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It is exceedingly difficult to find good barbecue in New York City, where I’ve lived for nearly 15 years.
My standards are admittedly high; they’re actually my late father’s, a meticulous and famously opinionated aficionado of smoked meats. Nearly every encounter prompts Dad’s words to echo in my head: “No one can do good barbecue north of the Mason-Dixon.”
In the mid-1990s, when restaurant guides were not yet readily accessible online and long before modern food media considered barbecue worthy of attention, my father championed small mom-and-pop spots whose smoked and pulled offerings bordered on the ecstatic. He’d keep an eye out for them on the annual two-day-long, nine-hour drive from our family home in Rockville, Maryland, to my grandparents’ in Chattanooga, Tennessee.
On these trips, my mother would instruct me to tuck the Star of David around my neck into my T-shirt. Dad had an extremely complicated relationship with the South. The South was often unsafe for people like us, my father told me. Don’t say anything that might identify you as a Jew.
He’d left at 18 to attend college up North, but in the intervening decades, remained traumatized by the prejudice he witnessed during his time as one of a handful of Jewish children in the Chattanooga public school system of the 1960s and early ’70s.
My dad’s stories about his grade-school experience felt like dark fables, peppered with slurs hurled at him by classmates. Anti-semitism and its twin, racism, were default settings at his high school, he told me.
One incident stands out, the particulars of which I’d unearth years later in newspaper archives: In October of 1969, two years after the school was integrated, a fight broke out at a Friday night football game over the school’s mascot, simply known as The Rebel, and the school song, the Confederate anthem, “Dixie.” Tensions had been brewing for months, and on that night, Black students rushed the field and attempted to burn a Confederate flag. Police were called to quell the ensuing violence, which resulted in the partial paralyzation of a young Black girl. In the chaos that followed, calls to replace the mascot and song resulted in a school walk-out of a couple hundred white students. Dad, then a sophomore, was horrified. The protests became a flash point, sparking similar incidents in several other cities in Tennessee and at least one in Florida.
My father didn’t like to talk about the specifics of what he saw and experienced. I know remembering them was painful for him, and that he didn’t want to scare me. Maybe that’s why he instead made barbecue and other Southern delights the primary focus of family trips.
His warnings contrasted starkly with the brief but glorious interludes of culinary fabulism that punctuated our travel down South. Dad would make a precarious swerve onto an off-ramp for one of three things: the electric “Hot Now” sign of a Krispy Kreme, glowing orange-red like a burning bush; the yearning curls of steam emanating from a boiled peanut stand ensconced in a one-pump gas station; and, most frequently, a local restaurant billboard promising barbecue, glorious barbecue. A rustic hand-painted sign was an indisputable indicator of quality.
The Teppers stopped keeping kosher in the 1920s, when, during their time living across the border in Georgia, the frozen kosher meat delivered by train from Atlanta started arriving spoiled. That’s how Dad grew up fortified by collards stewed with bacon, lard-fried chicken, and all manner of delicacies that would have likely horrified our pork-eschewing Eastern European ancestors.
Much of his gastronomic education was received at the cafeteria of a Chattanooga hospital, where my grandfather was the administrator for a stretch of the 1960s. The predominantly Black staff cooked a hearty menu of fried fare and butter-drenched sides, plus what became Dad’s favorite meal: tangles of pulled pork served unsauced alongside a squeeze bottle of tangy-sweet tomato-based barbecue sauce. The best plates could make his eyes roll back into his head, and after several silent chews and swallows, he’d exhale a satisfied grunt of “pretty good,” the highest accolade in his vocabulary.
Previously theoretical to me, there were moments when Dad’s love of barbecue and disdain for the bigotry he experienced would collide. Once, somewhere in southern Virginia, Dad performed the customary lurch off the highway in the direction of a promising barbecue counter. The restaurant foyer we walked into was plastered in Confederate flag wallpaper, and its bookshelves lined with KKK books. Dad turned on his heels and marched us all back to the minivan. Dad’s stories had become stomach-churningly real.
Still, I remember most of the barbecue spots we frequented as oases of safety. Despite everything, barbecue was a native language to him. These restaurants epitomized Southern hospitality at its most sanguine—here, Dad’s veneration for it rendered him welcome.
In 2015, Dad and I traveled down South to research a book I never did get around to writing. We flew into Charleston, South Carolina, priming our palates with Waffle House and Gulf oysters before meandering by car to Savannah. After that was a long drive across the state of Alabama, bolstered by MoonPies, before our final leg in New Orleans. Along the way, we kibbitzed with family still scattered across the South; he told me stories about his childhood I’d never heard before. Some beautiful, some painful, shared as we consumed prodigious amounts of barbecue.
Deep in my camera roll, I have a video of him finding God in a plate of barbecue in Ridgeland, South Carolina. An embroidered sign bearing the words “PRAYER IS WELCOMED HERE” hovers above him. Half his platter overflows with stewed collards, butter beans, a fried chicken leg, molasses-laced baked beans, and a hush puppy; the other half is just pulled pork. He is uncharacteristically verbose in his commendation.
“It is so good,” he tells the camera, head shaking. “Boy, oh boy.”
“And it’s, like, some of the best barbecue you’ve ever had?” I prompt from behind the iPhone.
“Yup.”
“And you’ve had a lot of barbecue?”
“I have had a lot of barbecue.”
I’ve now spent a decade processing that trip. It’s clear to me that my father’s barbecue obsession was, in a sense, that illusive olive branch to the South he’d been so unwilling to extend in words. Perhaps it was a means of reconciling the uglier parts of something with its virtues. I certainly don’t think it’s possible to have such an effusive reaction to someone’s cooking without feeling a swell of tenderness for them.
Dad died in the spring of 2018. In Judaism, the anniversary of a loved one’s death is called a yarhzeit, and it’s marked by reciting the prayers of mourning and lighting a candle that burns for a full 24 hours. To this ritual, my family adds a bit of mild sacrilege: a shared meal of pulled pork, smoked for hours and sauced with precision.
While writing this piece, an old high school friend of my father’s serendipitously reached out—he’d found a clipping from their school newspaper detailing “outstanding [but] usually unrecognised seniors,” my father among them.
“As for the problems of the world there are no simple remedies,” reads the article. “But perhaps the first thing Gary would do would be to have a ‘seminar on teaching people how to love each other.’” Finding common ground at the barbecue table is as good a place to start as any, I think.
I remain vigilant in my pursuit of truly excellent pulled pork. Something that makes me think: What angel, placed here by God, is capable of such artistry? Something worth veering off a highway for, that feels like a missing part of myself.