The Bar-B-Q Shop, Memphis TN

Here’s a restaurant that I genuinely waited a year to enjoy. When Marie and I went to Memphis to visit her younger sister in June of 2010 – “Never again visit Memphis in June,” I told myself, “because it’s too darn hot.” Shows how I listen. – Anne suggested that we eat at The Bar-B-Q Shop. She and her boyfriend and her housemates all agree that this is the best of Memphis’s many amazing barbecue restaurants. Unfortunately, we had Sunday free for eating out, and this is one of those aggravating places that closes on Sunday. We ended up at Jim Neely’s Interstate instead, and I had no complaints. Continue reading “The Bar-B-Q Shop, Memphis TN” →

Hot Thomas Barbecue, Watkinsville GA

Many years ago, Hot Thomas ranked among my very favorite barbecue restaurants. When I lived in Athens, I would drive over to Watkinsville maybe once a month to get a chopped pork plate. Then I moved away and they hit a run of bad luck and closed for a while. Actually, I sort of found out the hard way, by driving over here on two or three occasions in the 2000s and finding only disappointment where there should have been great barbecue. Continue reading “Hot Thomas Barbecue, Watkinsville GA” →

Heirloom Market Bar-B-Que, Smyrna GA

A week ago, I was back in Smyrna while Marie was treated to another baby shower. I was, unfortunately, back in Smyrna a little earlier than I should have been.

Like everybody else in this hobby, I had been reading about Heirloom Market, a teeny place that’s been getting a lot of attention. Last month, for some reason, I found cause to mention that apartment complex right at that terrible intersection of Powers Ferry, Interstate North and Akers Mill right underneath I-285 at the river, which, in the 1970s, was nationally renowned as the center of Hotlanta’s swinger and hedonist community. That complex has cleaned up (literally, one hopes) and now trades as “Walton on the Chattahoochee” and there are probably far fewer gold medallions worn by the current residents. Next door to the complex is a convenience store that has been there forever, and now one-third of that building is home to a really good little barbecue place that everybody’s talking about.

I pulled in right at eleven, which is when I wrongly figured I could get some lunch. Unfortunately for me, this place opens at noon on Saturday, so I left, drove over to say hello to my brother and use the computer for a second before heading back. I returned at 11:40 and a line had already started. There are lots of people curious to try this place!

Longtime readers might have noticed that I’m not one for dwelling on the personalities of celebrity chefs and their trendy creations, and Heirloom Market might or might not fit into that bracket, but I was amused to see biographies of the two owners, Cody Taylor and Jiyeon Lee, on the restaurant’s website. I didn’t read them and I’m not certain where they worked previously – I personally could not care less – but those who do follow chefs from business to business seem to want to know.

Taylor and Lee claim to use locally sourced wood for their pit and locally farmed meats for their kitchen and, like The Oink Joint in Zebulon, they offer some Korean influence on the menu for guests interested in trying something a little more esoteric than the traditional fixings of a barbecue joint. These include one of the three sauces that I tried, a mild orange “KB” sauce that was quite sweet and a little spicy, and some of the rotating daily sides. I enjoyed the kimchi cole slaw enormously, and, were I not allergic to them, I might have ordered the tempura sweet potatoes. The girl sitting next to me had those and they looked good.

The other sauces that I tried were a thin, peppery, Carolina-styled vinegar sauce called “Settler” and a Memphis-styled “Table” sauce that was thick, brown and smoky. Neither was really outstanding; to be honest, the pulled pork actually tasted best when I dipped it in the thin, red residue of the kimchi cole slaw. Honestly, if they’d bottle that stuff for the tables, they’d be on to a winner.

That said, the pork was completely wonderful and didn’t need any sauce at all. They pile a good amount of it on the sandwich, and I will certainly agree with Jon Watson and the rest of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution‘s team in calling this some of the best pulled pork in the region. Served on really good, thick bread and containing a good mix of tender meat and bark, It totally lives up to the hype. April was a great month for trying new barbecue for me. This, Bill’s in Hull and Hambones, down in Hapeville, all really surprised me very pleasantly.

The prices here are very reasonable. You can get a sandwich and a side for $6.50, or upgrade to a plate with a larger portion of pork, beef or chicken for about $3.50 more. Alternately, do what I did and instead of a second side, get yourself some sausage to go along with your sandwich. Seven varieties are available; I had a hot Italian link and it was delicious. The KB sauce went really well with it, too.

If there is a downside to Heirloom Market, it’s in the size. There is no outdoor seating – a shame on a day as lovely as last Saturday – and barely room for twelve guests indoors, crowded around one table and along the windows. The service is prompt and the drink selection is really nice. I probably should have just had a glass of water, but I helped myself to a bottle of Boylan’s birch beer. I hope that Taylor and Lee decide to take their apparent success to a larger space soon, because the next time that I should visit by myself, I would like the opportunity to read whatever I’m in the middle of. Crammed in as all the guests were, there simply was not room!

