by Don Wilding
Ingram would put Alabama barbecue up against any other region’s barbecue. In a press conference concerning the Alabama Department of Tourism’s Year of Alabama BBQ, Ingram called out barbecue in nearby Memphis. “I feel like Alabama has the best barbecue around if you ask me,” he declared. He added, “You always hear about Memphis, well Memphis and Alabama are some of the only places that argue about barbecue. To me, Alabama is the best.”287
Old Greenbrier Restaurant
In 1952, Jack Webb opened a small restaurant in Madison at the intersection of Old Highway 20 and Greenbrier Road. At the time, Old Highway 20 connected Decatur and Huntsville. Today, I-565 runs nearby.288 Before the interstate, they saw a lot of car traffic, or potential customers, so musicians performed on the roof to attract people to the restaurant.289
Old Greenbrier Restaurant has an extensive menu. They specialize in catfish and barbecue. For barbecue, they offer ribs, pork, chicken and ham. Like Big Bob Gibson Bar-B-Q in nearby Decatur, they serve their chicken with white sauce. Customers can order the barbecue as plates or sandwiches.
In the 1980s, customers could feast on an all-you-can-eat dark meat chicken plate. The first plate of the meal consisted of four chicken quarters. It became a favorite choice of NASA and Redstone Arsenal employees. “We would all order it and pig out,” remembered Pat Lewallen, a longtime resident of Huntsville and former employee at NASA.290
In 1987, brothers Jerry and Johnny Evans purchased Old Greenbrier Restaurant. Their father, Martin “Buddy” Evans, served as the sheriff of Limestone County. The Evans brothers learned the restaurant industry from their mother, Bobbie Ann Deemer Evans. In 1982, Buddy and Bobbie Ann opened Catfish Inn in Athens, but it has closed.291
In Madison, the Evans brothers, Jerry and Johnny, serve smoked chicken with white sauce and many other delicacies, including their locally famous hush puppies. Author’s collection.
At Old Greenbrier Restaurant, customers start their meal with baskets of their famous hush puppies. Throughout the meal, servers replenish the empty baskets. When Lewallen changed jobs, he took his northern-based clients and co-workers to Old Greenbrier Restaurant to introduce them to proper southern-made hush puppies.292 “The hush puppies are our trademark,” explained Jerry Evans. “People who don’t like bread or hush puppies like them. It draws them in.” In fact, the cooks could not keep up with demand. “It’s impossible to dip as many hush puppies as we need to do,” explained Jerry. The Evans brothers looked everywhere for a hush puppy maker. When they finally found a company that made the machines, they made an important business decision. “We wound up buying the company just to keep the hush puppies in business,” explained Jerry.293
Singleton’s Bar-B-Que
In 1957, two brothers, A.L. “Junior” Singleton and Aaron Singleton, opened Singleton’s Bar-B-Que on Huntsville Road at the eastern edge of Florence.
Since the age of twelve, Junior’s son Rick had worked in the restaurant with his father and uncle Aaron while simultaneously balancing a career in law enforcement. In 1972, he joined the Lauderdale County Sheriff’s Department. In 1978, he began working for the Florence Police Department. From 1996 to 2012, he served as the department’s chief of police. In 2014, he became sheriff of Lauderdale County, fulfilling one of his lifelong career goals.294 The restaurant featured memorabilia from Rick’s law enforcement career on the walls.
