

Carey Bringle

If you've been reading Bites this week, you may know that Travel + Leisure magazine proclaimed Nashville the No. 1 barbecue city in America (ahead of Memphis), setting off wildly varied reactions: some well-reasoned, some boastful, some sardonic, some wrongheaded and some just plain silly.

Carey Bringle, aka the Peg Leg Porker, is one of the Nashville pitmasters the Travel + Leisure article praised, but he also has strong, generational loyalty to the West Tennessee school of barbecue.

He addressed the controversy in a pretty thoughtful comment on Facebook late Thursday afternoon. Read his letter and see what you think:

To all the armchair BBQ critics: There has been a major buzz around the state and across the country in the last few days about Travel + Leisure magazine naming Nashville as the #1 BBQ city in America. I was taken aback myself but also flattered. I was mentioned in the article. It is an honor. What you all need to remember is that this is one magazine’s opinion. There are dozens if not hundreds of “Best BBQ” lists out there and this is just one. BBQ tastes are subjective, not absolute. The comments that have accompanied that article are disturbing to say the least. I love the one’s that say that I don’t know anything about Memphis or Memphis BBQ. You see, my family settled in Covington, TN in 1827. They owned the cotton gin there and then my grandfather settled in Memphis as an OB/GYN after WWII. He delivered about half the children in that great city. My great grandfather on my grandmother’s side of the family was E.L. Bruce. He owned the largest hardwood flooring company in, you guessed it, Memphis. My mother and father both went to Central High School and I spent quite a bit of my youth in Memphis even though I grew up in Nashville. After college, I lived and worked in Memphis for three years. My uncle competed in Memphis in May #1 and I have competed in it for 25 years. During college, my grandmother cut out and sent me every article published in The Commercial Appeal or Memphis Magazine about BBQ. My favorite BBQ places were in West Tennessee, in Moscow, Mason, Lexington and Memphis. The Rendezvous invented the Dry rib and it is actually Greek in origin. The atmosphere alone is worth the trip. Bozo’s in Mason has a hell of a sandwich. My earliest memory of BBQ was a Lewis’s store in Moscow where they had silver dollars in the floor. I would go with my grandmother and my granddad delivered the owners' children.