Bill’s Bar-B-Q, Hull GA

I have totally done Bill’s an awful disservice. I ate there once, maybe twice, back in 1993 or 1994, and I decided that I liked other, nearby, places better. It’s about a fifteen or twenty minute drive from Athens, depending whereabouts you are, north of the town of Hull and south of the somewhat larger town of Danielsville. This past Saturday, I decided it was long overdue for a return trip. Continue reading “Bill’s Bar-B-Q, Hull GA” →

Sam’s BBQ1, Marietta GA

I’ve been telling myself for at least five years that I needed to get over to Lower Roswell Road and check this place out. Friends, if you live in Cobb County, don’t make the mistake that I did and put this off any longer. Sam Huff has been cooking up some amazing pulled pork that you seriously need to try. He apparently lives out in West Cobb, in that Lost Mountain community that I had driven through just two days previously, and was a regular on the competition circuit for years, winning all kinds of awards for his pulled pork, ribs and brisket. Six or seven years ago, he partnered up with Dave Poe and they opened what would become two restaurants in Marietta. They’ve since gone their separate ways, and Poe got the other place on Whitlock. I drove past it two days previously as well. That was an odd weekend.

Two Sundays ago, Marie and I were going to do something to celebrate her birthday. She just wanted a day together, away from kids, with a few general ideas about what she’d like to do. As I assembled a battle plan and a road trip that would take us via back roads up through Roswell and Alpharetta, I looked for lunch in the area and realized we could get some barbecue at Sam’s place. Even better, Sam’s wasn’t one of those irritating closed-on-Sunday joints that have been complicating my life. We drove right past a place that I wanted to try, Amos’s, which is near Ball Ground, on our trip. Closed.

Sam’s occupies two storefronts in a beat-up old strip mall near Johnson Ferry Road. One of these is the takeout store and the other is the restaurant. Sam’s has been answering the same questions about their food for so long that it’s led to some playfully exasperated T-shirts and signs explaining how many people can be fed with a pound of pork, that their meat is pulled and never chopped, that take-out orders are two doors down, and other rules. This has led to playful teasing from the regulars about supposedly misunderstanding the policies. During our visit, I saw two groups come in to enjoy lunch who ribbed the kid at the register that they wanted carry out. Poor kid.

The pulled pork here really isn’t very smoky, but it’s very moist and flavor-packed. It’s served dry, and guests can help themselves to three sauces at a pump station next to the drinks. The most popular, unsurprisingly, is a sweet Kansas City-styled tomato-based sauce, but, while good, I found this the least of the three. The vinegar and the mustard sauces were both outstanding. I don’t know which I prefer; both really complemented the meat really well and I haven’t enjoyed the combination of great pork and great sauce so much in weeks.

The sides were very good, too. I ordered the lunch special with a sandwich, baked beans and a glass of sweet tea, and Marie enjoyed a plate of pulled pork with green beans and potato salad.

I definitely plan to go back soon for another meal. This is absolutely among the better barbecue joints in the Atlanta area.

Jomax Bar-B-Q, Metter GA

When I was about twelve, Neal and I were sent on a trip to a summer camp on Jekyll Island – it’s where we met Samantha, surprisingly – that included a glamorous stop in the town of Metter, where we were allowed to get off the bus, pick up a brown bag lunch, and return to the bus to eat it. There are, certainly, far smaller towns than Metter out there, but at the age of twelve I was unable to name a one of them. Besides, I was miserable and unhappy and didn’t want to be there, wherever “there” was. I doubt that had I known Jomax Bar-B-Q was right across the street from us that it would have improved things.

Metter is a long, long way from anywhere. There’s an interstate, I-16, that connects Macon and Savannah, and Metter is 2/3 of the way down it. I’m sure there are much more desolate stretches of nothing in Nebraska and the Dakotas, but this drive is inarguably one of the worst in the southeast. Middle Georgia, outside of the cities of Columbus, Macon and Savannah, is sometimes pretty to look at, but there’s certainly not a lot besides trees. 104 miles after leaving Macon, travelers on their way to the coast have been known to pull over and run around their cars screaming, so I figure Metter’s the best place for a small town to grow and take advantage of people’s desperation for anything to do.

It’s the perfect place, in other words, for one of the three or four best barbecue restaurants in Georgia to spring up. It may be 200 miles from my house, give or take, but it’s in the right place to keep drivers from losing their marbles. It is also notable as being, and I’m not kidding, the only restaurant for the 150-mile stretch of I-16 worth visiting. You can certainly exit from that highway and travel to, say, Vidalia or Statesboro and maybe find something to eat, but as far as restaurants by the exit ramp, it is, almost literally, Jomax or nothing. Most of the trip, you can’t even find chain fast food drive-thru places, but you can certainly find plenty of state patrol cars encouraging you to watch your speed.

I first discovered Jomax around 1998, coming back to Athens from a trip to Tybee Island. I was very much in favor of finding new barbecue restaurants for my old Geocities page on the subject. I recall that I found a good entry or two in Savannah, Tybee and Thunderbolt for the page, and just pulled off the highway for a break in the hopes of finding something else. Jomax is seriously worth the stop, and I believe that I did each of the three times I drove to the coast from Athens during those days. Frustratingly, they are closed on Sundays. Since I started accompanying Marie to visit her folks on Saint Simons – about ninety minutes south of Savannah – I’ve been arranging our travel times and route to make sure we get a chance to stop at Jomax frequently. If we must motor down I-16, then the least we can do is stop along the way for some of the state’s best barbecue!

