Paige Halter:
We’ve left St. Louis and the age-old debate about who created toasted Ravioli. Now, we’re heading further South- to Memphis, Tennessee- and if you follow the smoke, it’ll take you somewhere special.

Maybe to a street corner where a man’s been tending to ribs since the Carter administration… or to an upscale storefront on Beale Street where the barbecue’s trademarked, bottled, and shipped worldwide.

In Memphis, success is not always about what’s on the grill. It’s about the line between heritage and brand. Between who cooks up the flavor… and who owns it.

Memphis became a pork capital in the 19th century, when its location along the Mississippi made it a gateway for trade. By 1850, steamboats carried hogs, corn, and molasses up and down the river — fueling a booming meatpacking industry that depended on Black labor.

After enslaved people were legally emancipated, that labor gradually transformed. Some formerly enslaved cooks, pitmasters, and caterers turned the skills they’d gathered on plantations into something uniquely their own — barbecue as craft, as culture, as pride.

Merrit Bailey has been working in the restaurant business for fifteen years. He started catering out of his truck and now owns a nationally recognized bar-be-que restaurant in Orange Mound, Memphis called Ballhoggerz. The tiny building is packed with trophies from bar-be-queing competitions, and a little digging will reveal that he’s been named the fourth best Memphis style restaurant in the country.

Merrit Bailey:
In Memphis, you can look at it like two ways. You know, you got your neighborhood barbecues and then you got your established, bigger, predominantly white establishments. You know, there's bigger, more commercial, upscale joints, you know what I’m saying, that they compete on a bigger scale. So I try to set myself in to, I want to compete with the top dogs, you know. I want to compete with the biggest brand out there.

Halter:
When success allowed Bailey to move from his truck to a brick-and-mortar, he chose a historic Black neighborhood where he could serve the community with his food.

Bailey:
So I found it was important to try to bring some kind of value or some kind of meaning to the location that I wanted to be in. Not just go wherever. You know, I think the money is, or the high clientele is, but really where the city needed it.

Orange Mound is a culture-rich neighborhood built on the land that used to be Deaderick Plantation. In the late 1880s, a white developer began developing housing for working class Black families. It was the first planned subdivision specifically for African Americans. A century later, 97% of its residents were Black.

Bailey:
I have a real historical background in terms of my family and the city my father, he was the founder of the Civil Rights Museum. He also has the courthouse downtown named after him. That's his picture on the wall over there. The door is covering up right now. But his name is Judge de army Bailey, you know. So he has a real historical value in the city.

Halter:
Beverly Robertson grew up in Orange Mound and attended Melrose High School in the heart of the community. She eventually came to work at the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis and still has a deep love for Orange Mound.

Robertson:
The heart of the community is still there, but it's a bit of a food desert, because stores that used to exist around there, some have closed down. It's been a fight to open them back up, but there is finally a grocery store and in an area that's close to where people live, but that's a fight.

Halter:
Robertson says that while the spirit of her beloved community remains, the loss of some of the original community members to old age means that Orange Mound can be lacking in upkeep. That’s one of the reasons Bailey prioritized keeping his restaurant where the community needed it.

Robertson:
It reinforces the value system and the sense of pride we all have because so many of us stay so connected. It's very different, a lot of communities, when people move away, or when the community starts to go down or not value the assets that they used to. People don't want to come back. We want to come back to Orange Mound. We want to stay in Orange Mound. We want to build up Orange Mound.

Halter:
Ask ten people how they like their ribs and you’ll get eleven answers. Dry ribs, rubbed with spice and cooked slow — the meat’s natural smoke front and center. Or wet ribs, slathered in sweet, sticky sauce, dripping with history.

In Memphis, there’s pretty much one way of doing BBQ, and that’s dry. Pitmasters put meat straight on the grill, with lots of seasoning but no sauce. Dry ribs were often popularized at competition circuits and the world of sponsorships and hungry audiences.

At Charlie Vergos’ Rendezvous, the spice blend that gained fame in Memphis is actually Greek in origin. Vergos’s daughter, Tina Vergos Jennings, now operates her father’s restaurant.

