Early arrivals get to eat
Marianna diner serves its lauded barbecue daily until it runs out.
MARIANNA — At Jones’ BAR-B-Q Diner, you have two choices: with slaw or without.
The slaw, if you choose it, tops chopped pork shoulder on fresh white Wonder Bread with a thin, vinegar-based sauce. You can supplement it with a bag of Frito-lay chips and a canned Coke.
But that’s it. No brisket. No buns. No beans. No fries. No potato salad. No mustard. No hot sauce.
Actually, you do have one other choice: Take it or leave it.
And if you’re going to take it, you’d better take it early.
James Harold Jones, affectionately and respectfully known as “Mister Harold,” unlocks the doors of the white cinderblock building in the Lee County seat — in the heart of the Delta — around 7 a.m. and stays open “’til they buy me out.”
The locals know to show up early. As soon as Jones runs out of barbecue, he puts a hand-stenciled “CLOSE” sign in the right-hand window, draws the curtains, pulls down the door shade and locks the front door.
Regular customers who see that as they pull their cars into the small unpaved parking lot know what that means. But some customers, who apparently don’t believe it, still open the
wrought-iron storm door and rattle the handle.
“I’ve been called all sorts of names,” Jones says with a smile.
Until recently, he’d stay open until 1 or 2 in the afternoon before running out of ’cue. On this Friday morning, he’d exhausted the supply by 11:50 a.m.
Kimberly J. Williams, a travel writer for the Arkansas Department of Parks and Tourism who still lives in her native Marianna, says Jones regularly prepares about 900 pounds of pork, much more on holidays such as Memorial Day and Independence Day.
“I guess I’ll have to start cooking a little more each day to meet the demand,” Jones says with a shrug. “Usually, I just order what I think I can sell.”
NATIONAL ATTENTION
What kicked Jones’ business into a much higher gear was the March 13 announcement that the diner is one of the five restaurants to which the New York-based James Beard Foundation is giving its 2012 Foundation Awards in the America’s Classics category.
The awards go “to restaurants with timeless appeal and that are beloved for quality food that reflects the character of their community.” To be eligible, a restaurant must be locally owned and in existence for at least 10 years.
Jones’ BAR-B-Q certainly qualifies. It has been around for at least a century, almost 48 years in its current location.
Walter Jones, the family’s first pitmaster, and his brother, Joe, started serving barbecue on Fridays and Saturdays from their back porch in the 1910s.
But third-generation Harold Jones hints that the tradition, or at least the sauce, may go back 50 years or more beyond that.
“It’s an old sauce, real old,” he says. And it hasn’t changed: “I’ve learned over the years that what ain’t broke, there’s no fixin’ on it. It worked for them all these years.”
A Beard Foundation representative requested the recipe, which, of course, Jones refused to supply. But he does acknowledge that it consists of less than 10 ingredients. It’s simple, mild, finely balanced between vinegary and sweet, and it’s also family friendly, he says. “Something anybody can handle, kids, parents, grandparents.”
Hubert Jones, Walter’s son and Harold’s father, built the current diner in 1964, the year after his son graduated from a high school in Moro (where he was a forward for the Carver Eagles’ basketball team).
Harold Jones recalls the only time his father would let him skip school was when he needed help at the restaurant — for example, filling a massive order for the employees of a nearby grain elevator.
LONGTIME CUSTOMERS
Marianna Mayor Jimmy Williams, Kimberly’s father, who has lived in Lee County all his life and says he loves barbecue, also says he has been eating Jones’ sandwiches “for as long as I can remember.”
“I have been enjoying Jones’ barbecue since the ’60s, and I’m pleased that others are realizing it’s some of the best barbecue in the region,” he says.
Williams, in keeping with his civic position, is an equal opportunity barbecue consumer. He also eats at the town’s other barbecue establishment, Ora Lee’s BAR-B-Q Rib House, a family-owned restaurant that opened a couple of years ago on what Williams says was the site of another barbecue place, and at Cypress Corner, several miles south of Marianna on Arkansas 1 in Lexa.
“And I sometimes like to cook some at home,” he says, “but of course I can’t do it like these folks.”
APPETIZING AROMA
On a recent Friday, Jones’ wife, Miss Betty, who normally works in the office of the local school district superintendent, but who had the week off for spring break, was helping Mister Harold out in the kitchen.
