Tops Bar-B-Q and Burgers – Memphis Flyer

Maybe you don’t want to pull out grandma’s tarnished silver turkey tray and gravy boat this year.

Maybe you don’t want to hold a big frozen turkey under a sink faucet for an hour because you forgot to thaw the bird.

Maybe you really just want a “happy” Thanksgiving this time.

So, here are a few places that can redress Turkey Day stress.

Tops Bar-B-Q & Burgers

Just in time for the holidays, Tops is offering its Pit-Smoked Turkey Club as well as whole turkey breasts.

The sandwich comes with pit-smoked turkey breast slices, “barbecue mayonnaise,” applewood bacon, American cheese, lettuce, and tomato.

That barbecue mayonnaise — Tops’ original sweet barbecue sauce blended together with some spices — is a special component, says Tops CEO Randy Hough.

“Guests have been asking us for years — around the holidays, especially — ‘What do you have in terms of a turkey for the holidays?’” says Tops exec Hunter Brown.

They ask, “Are you going to have anything like a seasonal ham or turkey this year?” Hough adds.

This year, the restaurant chain has obliged. The five-pound breasts, which serve up to 10 or 12 people, are “100 percent usable,” Brown says. “You don’t have to carve around any bones.”

Tops will be closed on Thanksgiving, but customers can preorder the turkeys or just pick them up at a Tops location. “It’s already ready. We’re serving it as a sandwich and are able to get them one.”

And, Brown says, “Where else can you roll through a drive-through on your way home and say, ‘I want to get one of those pit-smoked turkeys,’ and several minutes later have it in your car on your way home as if you’re getting a cheeseburger combo? And we will hand it to you out the window.”

“We’ve got you covered until 9 at night,” Hough adds. “I could have used this a couple of times in my lifetime.”

Another Tops Thanksgiving option? Their turkey burger, which they offer all year round. “What’s cool about turkey burgers is turkey burger eaters love it, but cheeseburger eaters also love it,” Brown says.

Chez Philippe

This might not be the year you want to whip up truffle-stuffed squab and Chateaubriand for your Thanksgiving feast. So, let Keith Clinton make it for you from 5:30 to 10 p.m. Thanksgiving night at Chez Philippe at The Peabody.

Clinton, the restaurant’s chef de cuisine, and Konrad Spitzbart, the hotel’s executive pastry chef, created an elegant four-course prix fixe Thanksgiving dinner.

“At Chez, we are detail-oriented,” Clinton says. “We want to emulate the nostalgia and memory of a family meal by way of taste and service. We have familiar staples of holiday tradition. We just tweak the approach and keep it interesting.

“I’m going to use cranberries, turkey, and sweet potato. But I’m also going to use truffle, squab, and edible gold.”

Clinton also is also paying tribute to his own Thanksgivings past. “My grandmother has a patch of persimmon trees on her land. I’m going to use them in our opening canapé sequence as kind of a memory of those family gatherings of my own.”

That will be his persimmon and merengue, which he is featuring with pear and port gelée.

There will be sweet potatoes: Clinton’s “sweet potato and chèvre with sauce poivrade,” which he will serve with Heritage Farms turkey. “I have a distinct memory of watching the marshmallow bubble on top of the sweet potato casserole when I was a kid. I’m leaning on that memory to cook a course for our guests this holiday season.”

Spitzbart is offering pumpkin bavarois along with chocolate brûlée with brown butter and micro sponge crisp honeycomb for the dessert course.

Neil’s Music Room

If you want a more laid-back Thanksgiving dinner, but still desire traditional turkey and all the trimmings, head over to Neil’s Music Room at 5725 Quince Road. Owner Neil Heins is continuing his more than 30-year tradition of offering Thanksgiving dinner on Thanksgiving day.

Heins began doing the dinners when his club was on Madison Avenue. “I started doing them ’cause I was broke,” he says. “Everything was closed on Thanksgiving. I said, ‘Shit. I’ll open up.’”

His menu includes smoked turkey, homemade dressing, “real mashed potatoes,” cranberry sauce, green beans, corn, English peas, and rolls. “And then we give them a dessert. And most of the time it’s pumpkin pie.”

Dinner is served until they run out. “We start at 11 in the morning. And we normally close at 1 in the morning. It usually dies down at about 4 or 5. We’ll serve all day as long as we have it.”

John Williams and the A440 Band will perform.

Neil’s also is selling its Thanksgiving meal to-go.

Dale’s

Dale’s is continuing its 20-year-tradition of serving dinner on Thanksgiving. It’s featured from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. at the restaurant at 1226 Main Street in Southaven, Mississippi.

Customers get a choice of chicken and dressing or baked ham along with three vegetables, homemade rolls, and cornbread. “And it comes with a piece of sweet potato pie,” says owner Larita Mathis.

They normally serve the same items on their regular Thursday and Sunday menus. “So, we thought, ‘Why don’t we open on Thanksgiving?’” Mathis says.

Customers include “regulars that come every year and new people that just heard about it — or that we do everything from scratch.”

Dale’s also offers to-go orders to feed approximately 10 or 20 people. “All our vegetables and pies are available. So, that’s a big part of our business. People can place orders a few days before Thanksgiving.”

