Roadfood_ Revised Edition - Jane Stern [85]
The last Saturday of each month, the Henpeck Market features a live bluegrass jam that includes a supper of catfish, turnip greens, white beans, and slaw, and every Tuesday night meals are served family-style.
Interstate Barbecue
2265 S. Third St.
901–775–2304
Memphis, TN
LD | $$
Inside and out, Interstate is perfumed by smoke from slow-sizzling barbecue round the clock. That is because proprietor Jim Neely puts his pork shoulders in the pit at 5:00 P.M. for the next day’s lunch and he starts the day’s ribs every morning. Mr. Neely is a master, and in the city of Memphis, to be a true pitmaster is to be a god.
His restaurant is a modest pork house serving four-star ribs, shoulder meat, sausages, and bologna with all the proper fixin’s, including addictive barbecue spaghetti (soft noodles in breathtaking sauce). You eat at a table in the simple dining room where a “Wall of Fame” boasts critics’ accolades and 8 X 10s from celebrity fans, or enter next door and get it to go, by the sandwich, plate, or whole slab of ribs.
When you lift a rib and merely poke it hard with a finger, the meat slides off the bone. It is chewy with a deep savor haloed by the perfume of wood smoke; chewing it generates massive infusions of flavor that literally exhaust taste buds after a while. Chopped pork shoulder is a magnificent medley of shreds, chunks, wisps, and ribbons of smoky meat, all crowned with Neely’s spicy-sweet red sauce. A chopped pork sandwich is the most Memphian dish on the menu, made as per local custom with a layer of cool coleslaw atop the well-sauced meat. It is a total mess that disintegrates as you eat it, but the most delicious mess imaginable!
Joe’s Bar-B-Que and Fish
3716 Clarksville Pike
615–259–1505
Nashville, TN
LD | $
Joe’s just might be the world’s slowest fast-food restaurant. It looks quick. No indoor seating, just a drive-through line with a large menu to study and a microphone to speak into when the time comes to place your order. A few yards beyond the menu is the window where you pay and receive the food. We were third in line for lunch, and based on the timing, we almost believe that each car’s order is started from scratch, bagged, and served before the next car’s order is taken.
The thirty-minute wait was well worth it! This food is indeed made to order. Whiting is crisp and hot from the deep-fryer, served the Nashville way with mustard, dill pickle chips, raw onion, and plenty of hot sauce. The corn bread that enfolds pulled pork in Joe’s wonderfully soulful pork-on-corn-bread sandwich comes off the grill so steamy that the unwieldy sandwich is almost too hot to handle. Rib tips are succulent and sauced with gusto.
Dining amenities? There is a small gazebo in back with a few tables where customers are welcome to bring their bagged meals. The only problem is that the quickest way to get there is to drive from the pick-up window out onto Clarksville Pike—against the flow of traffic—then quickly cut back into the drive-through line. Or it is possible to pull out and make a legal U-turn in one of the parking lots across the road. That’s the slower way, and at Joe’s, slow is good.
Leonard’s
5465 Fox Plaza Dr.
901–360–1963
Memphis, TN
LD | $$
Since 1922, Leonard Heuberger’s pit has set the pork standard in Memphis. In fact, barbecue historians credit Mr. Heuberger with configuring the barbecued pork sandwich that has become a local signature dish: shreds of smoked shoulder meat topped with tomato-sweet, vinegar-tangy sauce, festooned with a heap of creamy, cool coleslaw. It is a mesmerizing confluence of sugar and spice, meat and bread and