Ridgewood Defines a Life of Barbecue

Smoky Mountain Living contributor Fred Sauceman loves to write about food in the mountains. In the past year, he has introduced SML readers to everything from Philippine flavors in Knoxville to the history of the MoonPie, the glorious green bean and the Southwest Virginia Hot Dog Trail.

Fred is senior writer and associate professor of Appalachian Studies at East Tennessee State University, and news director at WETS-FM, the public radio station at ETSU. He has written and edited seven food-related books and directed seven documentary films.

This is an excerpt from his latest book, The Proffitts of Ridgewood: An Appalachian Family’s Life in Barbecue.

Why Ridgewood?

While maintaining that spirit of barbecue inclusiveness, when asked to name my favorite, I answer instantly and confidently: Ridgewood Barbecue in Bluff City, Tennessee. I won’t make the mistake of saying it’s the best barbecue in America, as a couple of writers once did. To say that would assume I’ve tasted all the barbecue in America, an ambitious but impossible assignment. Yes, Ridgewood is my favorite. And flavor is only one of the many reasons.

When it comes to pork, I don’t know of anyone in America more knowledgeable than my good friend Allan Benton, owner of Benton’s Smoky Mountain Country Hams in Madisonville, Tennessee.  His ham and bacon are heralded nationwide.

“I had been told that Ridgewood was the best barbecue in East Tennessee,” Allan writes. “Still, I was not expecting too much.  After all, I have driven many miles out of my way just chasing a rumor of good barbecue, only to come away thinking it was good but not worth the drive. I had been told that Ridgewood uses hams instead of butts or shoulders. The plate arrived with the thinly sliced ham piled high on the bun. It took only one bite to know that Ridgewood lives up to the accolades and incredible reputation.  Ridgewood shares equal billing for great barbecue with its Memphis ‘cousins’ and is among the best barbecue joints anywhere in the South.”

Early in the fall semester at East Tennessee State University, in my course, “The Foodways of Appalachia,” I outline for my students the qualities and characteristics that I think make a good food story. Ridgewood meets pretty much all of those criteria. Among the hundreds of restaurants my wife Jill and I have covered for various assignments over the years, Ridgewood stands out, in our opinion, as the one place in the East Tennessee region that is truly worthy of book-length treatment.

Among those criteria for a good food story, longevity and continuity are at the top. Ridgewood has never moved from its place in beautiful Bullock’s Hollow, since it first opened its doors in 1948. The menu may have changed—as we’ll see, barbecue was not among the restaurant’s original offerings—but the location and ownership have remained constant.

Ownership by the same family is another measure in my classroom scale. Ridgewood qualifies again. It has always been owned by the Proffitt family—first Grace and Jim, then their sons Terry and Larry, and now Larry’s daughter Lisa. When Lisa’s children are old enough to take over the business, assuming hopes and plans work out, the restaurant will be in its fourth generation of family ownership. This is a story of smoked meat, but in a larger sense, it’s the story of an Appalachian family.

When people ask me what makes a good restaurant, I don’t start with the food. I start with the presence of the owners. When I stop for a bowl of Beans All the Way at The Bean Barn in Greeneville, Tennessee, I want to see Jerry and Donna Hartsell behind the counter. When I visit The Dip Dog Stand in Smyth County, Virginia, I want to see a Hall—Grant or Pam or one of their children, maybe even Crystal with her doctorate in education—spearing my red hot dog, dousing it in an Appalachian tempura, and painting it with mustard. When I’m ready for Thai curry in the mountains of East Tennessee, I want to make sure Prayoon and Rachel Royston are in their kitchen at Monsoon in Butler to serve it. At Ridgewood, I expect to see a Proffitt. I want to know that the hands of Lisa Proffitt Peters crafted my blue cheese dressing and stirred my barbecue sauce. I want to know that her dad, Larry, proclaimed it, “Good enough to sell.” The presence of the owners separates the places I love and respect from the anonymous, absentee-owned chains, whose dollars flee from the region.

