When I was in Nashville on a recent trip there, I had an open night after seeing accounts in the area. I got hold of my former colleague who lives in the city (and who wasn't available to meet up for dinner that evening) and asked him, "If I were to think of getting barbecue tonight, where would you send me?" He didn't even hesitate - Martin's Bar-B-Que Joint. It turned out that Martin's wasn't all that far from my hotel in Nashville's Midtown area and had plenty of parking available. I took off soon after that to go try Martin's Bar-B-Que Joint.
Pat Martin grew up in the small town of Corinth, MS just over the Tennessee/Mississippi border and about 100 miles east of Memphis. As a young child, his father's job as a government bond trader moved the Martin family to Connecticut. But in the summer months, Martin would head back to Mississippi to live with his grandparents. He learned from his father and grandfather that everything tastes better when it's cooked over an open flame on a grill. Barbecuing was a big part of his upbringing and Martin would go to Memphis with his father and/or grandfather to have barbecue at Gridley's Bar-B-Q (which closed in 2017).
His paternal grandmother was also a renowned cook in the Corinth area. Many of her family recipes that she used were printed in the local Church of Christ cookbook. In fact, the bulk of the recipes in the church cookbook that was sold to raise money for the church were from Martin's grandmother. And it turned out that the local Baptist and Presbyterian churches had Martin's grandmother's recipes in THEIR cookbooks, as well!
When Martin was 15 years old, he bought his first cookbook - The Thrill of the Grill - which he viewed as his primer to get more in-depth with cooking on a grill. But it wasn't until he moved back to Corinth for his high school years, then going on to college in Henderson, TN at Freed-Hardeman University to study finance that Martin developed his love for smoked pork and the techniques that were being used.
Pictured right - Pat Martin. Photo courtesy Nashville Lifestyles
There was a barbecue place in Henderson - about 40 miles north of Corinth - by the name of Thomas & Webb where, as a freshman in college, Martin saw his first whole hog being barbecued on a spit. The sight was amazing, but the smell of the smoke was even more intoxicating. When he tasted the pork pulled directly from the hog, he was hooked. This was West Tennessee whole hog barbecue at its finest.
Martin befriended owner Harold Thomas and wanted to learn all about the smoking techniques Thomas used to make the whole-hog barbecue. A religious school, Freed-Hardeman had a strict curfew, but Martin would regularly break it so he could go turn coals in the smoker at Thomas & Webb and to learn from the pitmasters.
During his time in college, Martin would do his own whole-hog barbecues - usually with pigs that Harold Thomas helped him source - for fraternities and social gatherings on campus. A summer internship in Chicago before his senior year gave Martin a chance to do whole hog barbecue for colleagues and clients in the Windy City.
But upon returning to Henderson, Martin was expelled from Freed-Hardeman for non-Christian transgressions. For his senior year, he transferred to Lipscomb University in Nashville - also a Christian university, but not as strict as Freed-Hardeman. Martin made friends fast while at Lipscomb with his whole-hog barbecues.
Upon graduating with a degree in finance, Martin became a bond trader in Chicago and New York City. But he never forgot his roots in whole-hog smoking. He decided he wanted to get back to the South and took a job working for a bank in Charlotte, NC. Newly married and facing a future in finance, Martin would immerse himself in smoking whole pigs on the weekend for his new colleagues and friends. He soon found that the finance world wasn't really what he wanted to do. He thought about getting a barbecue rig and traveling around to barbecue contests across the South. He also thought about going to culinary school, but didn't pull the trigger on that. But he soon realized two things - 1) he didn't want to work in finance any longer; and 2) his marriage was on the rocks. He quit the banking business, moved back to Nashville, then found himself divorced not long after moving back to the city.
In the late 1990's, Martin started doing odd-jobs around the area. Someone asked him if he could lay some sod in a yard of a new house that had just been built and Martin decided to start a landscaping business. It was also about this time that a young lady he had met during his year at Lipscomb - Nashville native Martha Ann Neil - came back into his life. The two married and Martin started a landscaping business in 2001.
