citizens against Drug Addiction— locally and in Floyd County, and I want them and other groups to have their meetings here.”
Christian appears to have the servant’s heart of his parents. I wish him years of success in bringing his special brand of family-friendly funk to Appalachia.
Open: Tuesday–Saturday, 11:00 a.m.–5:30 p.m.
24 Little Paint Creek; 606-889-6462
If you’re driving to far-eastern Kentucky from Lexington on the Mountain Parkway, fill up your gas tank. It’s a lonely road with few exits and plenty of curves. When I made the trip, those old mountains—home to some of the earth’s most species-rich forests—snuggled the road, dusted with snow. As I crossed into Magoffin County, the inclines rose up higher and steeper. I entered Prestonsburg at the lunch hour on a Friday and passed businesses on the main strip through town: a pawn shop, Family Dollar, Ace Hardware, Cash Express, Kentucky Mountain Bride, School of Hair Design, KFC, Taco Bell, Wendy’s, Hardee’s, Dairy Queen, McDonald’s, Arby’s. Is it any wonder that family-owned restaurants stand out like oases in the fast-food monocultures of small-town America? Thank goodness for barbecue places, which more often than not are still mom and pop.
Such is the case with Pig in a Poke, owned and operated by Brian and Tammy Cramer since 2007. I must admit that my expectations for this restaurant weren’t high after reading negative Google reviews—most complaining of poor service and about drunken patrons at the bar. I’d imagined a real dank dive-bar atmosphere. I was pleasantly surprised when I entered Pig in a Poke to discover a dining room with quality booths and tables, well-kept wood floors, a pleasant mauve and white paint scheme, and a cool spiral staircase leading upstairs from the downstairs dining area. The dining area upstairs—which does have a full bar with beers on tap—was built with even more gorgeous wood. Shades of brown create a relaxing, classy feel, from the dark brown slats of the cathedral ceiling to the wooden tabletops and bar seating. Nice chandeliers hang from the ceilings, and several flat-screened televisions provide many good viewpoints to watch UK games. There’s even a second-floor balcony in the Deep South style for outdoor sitting. Imbibers can get a Kentucky Bourbon Barrel ale on tap and relax in one of the lounging chairs and gaze across the road at the Archer Clinic of the Highlands Health System. If you eat too much barbecue and get abdominal cramps, care is available a hopskip away.
During the lunch hour, the clientele appeared to be primarily well-dressed businesswomen. It seems to me that if you want family dining, eat downstairs; if you want a lively bar atmosphere, go upstairs. And if you’re opposed to a rowdy bar atmosphere, then go at lunch. People were on good behavior.
I sat at the bar upstairs and spoke with Mr. Cramer, who was eating a lunch of pig nachos topped with buffalo-sauced chicken breast meat hand pulled after four hours of smoking. I told him I’d heard that eastern Kentuckians like their sauce with a little barbecue in it. He said 99 percent of his customers wanted their meats sauced, “the more the merrier,” but you could get the meats “dry,” without sauce, upon request. The honey sauce is the one that gets applied to most meats before serving.
I was glad to be the 1 percent in this case.
“When I started here,” Brian said, “I wanted to put a shoulder out there—I wanted to pull it off the shoulder and serve it to you plain and let you put sauce on it, but that just went south right away. People were like, ‘Man, I want the sauce on it.’” And so the heavily sauced barbecue culture was established.
The “Little of Everything” came with baby back ribs, pulled pork, pulled chicken, pulled brisket, sides of loaded potato salad and slaw, and a nice square of sweet cakey cornbread. The food was good, with my favorites being the well-seasoned brisket and the excellent loaded potato salad made with leftover baking potatoes and other rich stuff. A variety of Cattleman brand sauces in squirt bottles are available, along with one sweetened spicy vinegar sauce that’s passed around upon request. The pork (a shoulder-butt combo) and briskets smoke twelve hours on an Ole Hickory cooker using hickory wood. The meats go on naked, mostly, with only a salt and pepper rub applied to the brisket. “People tell me I’m losing money because of the bone,” Brian said. “But anything cooked with the bone in it, it’s gotta be good.” Amen to that.
The tasty chopped brisket was my favorite meat—very tender with some good fat mixed in with the lean—and I sure relished that loaded potato salad. I could make a whole meal off a pile of the potato salad, the brisket, and the sweet baked beans (a blend of pinto, northern, kidney, and regular baked beans). They also serve big baked sweet potatoes. “Some of them look like footballs,” Brian said. The sweet cakey cornbread was nearly like a dessert. Brian said the mountain folks had to come around to it—they were used to dried cornpones—but now people ate whole baskets of it. “I kinda think it’s messing up my dessert sales,” Brian said, laughing. Half-pound hand-patted burgers, sixteen-ounce charbroiled rib-eye steaks, fried pollock and chips, brats, grilled portabellas, and more round out the menu. Brian wanted to appeal also to the “mother-in-laws who don’t like barbecue.”
In his former job, Brian traveled all over Kentucky building traffic intersections and maintaining freeway lighting. “I was able to frequent quite a few barbecue restaurants and see how other people were doing it, which was really kind of beneficial.” His stops included Smokey Pig in Bowling Green, where Brian lived for a year (eating high on the hog but staying low on the chain at Motel 8 near I-65). On weekends he returned home and sold barbecue out of the end unit of a motel. He rented the room, which had a three-bowl sink and other stuff to satisfy health code requirements, and cooked on Brinkman smokers. He said when people were lined out the door he knew he was on to something. “By 1:00 I’d be sold out,” he said. “I called it ‘Pig in a Poke’ because a poke’s a bag and you could only get it to go.”
Eventually he bought the big building of his current location (it was an apartment complex with four units) and remodeled the heck out of it. There’s a really cool elevator, like a dumbwaiter, that transports food from the kitchen to the upstairs bar area.
“How’d you become interested in barbecue in the first place?”
“I love to smoke,” Brian said. “I love to smell it. I love to sit and drink a beer and just stare at it.”
About using a gas-wood hybrid cooker, Brian said, “It isn’t real in the sense that it’s not smokers that you have to stand and tend to all day and all night, but in this business, as much as we sell, it’s hard to mass-produce without something like an Ole Hickory pit or Southern Pride. I feel pork should taste like hickory, so we load it down with wood all the time to keep that smoke going. The Ole Hickory pit has been kind of a godsend because it’s a lot easier. But if you don’t see a stack of wood out back, then you really aren’t smoking. You gotta have wood.”
Brian summed up his philosophy: “The beauty of barbecue is that everybody does do things their own different way. Barbecue is a way of life. You don’t buy it in a bag. We’re constantly cooking here.”
ADDENDUM: In 2011, Brian opened a second location down the road in Pikeville, serving the same fine food.
Open: Tuesday–Saturday, 11:00 a.m.–8:00 p.m.
341 University Drive; 606-889-9119