photo by michael donahue
Hazel, Eric, and Frank Vernon at The Bar-B-Q Shop.
If you’ve ever wondered why The Bar-B-Q Shop sandwich is served on Texas toast, it’s because white bread was too soggy.
That was one of Frank Vernon’s innovations after he and his wife, Hazel, took over the old Brady & Lil’s Bar-B-Q Restaurant in 1981. Former owner Brady Vincent served his barbecue on white bread.
In the late 1970s, Vernon, who always wanted to own a restaurant, bought one of the old Harlem House restaurants at Broad Avenue and Scott Street and renamed it “Frank’s Restaurant,” says Frank’s son, Eric Vernon, general manager and part owner of The Bar-B-Q Shop.
His next restaurant venture was buying Brady & Lil’s in South Memphis. “Mr. Brady [Vincent] taught my father and mother how to prepare everything. They literally came in every day and learned how to cook and make everything from scratch.”
In 1984, Frank Vernon moved Brady & Lil’s out east, but his son says, “We realized that we had gotten too far away from our South Memphis crowd.”
In 1987, they moved to their current Midtown location and changed the name. “We only do barbecue,” he says. “Like you have a barber shop. You have a smoke shop. This is what we do.”
In the beginning, business was slow. “We had about 10 families that kept us afloat,” he says. “And, literally, word of mouth got around.”
Vernon once told his dad, “If you have a restaurant, you’ve got to have faith. And if you do not have faith, you will not be able to run your restaurant.”
The Vernons, who were so involved in making their business succeed, realized they needed to return to their church roots. Business picked up. “We were just blessed. People would call and say, ‘I want to come in.’”
Then they got a call from the Food Network’s Bobby Flay. “He just said he heard about us and wanted to come through.”
Since then, The Bar-B-Q Shop has been featured on TV “probably, nationally, 10 different times.” Around 2017, the Food Network named their ribs the “number-one ribs in America.”
Frank Vernon made The Bar-B-Q Shop what it is today, Eric says. In addition to the Texas toast, he added beef brisket, baked beans, turkey, and half a chicken. “And he came up with the most important thing: the ‘Half and Half’ — half wet and half dry.”
Eric’s mom, Hazel, who is heavily involved in the business, was instrumental in bottling their Dancing Pigs barbecue sauce, which came from the original Brady & Lil’s recipe. They’ve since added hot and mild sauce and the dry seasoning, which his dad came up with. “Hopefully, we’ll be adding the barbecue glaze to the Dancing Pigs lineup,” says Vernon.
Their Dancing Pigs products are now sold in Kroger stores in five states.
The Bar-B-Q Shop is located at 1782 Madison Avenue. 901-272-1277.
