Lauding Lassis Inn
John T. Edge, the longtime director of the Southern Foodways Alliance at Ole Miss and one of the nation’s best-known food writers, was on the other end of the phone line. He sounded desperate.
Edge was raised in Georgia and has called Oxford, Miss., home for more than 20 years. But Edge realized that the rich food scene in Arkansas had never received the national recognition it deserves. He adopted our state, its food traditions and its people. He may root for the Rebels rather than the Razorbacks in Southeastern Conference athletic contests, but he has become the leading proponent of Arkansas food on the national stage. It was Edge who led the way in 2012 when Jones Bar-B-Que Diner at Marianna became this state’s first James Beard Award winner.
Beard Awards are to the food industry what an Oscar is to the movie industry or a Pulitzer Prize is to those of us who write. The James Beard Foundation gave James Harold Jones’ small establishment in a residential neighborhood at Marianna one of its coveted America’s Classics Awards. Edge believes that this barbecue joint might be the oldest black-owned restaurant in the South.
James Harold Jones (known around Lee County simply as Mr. Harold) says his grandfather’s uncle started the family barbecue tradition. His grandfather and father followed, selling barbecue out of the backs of their homes. Hubert Jones, James Harold’s father, moved to the current location in 1964. Eight years after the Beard designation, people from across the country still make the pilgrimage to Marianna.
Edge was on edge, if you will, earlier this year because he had learned that the foundation was prepared to give the Lassis Inn in Little Rock an America’s Classics Award. Yet each time representatives of the foundation tried to call restaurant owner Elihue Washington Jr., he would see the outof-state area code, figure that someone was trying to scam him, and hang up. I’m always looking for the slightest excuse to eat some of Washington’s fried buffalo ribs, so I promised Edge that I would deliver the good news in person and urge my friend to take the foundation’s call.
On May 4, Washington will accept his award during a gala celebration at the Lyric Opera in Chicago. Since the award was announced last month, the parking area has been filled at the small wooden building near where Roosevelt Road passes under Interstate 30. There has been national news coverage. Garden & Gun magazine reported last week that the Lassis Inn “has been jam-packed by lunchtime every day since the announcement.” The restaurant was started in about 1905 by Joe and Molassis Watson. “Its first known advertising listing was in the Arkansas Gazette in 1931,” historian Revis Edmonds writes for the Central Arkansas Library System’s Encyclopedia of Arkansas. “Originally, Joe Watson sold sandwiches out of the back of the Watson home, and when he later added catfish to the menu, sales rapidly increased. Eventually constructing a separate building for their food business, the Watsons relocated the building in 1931 to its current location [at 518 East 27th St.], moving it a short distance once in the 1960s to accommodate the construction of Interstate 30 … . They had apparently intended to call the establishment the Watson Inn but decided on the derivative of Molassis Watson’s name because they thought it sounded better.
“Through the years, Lassis Inn has been known for more than its fish. In the years leading up to the desegregation of Little Rock Central High School in 1957, Daisy Bates and other civil rights leaders held frequent meetings at the restaurant. It became known that Lassis Inn was one of the few safe places in the community where people could gather to discuss the numerous problems associated with segregation.”
“This was the only place,” Washington says. “People couldn’t go anywhere else.”
Washington purchased the business in 1989. His catfish is excellent, but I can find catfish at a number of places. I go for the buffalo ribs. And I’m not talking about a four-legged mammal. Arkansas rivers produce three species of buffalo—smallmouth, bigmouth and black.
“Few recreational anglers go after buffalo, but commercial fishermen catch and sell millions annually from rivers and lakes throughout the Mississippi River Valley,” says veteran Arkansas outdoors writer Keith Sutton. “Buffalo fish are among our nation’s more important wild food fish. Many are sold in riverside communities in Arkansas where fried buffalo ribs long have been considered special delicacies. Some buffalo make their way to fish markets in New York, Chicago and other cities. The buffalo’s flaky white flesh, streaked with dark veins of sweet fat, embodies the rich, wild essence of the great rivers from whence they come. They are not just good; they are flat-out delicious. No other fish has flavor that quite compares to the buffalo.
“When I was state fishing records coordinator for the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission, I weighed a record 105-pound black buffalo taken by a bowfisherman on Harris Brake Lake near Perryville and later a 92.5-pounder caught on a rod and reel in Lake Maumelle.”
While visiting my grandparents in Des Arc when I was a boy, I would walk the one block from their house to the fish market each morning to watch commercial fishermen unload the buffalo and catfish they had netted in the White River. Now thanks to the Lassis Inn and the James Beard Foundation, a lot more Americans will learn the joy of consuming Arkansas-style fried buffalo ribs.
Senior Editor Rex Nelson’s column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.
He’s also the author of the Southern Fried blog at rexnelsonsouthernfried.com.