Our BBQ culture

LITTLE ROCK — On the Saturday before Election Day, let’s take a break from the politics that dominates this page and talk about something truly important.

Barbecue.

I recently had the honor of being asked by my friends at the Southern Foodways Alliance on the University of Mississippi campus to write the introduction for the Arkansas section of what’s called the Southern BBQ Trail. You already can find oral histories posted from Alabama, Mississippi, North Carolina, Tennessee and Texas at southernbbqtrail.com. Oral histories are now being collected from Arkansas.

I’ve never felt that the Arkansas barbecue culture gets the credit it deserves. Unlike our boastful Texas neighbors, we quietly prepare great barbecue, enjoy eating it and then move on with our lives. Because we don’t brag, Arkansas barbecue has never received proper national recognition.

Some of the best barbecue anywhere can be found in Arkansas, though national television shows and magazine articles tend to focus on North Carolina and Texas. Besides our modesty, a reason for the lack of recognition might be the fact that people from outside the state have a hard time figuring Arkansas out. We’re a fringe state, not solely a part of any one region. We’re a state that’s mostly Southern but also a bit Midwestern and a tad Southwestern. Northwest Arkansas is far different from Southeast Arkansas. Northeast Arkansas isn’t the same place as Southwest Arkansas.

The thing all parts of Arkansas have in common is that our people, while never boastful, are proud. So what if outsiders can’t figure us out? We already know that we have a good thing going when it comes to food.

I’ve long believed that the strongest barbecue area of the state is East Arkansas. The barbecue is pork here—beef has crept from Texas into parts of Southwest Arkansas—though the sauces vary from place to place.

At Craig’s on U.S. 70 in DeValls Bluff, you can walk into the ramshackle building and immediately be asked if you want your barbecue mild, medium or hot. The hot sauce is just that, which is why most folks go the medium route. The crowd is a mixture of locals, hunters from Little Rock and Memphis when it’s duck season, and those wise enough to get off Interstate 40 and find their way to DeValls Bluff.

In Marianna, meanwhile, Jones Bar-B-Q is in an old house in a residential area. It has been around since at least the early 1900s. It’s hard to determine the exact year it opened, but there are certain food experts who believe that it’s one of the oldest continually operated black-owned restaurants in the South.

Up in the far northeast corner of the state, you can find the Dixie Pig at Blytheville, whose fan page on Facebook has almost 1,500 members. For more than 70 years, the “pig sandwiches” there have drawn people from as far away as Memphis and the Missouri boot heel.

It’s common, of course, for restaurants to use the name “pig” in a state where the beloved athletic teams of the flagship university are called the Razorbacks and people call the Hogs at football games. Not only is there a Dixie Pig in Blytheville, there’s a different restaurant with the same name in North Little Rock. Among the oldest BBQ joints in Central Arkansas is the venerable White Pig Inn in a working-class neighborhood of North Little Rock. The Pig Pit at Caddo Valley changed its name to Fat Boys awhile back, but barbecue is still on the menu.

Although East Arkansas is regarded as barbecue country, the most famous such restaurant in the state is likely McClard’s in Hot Springs. Given the fact that Bill Clinton grew up in Hot Springs, McClard’s has received plenty of national media attention through the years. The attention is deserved, even in a barbecue-rich city that has other quality establishments with names like Purity and Stubby’s.

Alex and Gladys McClard owned the Westside Tourist Court in the 1920s. When a traveler couldn’t come up with $10 he owed them, he asked the couple to accept a recipe for barbecue sauce instead. By 1928, the Westside Tourist Court was Westside Bar-B-Q with goat as the featured item on the menu. McClard’s moved to its present location in 1942 and hasn’t changed much since, although the goat has disappeared from the menu.

I explained in the Southern BBQ Trail introduction that although Clinton was born in Hope, he moved to Hot Springs as a young child, finishing elementary school, junior high school and high school there. Most of us from Arkansas considered Clinton a Hot Springs product. During the 1992 presidential campaign, he became the man from Hope once his consultants determined that “I still believe in a place called Hot Springs” just didn’t have the same ring to it.

It’s another example of how this state of contradictions known as Arkansas confounds outsiders. The same goes for our barbecue, which varies from region to region and even restaurant to restaurant. Define Arkansas barbecue, you say? Impossible. Just shut up and eat, Arkansans will tell you.

Free-lance columnist Rex Nelson is the senior vice president for government relations and public outreach at The Communications Group in Little Rock.