Pictured right - Patrick and Martha Ann Martin. Photo courtesy Lipscomb University.
Five years after he started the landscaping business, workers were hauling all the company's mowers and other tools to a job outside of Nashville. The trailer came off the hitch causing the mowers, trimmers and other gear to fly off basically destroying everything. At that point, Martin realized that he was out of the landscaping business.
After receiving a check from his insurance agent for the replacement cost of the mowers and other tools, Martin decided to head down to Nolensville, south and east of Nashville, to get some brisket tacos from a Mexican restaurant that smoked their own meat. However, when he pulled up to the place it was closed. He went next door to an auto repair shop to inquire about the restaurant and it turned out the owner of the repair shop was also the landlord of the building where the Mexican restaurant was located. "They're closed," the landlord told Martin. "They were evicted for not paying rent."
At that point, something came over Martin and he said, "I'll take the building." It was a small place, not any larger than 950 square feet, but it perfectly fit what Martin was going to do with it - make it into a West Tennessee whole-hog barbecue joint. He called his wife and told her what he had done. The one thing that Martha Ann saw when Patrick would do his whole-hog barbecues for friends and clients was the sheer joy he had seeing the look on people's faces when they would eat his smoked pork. She was fully on board with his change in career.
The one thing Martin set out to do was to keep the dying art of West Tennessee whole-hog barbecue going. When he was going to college in the early 90's, there were 12 whole-hog barbecue joints in a town of 5500 people. 15 years later, there were just two barbecue places that did whole-hog barbecue in Henderson. Martin was determined to keep whole-hog barbecue as a viable form of regional barbecuing with his new restaurant.
The problem was - Martin didn't know the first thing about running a restaurant. Martha Ann and he navigated through the start-up process like two blind mice having to deal with ordering food, keeping an inventory, getting health department licenses, and dealing with state and local taxes. And another thing he needed was a worker.
One evening, Martin was having a beer with a buddy at an East Nashville bar that had live music. His buddy knew the drummer in the band that night, a guy by the name of Bo Collier who moonlighted as a line cook when he wasn't playing in the band. After an introduction by his friend, Martin was so taken with Collier that when Collier went back to the stage to play his set, Martin yelled at him from the side of the stage between songs, "Hey, man! I want to hire you!"
Collier casually said, "OK, man!" And when Collier went over to Martin's house to finalize the deal over a barbecue dinner a couple days later, he was blown away with Martin's expertise with a grill. "You're sitting on a gold mine," Collier told Martin.
With everything in place, Martin's Bar-B-Que Joint opened on October 16, 2006. Anticipation from the locals was so high that they sold out of food for the day at 5:45 p.m. Word of mouth on Martin's barbecue rose to a fever pitch that long lines to get into the restaurant were starting to be a norm. By the first couple of weeks, Martin realized that he needed more help so he enlisted some friends and family members to work for him until he could hire more people.
Within a short time, it became apparent that the 950 square-foot structure was too small for the amount of business Martin was doing. He continued to run out of barbecue early - and, actually, that was his plan as that's what all the good West Tennessee barbecue joints would do. But for people in the more urban Nashville area, it would piss them off that he'd run out of food. In 2010, he built a brand new location - much larger than the original building - just across the street and moved in. He was able to make more barbecue - brisket, turkey, chicken, etc. - but he would still run out from time to time.
But he also knew that if he was going to grow and expand his business, he needed some help and guidance. A chance meeting with two guys trying out his barbecue - John Michael Bodnar and Nick Pihakis who had started Jim 'n Nick's Barbecue in Birmingham, AL - put him on the path of expansion. Bodnar's father Mike Bodnar was the CEO of Fresh Hospitality, a holding and equity company that helped restaurants like Martin's Bar-B-Que Joint expand. Martin agreed to give Fresh Hospitality an equity stake in Martin's Barbecue Joint after his meeting with John Michael Bodnar.
