Barbecue with Bill
Bill Tsutsui wasted no time immersing himself into the Arkansas scene after becoming the 11th president of Hendrix College at Conway last June. I grew up in a college town, and my late father used to describe certain people as having “more degrees than a thermometer.” I thought about that term in the fall of 2013 when it was announced that Tsutsui had been hired at Hendrix.
He earned his bachelor’s degree from Harvard University. Three years later, he received a master of letters in modern Japanese history from Oxford University. Two years after that, he received a master’s in history from Princeton University. Later, Tsutsui earned his doctorate in history from Princeton.
I should know by now not to deal in stereotypes, but based on that background, I was expecting a quiet, introverted academician. What I found the first time we had lunch together was an outgoing man with a loud laugh who was interested in everything. I became especially intrigued when I learned Tsutsui has a deep interest in barbecue. We were kindred spirits.
Tsutsui came to Hendrix from Southern Methodist University, where he was the dean of its largest college. Prior to beginning his new job, he started a blog on the school’s website so students, faculty, staff and alumni could become familiar with him. One blog post was headlined “A Texas-sized passion for barbecue.” Tsutsui wrote that he had had this passion “as long as I can remember. My family moved to Bryan, Texas, in 1969, and I would guess that about half the restaurants in town (which probably totaled 10 or fewer at that time) were barbecue joints. We lived not too far from Tom’s BBQ, which is long gone but still fondly remembered in the Brazos Valley. Tom’s back then was located in a shabby cinder-block bunker of a building with no windows and (in my mind’s eye at least) covered in faded maroon paint, just across the road from the Texas A&M campus.
“Tom’s was famous for the Aggie Special, a mound of smoked beef and sausage, a stack of Mrs. Baird’s white bread, pickle slices, a whole onion and a slab of very yellow cheese, all served up on big sheets of butcher paper with worn, wooden-handled steak knives the only utensils provided. This less-than-elegant presentation (common in the German meat market style barbecue tradition of central Texas) did not go over well with my mother, who forbade family meals at Tom’s. As she was a biochemist (and thus, regrettably, had some credibility when it came to hygiene), my father and I had little choice in the matter.”
My wife is a south Texas native. I’ve long joked with her: “That beef brisket you serve down there in Texas is good, but quit calling it barbecue. You live in Arkansas now. To be barbecue, it has to be pork.” Tsutsui was aware of the distinction. In his blog post he wrote that his wife had purchased him a book on “Southern—not Texas—barbecue. I think she was hoping to ease me into the different foodways of Arkansas easily, as I’m sure she still remembers my impassioned rants against what was represented as smoked meat in Kansas City. The volume, a mixture of travelogue and cookbook, did catch my fancy. After reading for days about pulled and chopped pork, barbecued bologna and all the varieties of sauce and slaw from the Mississippi Delta to the Carolinas, I decided I needed to roll my smoker out of the garage and give Southern barbecue a try.”
I wasted no time sending an email to Tsutsui that read: “I know how busy you are about to be. But if you would ever like to spend a day getting out into Arkansas, eating at small-town barbecue restaurants and getting a feel for the state, just let me know. I love introducing people to Arkansas. As a history lover, I especially like it that history is your discipline. Arkansas has a fascinating history. A barbecue pilgrimage through the Arkansas Delta is definitely in order.”
So it was that Tsutsui, Hendrix graduate Eric Francis (a fellow writer) and I pulled out early one weekday and headed east. We got off Interstate 40 at Biscoe and stopped at Martin’s IGA Grocery for a cup of coffee and a sausage biscuit. I knew it was an experience Tsutsui would enjoy.
Our next stop was the Louisiana Purchase State Park, just off U.S. 49 between Brinkley and Marvell, to view the granite monument in the headwater swamp that marks the initial point for the original survey of lands added to the United States by the 1803 Louisiana Purchase.
As it turned out, we spent too much time in the swamp. When we arrived at the incomparable Jones Bar-B-Q Diner in Marianna, the sign that said “Close” (there is no “d”) was already in the window even though it was just past 10 a.m. James Jones, whose restaurant won the America’s Classics Award in 2012 from the James Beard Foundation, told us: “A lady bought half of what I had early this morning, and then a fellow came by from the Farm Bureau and bought the other half for a meeting. I was out by 8 a.m. You should have called and told me you were coming. I would have saved you some.” He did give us a tour of the barbecue pits.
Not one to be deterred, I headed a few miles south down Arkansas 1 and introduced my guests to the good barbecue at Cypress Corner. We made a second lunch stop at the famous Craig’s in DeValls Bluff. A sandwich from Jones will have to wait for another time, but I think Cypress Corner and Craig’s were enough to convince Tsutsui that there’s something to this Arkansas pork barbecue.