Last month, Jomax’s original owners bought back the restaurant. They opened it in… heck, I am not sure, but they sold it in 2006. I never noticed any change in the food’s quality while the other owners were there, although I believe they did have a more extensive menu, one of those full of ads for area businesses in Candler County. When we got the chance to stop by this past Friday, one of the first things I noticed was a news clipping announcing the return of Joe and Maxine to their old business, effective November 1. I suppose I should have been forward and welcomed them back and told them how much I’ve always loved their place, but three and a bit hours of driving with Marie’s car packed tight with luggage, Christmas presents and restless kids can make a fellow a little antisocial.

Jomax doesn’t do anything really abnormal or odd with their presentation. It’s basic chopped pork, very tasty and smoky, served with a single house sauce. This is a spectacular tomato and vinegar mix which is surely one of the best in the state. The secret here is simply to do the basics and do them really, really well. Their potato-packed Brunswick stew is one of my favorites, and their baked beans a match for Boston’s best. With everybody ordering different sides, we also enjoyed very good sweet potato fries and lima beans this trip.

The simplicity of Jomax’s approach has worked very well for them over the years. I think that my first visit, the place was a little quiet and slow, but every subsequent trip, they’ve had a fairly packed house and a staff of excellent servers positively hopping from table to table. I can’t imagine anybody traveling from Macon to Savannah not knowing about Jomax. It’s just where you get lunch on this road, simple as that.

Also, I’d be remiss if I did not mention that it’s an open secret that most weeks during the football season, Sonny Seiler is known to stop in on his way from Savannah to Athens, with the University of Georgia’s mascot, Uga, in tow. Joe and Maxine are big Bulldog fans and decorate their place accordingly, and while I’ve never been here at the right time for a meeting myself, I hear the Georgia faithful will often see off our puppy with a cheer and a wave. I figure, I got to talk with Coach Richt a couple of times at my favorite restaurant before it closed, so I’ve had my brush with Bulldog greatness. I also once got to confirm a confused tailback’s suspicion that Thanksgiving might be in November, but we won’t talk about that; it’s a bit embarrassing.

Wallace Barbecue, Austell GA

Many things cross my mind about what to talk about when Wallace comes up, but first and foremost is their sauce. They have two. One is a hot mustard-based sauce that’s bottled and on the table already. It’s terrific, and as promised, it goes very well with the restaurant’s Brunswick stew.

The other sauce is served with your order. I’d advise diners to ask for their pork dry, like David did when he and I went to supper Saturday night and ended up here. David’s on a pretty strict diet for blood sugar problems and needs to take it easy with the greasy fries and sweet sauces. I probably should have done it that way myself, because I like the way that Wallace serves their sauce on the side, piping hot, in a bowl.

The only other place that I’m aware of that does this is Sprayberry’s Barbecue down in Newnan, which is worth revisiting one day very soon, but possibly not this calendar year. The datebook is sort of packed. Now, the makeup of the sauce is quite baffling. I have heard that in Owensboro, Kentucky, they serve up a Worcestershire-based sauce, and kind of got a roundabout confirmation of that from the fifteen-sauce selection at Asheville’s Ed Boudreaux’s BBQ last month. I wonder whether Wallace might be using that as well. It’s certainly very thin and pleasantly vinegary, with pepper, but I couldn’t say beyond that. Our server, and you simply could not ask for a better one, politely declined to assist in identifying it. She explained that there’s one fellow “locked in the back” mixing up their sauces and that nobody but him knows the recipe. I just love that.

I first visited Wallace in 2002. Back then, I was working on a well-intentioned guide to barbecue restaurants here in Georgia that I had hosted on Geocities and waiting for tips on new, or old, places to try. Creative Loafing, the largest and best-known of Atlanta’s alt-weeklies, gave Wallace a good review, so I trekked down to Austell from my old apartment in Alpharetta one Saturday. That really was a haul when there’s nothing at your destination but one barbecue place and a thousand traffic lights and miles of abandoned, low-rent suburban blight along the way. Driving through the community of Mableton along what used to be called Bankhead Highway and is now Veterans’ Memorial Parkway has been one of the region’s most cringeworthy exercises for more than a quarter of a century. There’s really nothing wrong with this agonizing shithole of a road that a really powerful tornado wouldn’t fix.

Sadly, I haven’t found the chance to go back nearly often enough. I know that I’ve tried convincing my folks to have dinner out here instead of their usual barbecue haunts, but for some insane reason, my mom doesn’t like the place. Really, the only thing I have against them is the extremely greasy fries, which I had completely forgotten about. They’re really tasty, but I’m getting awfully close to forty and shouldn’t have fries twice in one day anyhow, particularly if the second meal’s fries are as greasy as this. I should have gone with the slaw.

Wallace is a pretty big place and it’s extremely popular in the area. Saturday nights, the place is packed with folks having a great time. I definitely need to find reason to head out this way again before long.