Barbecue in Memphis has a rich history with deep roots

Author Adrian Miller's research for a book about the history of African-American barbecue led him to an important conclusion about Memphis.

"I'm starting to think that Memphis is the most consequential barbecue city," said the author, who won a James Beard Award for his 2013 book about soul food.

Taking a look back at the history of barbecue in the Bluff City, it's easy to see how that conclusion can be reached.

The early days

In 1922, Leonard Heuberger opened a lunch counter at Trigg and Latham in South Memphis, selling pork sandwiches for 5 cents. About 10 years later, he moved to what Memphians mostly think of as the original Leonard's Pit Barbecue at Bellevue and McLemore.

"In all the time I've been here, I've never had a person come up and say, 'I went to so and so before I went to Leonard's,' and if anyone had, I would've heard about it by now," Leonard's owner Dan Brown said.

Brown started working for Leonard's in 1962, left when he was drafted in 1967 and returned in 1970 to find that it had been sold to an investment group with plans to open a chain of fast food restaurants. He stayed on, and while there were Leonard's all over town and one in Jackson, there was never a national expansion. The Bellevue store closed in 1991, and in 1993, Brown purchased what was left from the three investors who remained. The sole remaining Leonard's is on Fox Plaza Drive.

Jim Neely, who lived in South Memphis from the time he was born in 1937 until he joined the Air Force in 1955, remembers Leonard's but can spout off a list of other places from back in the day, too: Uncle Joe's (two of those). Culpepper's. Jeff's Barbecue. Gus's, maybe.

"Seems to me it was called Gus's. I believe that was the name," Neely said. "It was in the white part of South Memphis, a brick place, and it had fine barbecue. If you were black, you could get someone to bring it to you at the back door."

After the Air Force, Neely stayed in California until the early 1970s, and he opened Neely's Interstate Barbecue in 1978.

"When I was coming up, every neighborhood, black or white, had their own favorite barbecue place," Neely said. "It was a phenomenon. That's the very reason I'm in this business today. I wanted to recapture that, but I just can't seem to put my finger on it."

Others would argue. Neely now has three local restaurants and a concession in the airport, and he trained the nephews who would go on to open their own now-closed places in Memphis and Nashville and snag the Food Network show "Down Home with the Neelys."

Popular then and now

Some of today's other popular barbecue restaurants opened in the '70s. Payne's opened in 1972, and Cozy Corner in 1977. Gridley's, an institution with one outpost left in Bartlett though not under original ownership, opened in 1975.

"There was a time when I'd have to drive all the way over to Summer Avenue to get barbecue because Clyde Gridley was the only person in town doing it right," Neely said. "Well, there was another Uncle Joe's, way out in North Memphis by the old Firestone plant. He had such a little pit that I might drive out there and he'd be out, but I'd go back two hours later. You know how it is when you get a taste for something."

Of course, other places came and went. Gridley worked for Loeb's, a chain of about 100 barbecue restaurants over seven states that spanned decades, closing incrementally beginning in the 1980s. Don Pelts owned The Public Eye before he opened Corky's in 1984. Tops, which opened in 1952, is now in 15 locations around the area. Brady and Lil's opened in the '50s and in 1980 was purchased by Frank and Hazelteen Vernon, who in 1987 changed the name to the The Bar-B-Q Shop.

"I lived next door to Lil and I was only 4 years old, but I had a crush on her like you would not believe," Neely said. "They moved to New York and when they moved back here and opened, Brady had a great product. And you talk about a cat daddy. Man, he was a real cat daddy.

"And he invented barbecue spaghetti."

And there's the Rendezvous, open 70 years.

"My dad opened on November 6th Street, the other alley, in 1948," John Vergos said. "It's about 50 yards from where we are now. The only reason we moved is because NBC bank took that spot."

In 1968, Charlie Vergos planned to move to Beale Street where Silky O'Sullivan's is today. But when Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was killed April 4, businesses started moving away from Downtown Memphis.

"No one would lend him any money to stay Downtown," John Vergos said. "He didn't want to move out east, so he had to find another place and that's how we ended up where we are."

Charlie Vergos started his restaurant as a tavern, serving sandwiches and snacks, but was fooling around with ribs by the time he took his family on a trip to New Orleans in the early 1950s.

"He was just piddling around, but when he discovered those spices, he brought them back and combined them with his Greek seasoning and that's how we got Rendezvous ribs," John Vergos said. "Everyone else was mostly doing sandwiches."

Brown, at Leonard's, says he thinks ribs were so unimportant to Leonard's in the early years that they didn't even smoke them.

"This sounds crazy, but we used to roast them in the oven back when," he said. "I don't even remember selling a rib until much later on."

But Neely says that in South Memphis, ribs were anywhere you wanted them.

"Everything you got was a sandwich. Now you just say you want it pulled or chopped, but back then, when you ordered you'd either say a shoulder sandwich or a rib sandwich," he said. "If you got a rib sandwich, it would be three ribs between two slices of bread with coleslaw. Bones in 'em, so you'd take it apart anyway, but they called it a sandwich."