Otherwise, it’s pretty much a one-man operation. Jones employs a couple of young men to help him smoke the meat, which he does three days a week, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday.
“You can smell it from the highway,” Jones says, “kind of a free appetizer.”
He smokes his meat for 12 hours “for extra flavor” in a battered metal smoker, over charcoal made from hickory and oak, which he burns in a fireplace just outside his back door.
“The slower you cook it, the better it tastes,” he explains.
Jones says the high cost of pork shoulder — $1.59 a pound, up from the 85-95 cents a pound he used to pay — forced him a couple of months ago to raise his sandwich price from $2.50, where it had sat for years, to $3. He also sells smoked meat for $6 a pound. Posted around the service window are lists with the prices of up to four-dozen sandwiches and up to 7 pounds of meat, saving his customers from having to do the math themselves.
The building, in a residential area a couple of blocks off the main drag and not far from an elementary school, is pretty much indistinguishable from dozens, if not hundreds, of similar places across the South. It’s probably cleaner inside than many, though the dining room linoleum has gotten a bit battered and chipped.
About 95 percent of the orders are to go (many in the steady stream of customers only have a 30-minute lunch break), but there’s seating available for perhaps 10 at two sturdy wooden dining room tables.
ARKANSAS’ FIRST
The James Beard Foundation has handed out about 70 America’s Classics awards since 1998, says its president, Susan Ungaro, but this is the first place in Arkansas to receive one, the first, in fact, to receive a James Beard award of any kind. (Ashley’s at the Capital Hotel chef Lee Richardson has been nominated for a regional honor, but hasn’t won, the last two years.)
How, exactly, the Joneses came to the foundation’s attention is still a bit of a mystery, but the prime suspect is John T. Edge, director of the Southern Foodways Alliance, based on the campus of Ole Miss in Oxford, Miss. Edge, a former contributor to Gourmet magazine, writes a monthly food column for The New York Times.
In a recent article in Saveur magazine, he described Jones as “one pitmaster I’ll always go out of my way to visit.”
And, Ungaro says, Edge is one of the 17 “notable food critics and culinary writers” on the foundation’s Restaurant Committee, which picks the honorees.
Edge admits he serves on the foundation committee, but refuses to take credit for what he calls “a great decision.”
“The decision was a joint one, reached by committee members from across the nation,” Edge says. “I think we chose very well.”
Jones recalls Edge making several visits to his place a few years ago. Edge subsequently wrote an article, titled “In Through the Back Door,” for the March 22, 2010, issue of The Oxford American.
Before the current restaurant opened, Jones told Edge, “my father would sell the meat in town at this place they had. They called it the Hole in the Wall. That’s what it was. Just a window in a wall where they sold meat from a washtub.”
(Among Edge’s other contentions in that article: Barbecue was integrated, with white customers buying from black-owned businesses through their back doors, much earlier than any other Southern institution. And, if it’s possible to establish just when it began, “Jones’ might prove to be the oldest black-owned restaurant in the South, and, perhaps, one of the oldest family-owned black restaurants in the nation.”)
The article — ironically, perhaps — was nominated for
a Beard Foundation award.
END OF AN ERA?
This is probably the last generation of the Jones family in the restaurant business.
Mister Harold is 67 and although he has no plans to hang up his apron, his son, James Harold Jones II, is a teacher and basketball coach at Dollarway High in Pine Bluff and there’s very little chance he’ll take over when the time comes. “He’s got his hands full as it is,” says his father.
Jones, a self-proclaimed “cap fanatic,” had on a Los Angeles Angels chapeau on a recent Friday; for a recent set of Parks and Tourism photographs, it was the Chicago Cubs. “My favorite is the Cardinals,” he says.
He probably will not be wearing either a Mets or a Yankees cap when he, his wife and son attend the foundation’s annual awards ceremony and dinner, May 7 at Lincoln Center’s Avery Fisher Hall in New York.
“That’s a once-in-a-lifetime thing,” he says. Jones’ BAR-B-Q Diner, 219 W. Louisiana St., Marianna. (870) 295-3807. To read John T. Edge’s article, “In Through the Back Door,” visit oxfordamerican.org/articles/2010/mar/22/through-backdoor.