One of the things that the partnership with Bodnar and Pihakis did was help create a collective of chefs such as Ashley Christensen, Rodney Scott and Sean Brock, Southern Heritage writers such as John T. Edge, and others who were like-minded in keeping the traditions of Southern barbecue alive. The group - who called themselves The FatBack Collective - felt that while barbecue competitions were good, it was homogenizing barbecue away from a regional perspective. The group believed that the type of hog used in the cooking was the key. They advocated using Duroc, Berkshire, Yorkshire old-school varieties of pigs that weren't raised in feed lots and sold as a commodity, but raised in pastures and allowed to freely roam the fields.
The group all felt that there were no real secrets in barbecuing, just using the best products possible. To prove their point, the collective entered the prestigious Memphis in May barbecue contest in 2011 and with a top quality hog and used nothing more than salt, pepper, and smoke in the cooking process. They got third place. The next year, they competed again using the same techniques and got 7th place. The FatBack Collective more than proved their point and continues extoll the virtues of heritage breeding in pastures rather than feed lots, while also supporting farmers and working with restaurants who use their packing partners to offer the best in naturally-raised hogs for barbecuing.
Along with his partnership with Fresh Hospitality, Martin was able to open his second restaurant in 2011 in the Belmont-Hillsboro neighborhood of Nashville. A short lived location in Morgantown, WV closed a few years ago, but a large Martin's Bar-B-Que Joint opened in Nashville's South of Broadway (SoBro) neighborhood in 2016. In 2019, the location on Elliston Place which used to house a Logan's Roadhouse was opened. Today, Martin's Bar-B-Que Joint has six locations in Central Tennessee, one in Louisville, KY, one in Birmingham, AL, and one in Charleston, SC.
In 2017, Martin - along with Fresh Hospitality - opened Hugh-Baby's, a fast-casual burger/barbecue joint that paid homage to small town restaurants in Mississippi and Tennessee that Martin remembered as a young boy. The name Hugh-Baby was chosen in reverence to his uncle Hugh Coleman who was known in the family as Hugh-Baby. Martin's uncle loved these burger/barbecue restaurants and it was always a treat for Martin to accompany his family - along with Uncle Hugh-Baby - to these places as a youngster.
For the past few years, Martin has taken himself out of the day-to-day operations of the Martin's Bar-B-Que Joint locations. However, he is involved with the recruiting and training of pit masters who he has shown the art of whole hog barbecue hoping to keep the West Tennessee heritage alive with his barbecue joints. His goal is to turn the pit masters he's training into management personnel to grow his 9 location chain of barbecue places around the Southeast. And as an incentive to the pit masters, he gives them a 20% stake in the location that they're in charge of to give them a sense of pride and ownership in what they're doing.
And on top of running a barbecue empire and training potential pit masters, Martin is also an author. In 2022, Martin released his first cookbook - Life of Fire: Mastering the Arts of Pit-Cooked Barbecue, The Grill, and The Smokehouse. The book focuses on Martin's whole-hog cooking techniques and procedures, as well as family recipes that have been handed down from his grandmother. Martin was also a fixture at the annual Big Apple Block Party barbecue extravaganza in New York City until the event ended in 2018. He has been featured on Diners, Drive-ins and Dives, The Today Show, and has had articles and mentions in publications such as Condé Nash Traveler, Men's Journal, and Bon Appétit. Not bad for a guy from the Mississippi/Tennessee border who wants to keep the heritage of West Tennessee whole-hog barbecue alive!
The Elliston Place location for Martin's Bar-B-Que Joint was about a half-mile from my hotel. (see map) I could have walked it, but I wanted to drive there so I could check out some sights around Vanderbilt University and Centennial Park after dinner. There's plenty of parking to the west side of and behind the building at Martin's. I realized that the area on Elliston Place was familiar to me as the former location for the venerable Rotier's Restaurant was just across and down the street. (To see the Road Tips write up about Rotier's, click here.) Rotier's lost their lease in 2021 after the new owners of their 90-year-old building didn't want to renew their lease and instead they tore down the building for future development on the block where West End Ave. meets Elliston Place.
Inside Martin's Bar-B-Que Joint, they've done a lot to make it look like a joint. It's sort of kitschy with old license plates, road signs, farm signs, beer logo signs, pictures - just a lot of busy stuff on the pine wood walls of the restaurant. They had a pretty good sized dining area at Martin's and I would have to say it was less than half capacity when I was in there.
