Visiting the amazing number of barbecue restaurants in Memphis is like visiting the plethora of Memphis in May World Championship Barbecue Cooking Contest (WCBCC) booths; there’s variety in the barbecue taste, as well as the atmosphere.
It recently hit me how many Memphis-area barbecue places I’ve never been to. I usually go to the same ones.
I was astounded at the number of them on Google. So, I set out to visit some unfamiliar places.
Ty’s Smokehouse, located at 7174 Stage Road #101 in Bartlett, was first. It was packed. Shiny trophies — a good sign — glistened on the wall.
“We opened July 1st, 2013,” says owner Tim Theisen. “We used to have a team, TNT Smokers. We used to do mostly the KCBS (Kansas City Barbecue Society) circuit.”
Theisen helped out during Memphis in May’s barbecue contest, but he didn’t participate. He couldn’t afford to take a week off from work. “I worked in construction at the time.”
I ordered a fabulous pulled pork sandwich from the restaurant. Great smoky taste.
Kevin Barber, Derek Davison, and Cleitis Blackwell joined me at my table. They’re with Tower King II working on a project.
Barber, who lives in Dallas, Texas, hadn’t been to Ty’s since they did some work in Memphis back in March of 2018.
They visited barbecue places on their last trip. “I think we tried five and we kept coming back to this one,” Barber says.
Next, I traveled to 1023 Jackson Avenue to try barbecue at Smoky City BBQ Grill & Diner. Nate Strong Jr., who owns the place with his dad, Nate Strong, tells me they opened in 2016.
I loved this barbecue, which reminds me of classic barbecue sandwiches I ate growing up in the 1950s. Strong says the mixture of wood and charcoal is one reason it tastes so good.
He let me sample a dry and a wet rib. “They come off the bone,” he says. “And they love our dry rub.”
Mike Hollis walks in the restaurant, looks at me, and says, “Steven Spielberg. What’s up, bro?” (I usually get “Howard Stern” or “Einstein.”) Hollis is a Smoky City fan. “I’ve never had a bad experience,” he says.
He orders a catfish plate, one of the many items besides barbecue sold at Smoky City.
BallHoggerz BBQ at 1404 Airways Boulevard was my next stop. Owner Merritt Bailey, a longtime friend, is the son of Adrienne and the late judge D’Army Bailey. I forgot Merritt owned a restaurant.
Between 2014 and 2017, Merritt was on a WCBCC team that went by the same name as his restaurant. His team won awards every year, including first place in the chicken, shoulder, and turkey legs categories, and second place in ribs, in 2017.
Hence the name. “We hog the trophies,” he says.
Merritt used to “move place to place” selling barbecue from his truck with the grill in the bed. He opened the restaurant six years ago.
His tantalizing barbecue sandwich with a couple of dill pickles on top of the bun was delicious. It’s the “long and tedious smoking process to get the meat tender.”
They also have a great dry rub and a popular “mild, tangy sauce.”
Merritt obviously loves his job. “We’re grillin’ and we’re partyin’.” And, he adds, “If you’re not having fun, you’re doing the wrong thing.”
A big picture of D’Army hangs near the front door, but Merritt says his dad didn’t teach him how to cook barbecue. “He wasn’t really a grill guy.” Merritt learned by “trial and error.”
But his dad did give him advice about owning the restaurant. “He said it wasn’t going to be easy, but stick to it.’”
Finally, I have to preface Fat Larry’s BBQ at 7537 Highway 70 in Bartlett as a place I visited several times years ago.
Owner Larry Mayes died since I was last there. But even though Mayes is gone, the barbecue is “still made with the same amount of love, the same amount of passion,” says Dan Dippery, a Fat Larry’s fan.
The succulent barbecue was slathered with sweet sauce. It brought back a lot of memories.
Fat Larry’s sells more than barbecue. The brown sugar pork chop on the menu caught my eye. And the server told me about their homemade coconut cake.
Larry’s wife, Ginny Mayes, tells me the name “Fat Larry” came about when her husband and Larry Ohrberg had a barbecue cooking team that participated in the Kansas City circuit. “They both had bellies,” she says. “They called themselves ‘Two Fat Larrys.’”
And Mayes was the hog cook on a team with John Maki called Custom Cookers. Their awards include first place in whole hog at the 1999 WCBCC, she says.
Larry’s entire family cooked. “His brother owned a barbecue restaurant.”
Fat Larry’s restaurant opened in February 2008. Larry died on Halloween 2020 in New Mexico, Ginny says. “Our cook and our servers, everybody just carried on.”
Ginny and their daughter, Hallie McIlvain, decided to keep the restaurant going. “I couldn’t see putting an end to all of Larry’s hard work.”
They also wanted their employees to keep working. “We kind of feel like this is Larry’s legacy. We feel like we need to keep cooking.”
Larry believed in making his customers feel like family, Ginny says. “Make people feel at home. That’s just the way he was. No pretension. It is what it is.”
As her husband used to say, “I’m fat and I love to cook. And I love to watch people eat.”
