Helen’s Bar BQ will be featured on PBS show
Helen Turner has been running her Brownsville barbecue restaurant for more than 20 years. The no-frills West Tennessee restaurant is renowned worldwide for its hand-chopped barbecue sandwich and house-made secret sauce.
Once again, Turner is getting national attention for her ‘cue.
Helen’s Bar BQ is one of the barbecue restaurants featured on the season finale of celebrity chef, author and restaurateur Vivian Howard’s new show, “Somewhere South.” The episode airs Friday on Memphis’ PBS station, WKNO.
“We were looking for female pitmasters and not in the usual places. While Memphis barbecue has been covered to a great extent, we were hoping to share the stories of pitmasters — or in this case pitmistresses — and barbecue restaurants that don’t often get told,” Howard said of her decision to feature Helen’s Bar BQ.
The six-part series debuted on PBS on March 27.
Howard, who previously hosted the award-winning series “A Chef’s Life,” takes viewers on a culinary tour exploring the dishes she says “are uniting cultures and creating new traditions across the American South.”
Each episode examines the connectivity of a single dish — from dumplings to hand pies, porridge and more — and the ways people of different cultures interpret that dish while expressing the complex values, identities and histories that make up the region.
The series finale focuses on barbecue.
Starting from the whole-hog pits in her figurative backyard, Howard explores the history of black barbecue entrepreneurship, from the North Carolina families who started turkey barbecue to the women firing up pits in Tennessee.
When asked about her favorite dishes at Helen’s Bar BQ, Howard said she thought the pulled pork sandwich with skin was “amazing.” She also said she really loved the barbecue bologna.
“Helen does something that not a lot of people do now — cook over wood. That is an uncommon thing these days and absolutely worth the trip to Brownsville,” Howard said.
In the episode, Howard also travels to the west coast of Florida, where her perspective on Southern barbecue drastically changes.
During her visit to Texas, she discovered barbecue techniques steeped in tradition are being given a spin — a pair of sisters in tiny San Diego, Texas, add a Tejano touch to their barbecue joint menu, and two Japanese American brothers with a smokehouse pair brisket and bento boxes.
While Howard did not visit any other Tennessee barbecue restaurants during the filming of the show, Memphis-based Payne’s BBQ and Cozy Corner are highlighted in the segment. Like Helen’s Bar BQ, both barbecue shops are owned by women: Flora Payne runs Payne’s, and Desiree Robinson runs Cozy Corner.
The finale of “Somewhere South” airs at 8 p.m. May 1 on PBS, Pbs.org and the PBS Video App.
Jennifer Chandler is the Food & Dining reporter at The Commercial Appeal. She can be reached at jennifer.chandler@commercialappeal.com, and you can follow her on Twitter and Instagram at @cookwjennifer.