There's a step-up bar area with booths along the side wall. I don't know what you call that thing above the bar, but inside of it were flatscreen televisions with more kitsch on the outside of the structure. Music from Hank Williams, Jr., Drive-By Truckers, the late-Charlie Robison and North Mississippi All-Stars was playing in the background while I was there.
The patio is located off to the side of the front of the building. The smoking pit house was there, as well, with an outdoor bar area that was unmanned that evening. Stacks of oak wood were outside the pit house, but I didn't smell any thing cooking while I was there.
It's counter-service at Martin's Bar-B-Que. The line was five deep when I got there. Some people were there to pick-up to-go orders, while others were ordering for dine-in. A guy who was in front of me in line turned and asked me if I'd ever been to Martin's before and I said I hadn't. "I haven't either," he said. "I was wondering what I should get." We chatted a bit and found that he was also in town for business and was also told that Martin's was the best barbecue in the city. He seemed like a nice guy and for a moment I contemplated asking him if he wanted to hang out and have dinner. For a moment. But, no, I didn't. It's a guess he feels the same as I do about dining alone on the road and it's nice to have some company from time to time.
I looked through the menu as I was waiting to order at the counter. They had a number of smoked meats from pulled pork, brisket, spare ribs, chicken, sausage and turkey. Sandwiches with the smoked meats were available along with chicken tenders, fried catfish, brisket tacos, and smoked bologna sandwiches. Salads, smoked brisket chili and Brunswick stew were also available.
I told the guy I was in line with that anytime I'm at a new barbecue place, I always try to get a sampler platter and Martin's had three sampler platters to choose from. They had a pulled pork and brisket sampler, four bones and brisket, and the "Big Poppa" sampler that consisted of a full rack of ribs, 12 ounces of pulled pork,12 ounces of brisket, 12 ounces of sliced smoked turkey, and a choice of 3 sides. That was designed to feed six people and I thought that might have been a little too much for me.
I ended up getting the brisket and ribs sampler. Two sides came with the sampler and I had a choice of a number of items including fries, potato salad, homemade chips, mac & cheese, and hushpuppies. I got the baked beans and the cole slaw. I took a seat in a booth in the bar area and placed my number on the table. I was a little confused about the bar procedure and I asked the guy at the counter that if I wanted a second beer if I had to come back to the counter. He said that was an affirmative. The line was always five to seven people deep while I was there and I just decided to order two beers and get it over with. I got a couple of the Homestyle hazy IPA from the Bearded Iris brewery in Nashville. I liked the beer so much that I stopped at a liquor store later in the evening to pick up a couple six-packs of the beer to take home.
I purposely took a table where I noticed there was a squeeze bottle of barbecue sauce. It was a vinegar-based that was just OK to me. A small tub of a sweet smoky sauce came on the side. I didn't realize until later on there were bottles of the sweet smoky sauce on other tables. But quite honestly, neither the ribs or the brisket needed any sauce. The ribs had a great rub on them with a chewy bark. The meat fell off the bone rather easily. The ribs were very good.
As was the brisket. Flavorful and tender, the brisket nearly melted in my mouth. It also had a tasty bark on the outer shell and had a great smoky flavor.
The sides were good to very good. The cole slaw was vinegar-based and a bit bland for my taste. But the baked beans were very good and had a sweet and smoky flavor to them. There were chunks of pork and brisket in the baked beans and I didn't need to try and sauce them up as I liked them the way they were.
My first visit to Martin's Bar-B-Que Joint will not be my last. We're making new contacts in the Nashville production industry and I'll have no problem heading down there a couple times a year. The good thing about it, there's a Hilton property right next door to the Martin's Bar-B-Que Joint on Elliston Place so I can stay there and walk to Martin's. The ribs were excellent, as was the brisket. I would like to try the pulled pork the next time I go as that's what Patrick Martin is famous for. He's got a great back story as he finally found his passion in life and he's been very successful at it.
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