My wife and I spent some time in Louisville in the late summer going around to different places that I don't usually get to see when I travel there for business. We were up exploring the Highlands neighborhood in the middle part of the day and found a barbecue place that we wanted to try. Except that it didn't really look like a barbecue place, and the name wasn't really indicative of it having barbecue - Mark's Feed Store. Still we wanted to give it a try.
Mark Erwin had been working in the service industry and had been on management teams that opened new restaurants. One thing that he noticed that Louisville didn't really have was a good barbecue joint. Erwin had gone around to visit barbecue masters across Kentucky to learn the tricks of the trade. But while smoking meats was one thing, he also realized that if he didn't have the sauces to go along with the barbecued meats his restaurant wouldn't survive.
For months, Erwin worked in his kitchen to come up with the right combination of ingredients for his signature sauce. One concoction - which consisted of 26 ingredients including 13 secret spices - was the one he deemed as the sauce that he would like to pair with his smoked meats.
Finding a spot for his barbecue joint turned out to be somewhat easier. He found a historical building that once housed a feed store in the Middletown neighborhood in Louisville and decided to incorporate the concept into his barbecue joint. He put in an old style barbecue pit in the place and opened the first Mark's Feed Store in 1988.
Erwin grew the business by opening up more locations around Louisville, as well as in Lexington and Elizabethtown, KY. But after 25 years of running Mark's Feed Store, he was looking for a change in life. That's when Ulysses "Junior" Bridgeman came into the picture.
Junior Bridgeman was a basketball star at the University of Louisville and enjoyed a 12 season career in the NBA, primarily with the Milwaukee Bucks. After Bridgeman retired from the NBA at the age of 33, he bought five Wendy's locations in the greater Milwaukee area. Milwaukee fans grew accustomed to seeing the former basketball star working behind the counter at one of his Wendy's restaurants.
Bridgeman's Wendy's franchise stores in Milwaukee were doing anywhere between $400,000 and $800,000 in annual sales - not too good for comparable stores in similar markets. Bridgeman instilled a team concept in his stores empowering his workers to take pride in their jobs and offering bonuses if certain goals were met. Within a short while, Bridgeman's Wendy's locations were taking in a minimum of $1.5 million in annual sales.
Pictured right - Junior Bridgeman. Photo courtesy Fortune Magazine.
As business grew for Bridgeman, so did the number of locations he owned. At one point, Bridgeman Restaurants (now called Manna, Inc.) owned 160 Wendy's franchises - many of those in Wisconsin where he played professional basketball - the second most by any single franchisee in the U.S. for Wendy's - and nearly 125 Chili's locations. He also held franchises in Fazoli's, Perkins, Fanny May Chocolates, and Blaze Pizza. At its height, Bridgeman's company - with offices in Milwaukee and Louisville - owned around 450 different restaurant locations and employed 9000 people.
Bridgeman also owned the Napa River Grill - an upscale steak and wine place in the Westport Village shopping area on Louisville's east side - when he found that Erwin was looking to sell Mark's Seed Store. Bridgeman's company took over ownership of Mark's Seed Store in October of 2013 from Erwin who is now in commercial real estate specializing in restaurant properties. In 2016, Bridgeman divested many of his holdings in Wendy's and Chili's to become an independent bottler for Coca-Cola owning the rights to distribute Coke products in southern Illinois, Missouri, eastern Kansas and Nebraska. However, he still owns Mark's Seed Stores with 8 locations in Kentucky and southern Indiana, as well as a number of franchised restaurants.
It had just started to rain pretty heavily when we pulled up to the Highlands location of Mark's Feed Store along Bardstown Road at Sherwood Ave. (see map) We went around the block and found a parking spot on Sherwood next to Mark's Feed Store.
The Highlands location of Mark's Feed Store is in an older building with a long and narrow dining area. There was a set stairs that went to a dining room upstairs that we didn't visit. Booths were along the walls with tables in the center of dining area, all of which had vinyl checkerboard table coverings.
Our server that afternoon, Dylan, came over with a couple lunch menus for us. I ordered up a pint can of the West 6th IPA from the West 6th Brewery over in Lexington, KY. My wife just stayed with water, but I like to have a beer when I have barbecue.