Of course, choosing a topic for a food story gets almost nowhere without a quality product to describe. Ridgewood barbecues fresh ham, and the pitmasters there do it exceedingly well. Ham, high on the hog, is the only cut of pork barbecue you can order. Both the pork and the beef are produced without the use of compromising shortcuts. There is no gas in the process. There is no electricity.  Those hams and beef are fueled and flavored by hickory wood, fire, and smoke, which leads to another criterion for a good food story:  adherence to tradition.

Hardly a week passes without a visit from a salesperson trying to convince Larry and Lisa to give up the laborious process of smoking hams and beef over hickory wood. “We can sell you an electric cooker or a gas cooker,” those salespeople will say, “and you can just press a button, go home, and forget about it.” That pressure to convert to gas-powered or electric cookers occurs with relentless regularity. But the Proffitts resist the temptation. They send those salespeople on down the road. The Proffitts realize that the most important ingredient in the cookery of Appalachia is the investment of time. It makes all the difference.

An Appalachian Story

In the Proffitt family, I find many of the noble values that define the Southern Appalachian region. It’s a region where I was born, where I was educated, and where I have always worked. I will never leave it. My affection for the people of Appalachia began with my parents. My father, along with his parents and eleven brothers and sisters, sharecropped in the Orebank and Bright Hope communities of Greene County, Tennessee. My mother was the child of public servants, who lived in town and navigated through the Great Depression with little financial suffering. My maternal grandfather patrolled the streets of Greeneville, Tennessee, as Night Chief of Police. My maternal grandmother staffed the town’s telephone switchboard. My father made televisions, and my mother made dresses. My family understood the nobility of hard work. My people understood the importance of frugality in any kind of economy. In flush times they saved. In hard times they saved. They persisted on, never giving up, no matter what hardships temporarily blocked their path. Most of all, they loved their part of the world and never wished to leave it. 

I find the very same qualities in the Proffitt family. When Larry Proffitt headed off to pharmacy school at the University of Tennessee in Memphis, he knew he would return to the hills and hollows of his homeplace, and he has never left. The education he received on the banks of the Mississippi River in the 1960s improved his lot in life, but folks who have known him a long time are quick to say that education never changed him. Nor did it alter his beautiful Appalachian mountain accent, still clear today in the cadence of his voice, the hardness of his vowels. As so many people in these mountains are, Larry is a born storyteller. His stories and his philosophies are the foundation of this book. His education is deep, but his wisdom is natural. As I tell my students each fall, he is one of the smartest and wisest people I know.

The Proffitts have never lived an extravagant lifestyle. As Larry often says, “We were just poor folks, trying to make a living.” For much of his life, he has worked two jobs, as a restaurant owner and manager in Bluff City and as a pharmacist in Elizabethton. He had good role models. His father Jim made rayon in Elizabethton and barbecue sauce in Bluff City. His mother walked the creaking floors of country stores stocking shelves and then embraced the morning-until-night life of a restaurant owner.

It would have been easy, at The Ridgewood, to give in to less laborious cooking methods. But the Proffitts never have. In barbecue, just as in life, they have learned that the easy way is rarely the best way.

Over the years, when government policies forced them to retool their business, when highways passed them by, when death decimated their ranks, when dietary fears gripped America, the Proffitts never thought of giving up. It simply wasn’t in their DNA. When they faced hardships, they kept on, without complaint. Tough times only helped them appreciate what they had all the more.

When lawyers and businesspeople talk franchising or outright purchase, as they do often today, the Proffitts send them packing, too. The Ridgewood, Larry tells them, is not for sale. “It won’t be for sale. We’re going to do the same thing we’ve been doing all these years. No change.”

Love of the land, respect for tradition, veneration of hard work, defying adversity, and admiringly stubborn independence. They aren’t characteristics unique to Appalachia, but in combination, they are characteristics that strongly define Appalachia. They are the values that have made Ridgewood an Appalachian and an American institution.

Reprinted by permission of Mercer University Press, excerpted from The Proffitts of Ridgewood: An Appalachian Family’s Life in Barbecue, by Fred Sauceman (2017).

Looking for a good Christmas gift? Copies of The Proffitts of Ridgewood: An Appalachian Family’s Life in Barbecue are available for purchase from the publisher (mupress.org), at regional bookstores, or online.