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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.