The lunch menu is more condensed than the dinner menu at Mark's Feed Store. They feature a sandwich lunch special daily with a choice of either pulled pork, brisket or chicken with one side for $6.99. (Add .50 cents for brisket.) All in all, the lunch menu was pretty basic with no combo plates, no burgers, and no dinner entrees available. But one thing they did have was burgoo as an appetizer.
For those who don't know, burgoo is a stew that is more of a social event than anything. It's similar to booyah, a stew that is found in northern Wisconsin and northern Minnesota. Burgoo has its roots in Kentucky where people long ago would combine the bounty from wild game hunts - usually deer meat, squirrel meat and game bird meat - then added vegetables such as corn, green beans, potatoes, tomatoes, and okra to the mix. The concoction was simmered low and slow - sometimes as long as two days - in a large vat that had to be stirred on a regular basis. The burgoo was generally served to large groups during harvest season.
Today, burgoo is still found throughout Kentucky, but you will also find it in parts of central and southern Illinois, and southern Indiana. Game meat burgoo from long ago has been replaced by a modern day recipe featuring a combination of chicken, pork, lamb, and sometimes beef, with a myriad of vegetables. And depending upon the recipes used it can be made with a little bit of a spicy bite. Most of the time these days, burgoo is made as part of a fund-raiser or a local celebration. My sister-in-law comes from the town of Winchester, IL and they have an annual burgoo festival that draws hundreds and hundreds of people. And the highlight is the making of the burgoo a couple days in advance. I understand that getting a two to three hour shift manning the vats of burgoo during the overnight is usually an excuse to drink heavily during that time.
The burgoo at Mark's Feed Store was very good. I ordered a cup of it and it was more like a small bowl of burgoo than a cup. Like good burgoo, it was thick - so thick that the spoon could literally stand up in the center of the stew. It featured smoked pieces of pork, chicken and brisket with corn, peas and other veggies mixed in. It did have a bit of a spicy kick to it, but it didn't overpowering the overall taste of the burgoo. I would have had no problem coming back to Mark's to enjoy just a bowl of burgoo. It's a great comfort food, for sure.
For lunch, they had a "Bar-b-que Lite" platter that featured a choice between smoked brisket, smoked pork or smoked chicken with a choice of one or two sides. I got the brisket along with a side of baked beans and spicy fries. The brisket was served in a small paper food boat and was cut thick. But it was tender and had a good smoky flavor to it. The fries, however, didn't seem to have much - if any - spicy flavor to them. And the baked beans were simply dreadful. They didn't appear to be anything more than Van Camps pork and beans from a can warmed up and served. Even adding barbecue sauce didn't help those out.
My wife ended up getting the 4 Bone Baby Back Ribs lunch platter. The ribs had a lot of meat on them, but they were covered with what appeared to be a glaze. They didn't appeared to be smoked, but I tried a bite of one of the ribs and they had a good smoky flavor to them. The meat pulled apart from the bone rather easily and were very tender to the bite. For her side, she got the mac and cheese, but she wasn't too enamored with it. "It tastes like it's been warmed up in a microwave," she told me. "It's all rubbery."
Since Mark Erwin felt that good barbecue also had to have good sauces, there were three different types of sauces on the table. There was a tangy sweet that I liked quite a bit; a hot sauce that really snuck up at the end of the flavor; and a honey mustard that I didn't try because, well, I don't like a honey mustard sauce. I usually like to combine the spicy and sweet sauces together, but they didn't seem to go well together. I ended up sticking primarily with the tangy sweet sauce as I finished up the brisket.
The highlight of the lunch was - I felt - the excellent burgoo they had at Mark's Feed Store. While the brisket and baby back ribs were good, the sides were simply abysmal. It tasted like the baked beans were nothing more than canned pork and beans, the "spicy" fries didn't have hardly any spicy taste to them, and my wife's side of mac and cheese was overcooked and rubbery. But the service and the atmosphere was fine at Mark's Feed Store, as was the barbecue we had. I just wish they would have offered a combo plate during lunch as I would have liked to have tried some of the pulled pork barbecue, as well.
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