The dressing is made from her grandmother’s recipe, Mathis says. They boil the chickens to make the broth. And they make the cornbread that goes in it.

“We don’t use turkey because the turkey broth has a wilder flavor. If you try to make dressing with that, your dressing has a totally different taste. We tried that one year and it’s just not the same.”

Mathis and her family may grab something to eat that day. But, she says, “By the time we feed everybody, we just want to eat a hot dog or something. We don’t want to look at chicken and dressing.”

Eating at Tops Bar-B-Q & Burgers was a once-or-twice-a-month visit for the Donahue family when I was growing up. We always got barbecue. And my dad always wanted to go to a particular Tops location on Jackson Avenue because he believed we got more barbecue on our sandwiches there.

Well, a lot has changed. I eat at Tops about twice a week on the average. I fell in love with the hamburgers a long time ago. They’re the benchmark when it comes to grilled hamburgers. And I loved the turkey burger when it was introduced. Then the chicken sandwich with white sauce and dill pickles.

I’m happy Tops keeps introducing new items. And now they’ve added even more.

I talked recently with Tops execs Randy Hough and Hunter Brown to discover what’s new at this iconic restaurant that began in Memphis in 1952.

“We are a barbecue company with world-famous cheeseburgers,” Brown says. “That is our core group of what got us to the dance and what will forever be in our blood. When we think of a lot of new items, we try to broaden the audience. But never take our mind off the main date that got us to the dance.”

Listening to their customers, Tops added chicken and turkey. “Some people don’t eat pork or beef, so there’s an option for someone now.”

Regarding the turkey burger, Brown says, “I would put this turkey burger up against any turkey burger in Memphis, hands down.”

Hough discovered that a customer added rib rub to their turkey burger. “What a great combination.”

After noticing customers making additions to their sandwiches, Tops execs thought, “Let’s give a couple of other options for our guests,” Hough said.

They now offer “Smoky,” “Spicy,” and “Sloppy” pulled chicken sandwiches.

“Smoky” is their original pulled chicken sandwich, which they called the “Fire Braised” chicken sandwich. This is the one with the white sauce and dill pickles. It’s permanently on the menu.

“Spicy” is similar to “Smoky” except they substituted thick, spicy hot pickles for the dill pickles. And, Hunter says, “We took our traditional white sauce used for the ‘Smoky’ and blended it with our original Tops hot barbecue sauce.”

Then there’s the “Sloppy,” now one of my all-time favorite sandwiches. The pulled chicken sandwich is paired with “Slop Sauce,” which Brown describes as “a little bit of a tropical barbecue sauce.” The “sweet, light” sauce is “more of a Hawaiian barbecue sauce.”

For the base, they added a grilled pineapple, which is perfect for me because I love sweet and savory.

“Sloppy” and “Spicy” aren’t permanent menu items. “This is a limited time offer,” Brown says. “Get it while it lasts.”

But they might stick around if there’s a high demand. That’s what happened with the “Smoky” when it was introduced two years ago. It was meant to be a three-month special, but, Hough says, “because of the amount of guests that purchased it and the comments we got, we said, ‘We just can’t pull it. We have to leave it here.’”

“What we like to do with some of these different options is to bring them back,” he continues. “Let guests have the opportunity to try new items and then we come back with them later, if they were well-received, and give them another chance to try them.”

That brings us to the newest item at Tops: a hot dog. “There are certain guests that told us they would love for us to have a good, all-beef hot dog,” Hough says.

And they already have flat-top grills at their restaurants.

The hot dog is now available only at the Frayser Tops locations at 2288 Frayser Boulevard and 3023 Thomas Street. Those “are two of our oldest locations and have the voice of the guests that have been customers for years,” Brown says, adding, “It has been received with open arms. It’s been great. It’s been received so well it’s actually opened up options for it to go to other restaurants.”

Tops offers three varieties of hot dogs. One, which comes with a drink and costs $4.99, is “a nice, all-beef grilled hot dog dressed with ketchup and mustard and a big bag of Brim’s chips.”

The “specialty hot dogs” are the “Memphis Slaw Dog,” with coleslaw and original Tops barbecue sauce, and the “BLT dog,” which is dressed with mayonnaise, lettuce, tomato, bacon, and melted cheese. Both come with Brim’s chips and a drink.

All the hot dogs are “grilled to order,” which means they aren’t putting the hot dogs on a roller and letting them sit gas station-style, Brown adds.

Finally, I heard a rumor that Tops is going to offer turkeys during the holidays.

“We are verifying the rumor,” Hough says. “It’s in the works.”

It will be a “pit-smoked turkey breast that will feed about 10 people,” he says. They will offer the turkeys from November 1st through the first week in January. It doesn’t come with sides because they feel most people serve their own signature sides. “We’ll smoke the turkey and they do the sides.”

And, Hough says, “This turkey promotion is the first time we’ve ever done anything like this.”

Tops isn’t stopping when it comes to new products. “We never stop working on new ideas,” Hough says. “This is it for right now — a lot going on. Certainly other things, for sure. But nothing we can talk about right now.”

But here’s a hint: One long-time Tops employee created “an amazing cheeseburger salad,” Brown says.