For fifty-eight years, Singleton’s Bar-B-Que served barbecued pork and chicken. The pork came with a thin, tangy red sauce. Like most barbecue restaurants in the Tennessee River Valley, the chicken came with white sauce. “The white sauce had a good bite of vinegar,” remembered Blake Ball, a native of the Shoals and former student at the University of North Alabama, also located in Florence.295
In 2015, Singleton’s Bar-B-Que of Florence became one of the inaugural members of the Alabama Barbecue Hall of Fame but also permanently closed its doors. “We knew it had closed, but since it had been around so long, we wanted to honor it,” declared Brian Jones of the Alabama Department of Tourism.296
With regard to closing the restaurant, Rick explained that it had become too much work combined with his other jobs. He estimated that he worked between seventy and eighty hours a week at the two jobs in the pit room and in law enforcement. “It will be a little different getting off at 5:00 and going home,” joked Rick. When the restaurant announced its closing, people started sharing their memories from first dates to engagement proposals.297 Rick professed, “We’re really proud to be honored, especially for my parents and uncles. They’re the ones who really started the business.”298
Brooks Barbeque
In 1965, an African American couple, Sammie Brooks Sr. and Lucille Brooks, opened Brooks Barbecue in Sheffield near Muscle Shoals in the middle of the civil rights movement. Sammie had served as a cook in the navy. According to his granddaughter Lanndrea Banksden, “He…came up with a lot of different recipes, and it stemmed from there.” The family has relocated the restaurant many times. Currently, they have a small, unassuming brick building in Muscle Shoals. Although the location has changed, the recipes remain the same.299
For fifty years and three generations, the Brooks family has continued to own and operate the restaurant. Sammie and Lucille had five children, including two daughters, Mary Ann Banksden and Christina Brooks McCants. They run the restaurant with the help of two of their own children, Lanndrea Banksden and Lonzie McCants III.300
Inside the restaurant, they only have three tabletops for dine-in customers, so they do most of their business on a carry-out basis. The barbecued meats include pork, chicken, ham, turkey and ribs, which come as sandwiches and plates but also for carry-out by the pound.
Originally, Sammie used an open pit. Now, they cook the meat with a smoker. As the meat smokes, the cooks baste it with Sammie’s original basting sauce. “Our basting sauce makes the meat taste special,” explained Lanndrea. The meat has a spicy and tangy flavor, complemented perfectly by their famous hotslaw.301
At Brooks Barbeque, the sandwiches come topped with homemade hotslaw. The plates come with it, as well, along with homemade baked beans, homemade potato salad and bread. When placing an order, the staff will ask you to choose between regular, hot or mild flavors.302 They also sell the homemade hotslaw at local grocery stores throughout the Shoals.
In addition to barbecued meat, they serve hot dogs and smoked wings. Like the barbecue sandwiches, the hot dogs come with hotslaw, a match made in heaven. The wings come in seven different flavors: traditional, lemon pepper, hot, mild, Cajun, hot Cajun and sweet heat.
For dessert, Brooks Barbeque sells sweet potato, pecan and coconut pie either by the slice or the whole pie. Every day, they quickly sell out of these homemade pies originally crafted by Sammie. “I cook the sweet potatoes down from fresh,” explained Lanndrea, who now bakes the pies for the restaurant. She boasted, “Nothing is canned. We use all fresh vegetables.”303
Whitt’s Barbecue
In Athens, Alabama, a town just north of Decatur immediately off I-65, Floyd Whitt, who worked as a professional bricklayer, put his skills to use building different types of barbecue pits. He also experimented with different sauce recipes. As neighbors and travelers passed by the house, Floyd let people taste his barbecue and only accepted feedback as a form of payment. After more than a decade of working on the recipe and technique, Floyd and his wife, Laura, perfected their barbecue.304
On Labor Day 1966, Whitt’s Barbecue opened in Athens.305 The restaurant did not have any customer seating. Instead, they only served customers through the drive-through lane. Originally, Whitt’s Barbecue sat on a dirt road, but that dirt road became East Elm Street, also known as Alabama Highway 99, a four-lane paved highway just off the interstate.306
Whitt’s Barbecue continues to use the techniques and recipes developed by Floyd and Laura. They only use hickory wood. Unlike many barbecue pit masters, however, Floyd removes the bark, a term for the charred outer pieces of pork. “When we started, we h
ad people say it wasn’t real barbecue because it didn’t have the hard, gritty pieces in it,” explained their son, Joe. The Whitts did not care. “We made barbecue how we liked it, and that’s how we make it for our customers.”
Over fifty years, Whitt’s has gained a regional and national reputation for excellence. According to professional pit master and Athens native Troy Black, “It was a simple, drive-thru-only shack with a limited menu.” He added, “A barbecue sandwich consisted of a succulent pulled pork, vinegar-based slaw, a sliced pickle, and mayonnaise.” Black’s comments about Whitt’s appeared in the preface to a book on southern barbecue produced by the editors of Southern Living.307
Like many barbecue joints, the Whitts keep their sauce a secret, even within the family. As of 2014, only four members of the Whitt family knew the recipe. The recipe consists of a dry ingredient mix and a liquid mix. According to Joe, “We get a company to mix up the dry ingredients and send it to us. Then we add the liquid ingredients ourselves.”308 This way, they keep the recipe in the family.