The barbecue patriarch

Charlie Vergos died in 2010; Neely is by age and by temperament the patriarch of Memphis barbecue.

"People ask me what makes my barbecue different from other places, and I tell them one word: me. I've been around it all my life," he said. "When I lived in California, every time I crossed that bridge I'd head somewhere for barbecue."

His memory is long, his knowledge deep.

Vergos said that other than Leonard's, he doesn't know of any place open before the Rendezvous, but he remembers his father talking about a place called "Johnny something" back in the '30s and '40s. Maybe Johnny Moore's?

"Johnny Mills," Neely said with about 10 seconds' thought. "Down around where W.C. Handy Park is now. It was a black restaurant, but he cooked for everybody. Mayor Crump would go in there, and they'd clear the place out. He had a helluva reputation."

Memphis barbecue now

Today, pigs fly. You can have Memphis barbecue all over the country, shipped via FedEx from here to there. There are more than 100 barbecue restaurants open, and who knows how many shuttered.

Memphis sealed its international reputation as a barbecue city in 1978 when 26 teams came together in a parking lot to see who could smoke the best meat. It was Bessie Louise Cathey — the first winner at what would become the Memphis in May World Championship Barbecue Cooking Contest was a woman. Since then, it's largely been a man's game, with the notable exception of Melissa Cookston, who has been named grand champion twice and won the whole hog division five times.

Today, "Barbecue," as it's simply known around here, draws more than 200 teams and more than 60,000 people to Tom Lee Park the third weekend of May, where teams compete for a big trophy and a big purse in shoulder, whole hog and ribs categories.

It's all pork, which Miller, the author, points out is the original American barbecue and one of the reasons he feels like Memphis can potentially plant the flag as the most important barbecue city in the country.

Kansas City will likely dispute the claim. After all, its annual competition is twice as large. But it should be noted that they also allow beef and chicken, where in Memphis those are just ancillary categories.

When they come for our flag, we just need to say one name: Henry Perry.

Perry was a porter in a Kansas City saloon when in 1908, he started smoking meat and selling from a stand in an alley. It caught on, and eventually Perry opened a restaurant, then a bigger one. He trained Charlie Bryant, who took over the business when Perry died in 1940. Later it went to Bryant's brother, Arthur, and that's how the renowned Arthur Bryant's barbecue came to be. Perry was generous with his knowledge and taught other men how to smoke, who in turn passed their knowledge on and continued the Kansas City barbecue tradition.

"Perry is the man that is credited with starting Kansas City barbecue," Miller said.

There's a little thing they leave out on the website. Perry, who was born in 1875, ended up in Kansas City after spending years working up and down the Mississippi in steamboat kitchens. Where did he hop on his first boat? In the port of his hometown.

Memphis, Tennessee.

At a glance

Memphis In May World Championship Barbecue Cooking Contest

When: May 16-19

Where: Tom Lee Park

Teams: 225 teams from 22 states and four countries will take part in this year's contest

Details: memphisinmay.org, click on World Championship Barbecue Cooking Contest

It came from Memphis

Barbecue pizza was invented in Memphis by Horest Coletta at Coletta’s, the restaurant at 1063 South Parkway East that his father founded in 1922 as an ice-cream stand. In the mid-1950s, sailors from all around were stationed at the Memphis Naval Air Station in Millington and they wanted pizza. Coletta obliged, but it didn’t catch on with locals. His solution was to top the pie with a familiar food — barbecue — and soon everyone was eating it, including Elvis. There's an Elvis room there today.

Barbecue spaghetti started here, too. Brady Vincent of Brady & Lil's created the dish after he and Lil moved back to Memphis from New York and opened their restaurant. Unlike many versions which are little more than barbecue sauce and pork on noodles, this one has an Italian touch, a bit of marinara to it. When Frank Vernon purchased Brady & Lil’s, he also acquired the spaghetti recipe and today you can get it at the The Bar-B-Q Shop (which is what the name changed to in 1987).

Barbecue nachos from Memphis? Natch. Walker Taylor, owner of the Germantown Commissary, credits them to an employee named Rosie. Serving from a concession at a festival, she ladled cheese sauce over tortilla chips and someone asked for a handful of pulled pork on top. She obliged, and today they’re all over menus in town.

Where did barbecue originally start?

Author Adrian Miller and other culinary scholars believe barbecue was born in the Caribbean.

On his first voyage, Christopher Columbus encountered indigenous tribes cooking on a platform over green wood that produced smoke and slow heat. The Spanish referred to the apparatus as "barbacoa" and took the concept with them as they went north.

When Hernando de Soto landed in Tampa Bay in 1539, he had pigs with him. In winter 1540, de Soto and his men made camp with the Chickasaw Indians near what is known today as Tupelo, Mississippi. There's a record of a pig roast with the Indians, cooked barbacoa style.