Tina Vergos Jennings:
Ours is unique. My dad's parents were from Greece, and my mother was from Greece, and our seasoning that is on the ribs is actually a combination of Greek seasoning. And he loved New Orleans, so he loved the Cajun seasoning, so he just combined the two. So what you have on your plate is that it's part Greek seasoning, part Cajun.

Rendezvous has been run by the Vergos family since 1948. Tina worked as a teacher and then in real estate before her mother summoned her to officially join the family business.

Tina:
So I came, and I've been here ever since, and it was the best thing I could have done. Sometimes you need a woman to go into the business to kind of reorganize things. And it turned Of course, I'm still here, so it's turned out to be great whether my children come into the business or some of my other nieces and nephews, I don't know, but they'll always be a part of the business.

Halter:
Tina says that even the employees who aren’t technically blood are still treated like it. They have servers who have been working there for over fifty years. Charlie Vergos always said that he didn’t want to expand past his original location.

Tina:
But my dad made the comment, if I can't see what's going on over my roof, then I'm not going to do that. He feels like, once you start spreading out, you kind of lose the flavor and the atmosphere of the restaurant, restaurant, you just can't replicate this.

That being said, Rendezvous stopped being just a local brand in the 1980s, when a member of the Vergos family who worked for Delta airlines set up an arrangement to get products shipped through the airline. Rendezvous ships sauces, spices, and entire reheatable meals through Canada and the United States.

Customers can get four Rendezvous meals shipped to them for a hundred and forty nine dollars.

Tina:
Seasoning, sauces, ribs, you can have a complete meal the next day

Halter:
Some things are tied to the city, however. Since they don’t ship internationally, customers come to them. Tina says people who love BBQ and Elvis often visit from Europe. Local pitmasters distinguish Memphis BBQ from anywhere else in the world.

Tina:
Memphis is on top. I think so. I do. I will say that, yes, we are no no other city can claim it. I think we have the best barbecue places. I think you'd be happy anywhere you go.

Halter:
But the Memphis brand doesn’t necessarily include everyone.

Bailey:
Every time somebody mentioned Memphis barbecue, they only mentioned like five places. It'd be like the same ones, Central, Rendezvous, Cozy Corner, Paynes, be the same five every time. So like, man for a city that's known for barbecue, and we only got a handful of joints out here that people are mentioning. That’s why I got into it. I was like well there’s gotta be a niche somewhere, somebody’s needing new flavor or somewhere new to go to.

Halter:
Part of Ballhoggerz’s mission was to shake up the mainstream bar-be-que scene in Memphis, and make the brand that’s known everywhere, be known for something new. It’s certainly been successful. USA Today named Ballhoggerz as the number four best place for Memphis style bar-be-que, one ahead of Rendezvous.

Surprisingly, number three on the list is in St. Louis, Missouri. Number one? Tennessee. So the Memphis brand apparently doesn’t require a brick-and-mortar in Memphis, despite the locals saying that’s what makes them the best.

Within Memphis, it’s the spices that differentiate one bar-be-que joint from another. Bailey says that most of the meat comes from the same farms and the same pigs.

Bailey:
Memphis, we don't have that many suppliers here. Okay, yeah, we don't have that many suppliers. So some people got the pretty much the same stuff, but if you stray too far away, you risk your food quality, because some products aren't as good if you try to go a cheaper route.

Today, the Memphis barbecue “brand” is incredibly lucrative. Chain restaurants trademark sauce names. Franchises sell “authentic” Memphis rubs across the globe. So who really owns that world famous Memphis flavor? And why is this even important to know? We’ve seen that authenticity can come from different places – families long established in the business, or solo cooks making a name for themselves. Their target audiences differ too. Restaurateurs have to decide if they want to cook for locals, travellers, or both. And if they want to let their famous spices migrate elsewhere.

In our final episode, we’ll go even further south, to New Orleans. Just like St. Louis and Memphis, New Orleans has immigrant pride, and flavors the city calls its own. There’s seafood, streetcars, and a natural disaster that reshaped the city forever.