The Whitt family has continued to spread Floyd and Laura’s barbecue throughout the region. They have thirty-two total locations in Alabama, Tennessee and Kentucky. The Whitt family still owns eight of them. At all the restaurants, they continue to serve things as Floyd did. In fact, new franchisers have to train at the Athens locations. They use hickory wood and offer a vinegar-based sauce. “The pork barbecue, it’s cooked the exact same way at every place,” said Joe.309
AN ENDLESS FEAST
Birmingham and the Tennessee River Valley have extraordinarily high concentrations of barbecue restaurants, but Alabamians find good barbecue everywhere. Lee Sentell, who directs the Alabama Tourism Department, estimates that Alabama has over three hundred barbecue restaurants, which means a higher percentage of Alabama’s restaurants serve barbecue than anywhere else in the country.310
In 2015, his department solicited nominations through Facebook for a contest to find the best barbecue in the state. Of these 300 restaurants, more than 180 received nominations.311 If they had taken nominations with old-fashioned pencil and paper, they likely would have received a nomination for every single barbecue joint in the state. In the state of Alabama, there are too many favorites for one book.
CHAPTER 7
BARBECUE AND BEYOND
Alabama Barbecue Restaurants in the Twenty-First Century
In the twenty-first century, Alabama’s barbecue legends have continued to balance tradition with emerging food trends, such as globalization, organic and heritage-breed food and culinary television and tourism.
For millennia, humans cultivated, sold and consumed local, in-season food, but technological innovations have globalized food production and consumption. Producers and distributors compete in a global marketplace. Restaurateurs analyze the freshness, quality and price of products from around the world. They no longer must rely on local suppliers. They also do not have to schedule their menus based on availability and the time of the year.312
With globalization, restaurateurs and consumers now tangle with a host of unprecedented issues. Foreign producers sometimes have stricter or more lenient laws governing food safety and labor practices. As a result, international governing bodies, such as the United Nations and the World Health Organization, have had to deal with the international food trade to ensure food safety and fair labor across international borders.313 Meanwhile, people debate how the year-round cultivation of food and international trade has affected quality and food safety.
Americans have become increasingly aware of issues pertaining to food safety and quality. The National Organic Program, a division of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Agricultural Marketing Service, regulates the term “organic” with a strict set of rules concerning production, processing and labeling of food. In 1997, the organic food industry sold $3.6 billion in food. As of 2008, sales of organic food had risen to $21.1 billion. In fact, organic farmers have trouble keeping up with the demand for organic food.314
Likewise, many farmers have started to raise heritage-breed livestock and crops to maintain genetic diversity, thus making animals and plants more disease-resistant. These animals grow at a slower pace than traditional breeds, which means they cost more to raise and cost more for consumers. According to the advocates of heritage breeds, however, the slower growth of these species entails richer, more complex flavors.315
Although people have always enjoyed food, it has become a form of entertainment in the television and tourism industries. Currently, Food Network constantly shows programs related to food. On other stations, such as CNN, Travel Channel and major networks, viewers enjoy foodrelated shows. From 2009 to 2010, TLC aired an original series titled BBQ Pit Masters. From 2012 to the present, Destination America has aired new episodes of the program. Through television, some chefs have become international celebrities. People travel all over the world to eat at celebrated restaurants and try unique flavors. In major cities across the United States, tourism agencies offer food-based tours and tastings. In a recent survey, about one-third of travelers admitted to seeking out gourmet food on their journeys.316
In the Alabama barbecue scene, restaurateurs have managed these trends in their own way. At Jim ’n Nick’s Community Bar-B-Q, Saw’s BBQ and Moe’s Original BBQ, culinary school–trained chefs developed the menus and recipes. They seek and have won national restaurant awards. Yet they approach barbecue and their menus in different ways from one another when it comes to issues such as globalization and heritage breeds. In the twenty-first century, Alabama’s barbecue restaurateurs have forged different paths to regional and national success.
