photograph by michael donahue
Andrew and Rose Pollard
Customers often ask what the “A & R” stands for in “A & R Bar-B-Que.”
Andrew Pollard provides the answer: “I’m the ‘A’ and my wife is the ‘R.’ It could have been ‘R & A,’ but alphabetically that would have been wrong.”
Andrew and Rose are the owners of the A & R Bar-B-Que location that opened in January 1983 at 1802 Elvis Presley Boulevard. Their son, Brian Pollard, runs that location. Their daughter, Lashun Pollard Turner, is owner of the A & R at 3721 Hickory Hill Road.
Over the years, the couple has served thousands of customers, including Isaac Hayes, Rufus Thomas, David Porter, and Jimmy Hart, and the restaurant has been featured on national TV.
The menu originally included pork shoulder, smoked sausage, rib tips, hot dogs, and hamburgers, but they added catfish and other items over the years. Andrew used to make all the desserts, but now he personally makes only the fried pies, which include sweet potato.
He says he learned how to barbecue from his father, Alonzo Pollard. “Out in the backyard, he’d get a big old tub, and put a rack out of the oven on top of it.”
photograph by rose pollard
Michael Donahue enjoys lunch, complete with a side of barbecue spaghetti, at A & R.
Andrew continued to barbecue pretty much like his dad. Lots of barbecue restaurants use fireboxes, he says: “Fire on one side and the heat travels over the meat. The way we do ours is, fire under the coals goes straight up through the meat.”
The pits themselves are made of high-gauge steel and lined with fire bricks to hold the heat — and the smoke. “That’s the way my dad cooked his,” he says, “with the coals on the bottom and meat on top. We haven’t made any changes, and don’t intend to.”
Rose contributed the barbecue sauce recipe, which she got from her sister. Andrew later changed it a bit, removing beer from the mix because, Rose says, “a lot of people don’t do alcohol.”
“You couldn’t taste it anyway,” Andrew says.
A & R Bar-B-Que was not an instant hit. At first, no one knew about the place “except maybe church members, where we attended church,” says Andrew. “Also, my wife worked across the street at the bulk mail center. We would fix lunches for them every night.”
Things changed after The Commercial Appeal reviewed the restaurant in 1988. “We had started making barbecue spaghetti because that’s what Rose liked,” says Andrew. “People started coming from everywhere. That’s what really caused it to take off.”
The current address Is not their original location. “We used to be in a little red building across the street. They’ve torn it down now, but it was only one room, about the size of a nice-sized kitchen.” They moved because “we had grown so much and so fast people didn’t have a place to park.”
A & R eventually expanded to five locations, though only two remain today.
They’re proud of how many regular customers visit. “They’re the most faithful customers you can have,” Andrew says. “I’ve got some that came in when we had the other building years ago.”
“Remember that guy that used to come here?” Rose asks her husband, “the one who got those double burgers?” He used to get two burgers at a time, Andrew says, “and our burger weighs a half pound. Each one.”
“So, he was eating a pound of ground beef every day,” Rose says. “That was a lot of ground beef,” Andrew agrees, adding, “It’s hard to eat just one of our burgers.”
A & R Bar-B-Que, 1802 Elvis Presley Blvd. and 3721 Hickory Hill Rd.