JIM ’N NICK’S COMMUNITY BAR-B-Q
Before Nick Pihakis opened a barbecue restaurant with his father, Jim, he worked at Rossi’s, an Italian restaurant in Birmingham owned by fellow Greek Americans Connie Kanakis and Michael Matsos. He worked there for eight years.317 When Jim retired from the insurance business, he partnered with his son in the restaurant industry. Together, Jim and Nick purchased an old pizza place, which they owned and operated for three months before closing it down. At this point, they owned a building but did not have a restaurant. With an opportunity to start fresh, father and son chose to pursue barbecue. 318
In 1985, they started Jim ’n Nick’s Community Bar-B-Q. “We chose barbecue because it surrounded us in Birmingham, and we wanted to become part of the Alabama barbecue community,” explains the younger Pihakis. Immediately, the Pihakises’ restaurant became entangled in Alabama barbecue history. They hired a former pit worker from Ollie’s Barbecue to teach them how to work in a hickory pit.319
Over the course of nearly thirty years, Jim ’n Nick’s has expanded its menu. Initially, Jim ’n Nick’s had a limited menu, with pork, chicken and ribs and baked beans, coleslaw and French fries. Now, they serve catfish, which comes grilled or fried. They also offer fried chicken tenders, hickorygrilled chicken breasts and steaks. For barbecue, they feature styles from across the South. They have pulled pork with vinegar-based sauce, like in North Carolina. They also have Texas-style beef brisket. They serve smoked chicken with white sauce, like in the Tennessee River Valley. They even have two styles of ribs: spare ribs and baby back ribs. Although barbecue remains a feature of the restaurant, Pihakis views his chain of restaurants as southern food restaurants, not barbecue joints.320
They have continued to expand in terms of their presence, as well. The restaurants have spread throughout the South. As of 2017, the restaurant chain has more than thirty locations in seven mostly southern states: Alabama, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Tennessee.321
At Jim ’n Nick’s Community Bar-B-Q, Pihakis has focused on the highest quality, so he hired Drew Robinson as executive chef. Robinson studied at the New England Culinary Institute. After traveling the country, he worked at Highlands Bar and Grill, which frequently wins James Beard Foundation Awards. There, he learned under Chef Frank Stitt and eventually became chef de cuisine
, which means he controlled the entire kitchen. Upon joining Jim ’n Nick’s, Robinson focused on the careful selection of ingredients and preparing quality southern food.322
They prepare everything in the kitchen. “We have always made everything from scratch. We’ve never had a freezer or pre-purchased anything,” advertised Pihakis. In fact, he makes teaching how to cook a major point of the restaurant. He wants his employees to learn a skill and, eventually, take that skill out into the world.323
In yet another measure of success, Jim ’n Nick’s has won international and local awards. In 2011, Jim ’n Nick’s teamed up with the Fatback Collective to compete at the World Championship Barbecue Cooking Contest at Memphis in May. In their first-ever Memphis in May competition, they placed third, which set a record for the best result by a first-time participant. In the same year, Big Bob Gibson Bar-B-Q won the grand championship, which means Alabama placed two competitors in the top three spots. Recently, they have continued to rack up awards. In 2013, Alabama voters selected Jim ’n Nick’s as the best barbecue in the state. In 2015, Nick earned recognition from the James Beard Foundation as one of the top restaurateurs in the nation.324
Jim ’n Nick’s Community Bar-B-Q jockeys for customers with other restaurants, but the communal and familial nature of barbecue tends to overwhelm competitive drive. Pihakis takes his team to visit famous barbecue joints in Alabama and across the South, such as Archibald’s Bar-B-Q in Northport. He has a great relationship with other barbecue legends, like the Archibalds and Washingtons. At the Tuscaloosa location of Jim ’n Nick’s, Pihakis celebrated George Archibald Jr. and Betty Washington with a dinner in their honor. He says, “Whenever I take a group to visit Archibald’s to sample their food, they always tell us to bring some of our food.” Pihakis respects the barbecue pit masters of the past because he understands the difficulty of the work. “I want them to know that we love how they work, and I want them to know that we use them as a backbone and inspiration at Jim ’n Nick’s.”325