This is an introductory post to the Memphis in May World Championship Barbecue Cooking Contest, or “BBQ Fest” as the locals call it. I’ll explain what it is, and how I came to be on a team. If you’ve been reading my blog for more than a year, you probably already know a lot of this.
BBQ Fest is an annual event where over 200 teams compete for the World Championship in three main categories: Ribs, Shoulder, and Whole Hog. There is also a fourth category, Patio Porkers, for smaller teams with smaller grills. The week before BBQ Fest, teams load in and build their booths. Some of the booths can be quite elaborate: Ours have always been multiple stories tall, and last year and this year we’re working with a professional designer from Holliday Flowers.
Wednesday night is a special “friends & family only” night, and then Thursday-Saturday the event is open to the public. BBQ Fest does not run on Sunday, to give teams a day to tear down their booths and load out before the new work week begins.
The first couple of years I lived Downtown and attended BBQ Fest, I didn’t have much fun. Why? Because I didn’t know a lot of people on teams. You see, each of the 200+ booths is a private party – you have to be a team member, or be invited in by a team member, to sample their BBQ and beverages. Teams are not allowed to sell to the public. This is due to state health regulations. There are licensed vendors that sell BBQ, but it’s not a whole lot of fun to walk around and be an outsider looking in.
By 2005-06, I’d met enough of my neighbors that I knew people who knew people on teams. I got in four or five booths in ’05 and nearly a dozen in ’06. Had a lot more fun, but I still didn’t know what it was like to be on a team.
Then, in late 2006, I got an e-mail from my friend Chuck. “A few of us are thinking about starting a BBQ team next year,” the e-mail said. “Would you be interested?” He told me that he had a friend in Chicago who owns a BBQ restaurant who would bring his rig down and cook. It would be mainly Downtowners having a party at BBQ Fest, but at the same time we’d have enough cooking talent to do well in the contest. The team would be called The Ques Brothers, with the two main guys taking the aliases Elwood Que and Jake Que.
“What would my responsibilities as a team member be?” I asked. “You know I can’t cook. And to be honest, I don’t really want to work on the load-in, build, or tear-down of the booth.”
“You don’t have to,” he said. To this day I’ve held the team to that agreement, although I contribute in other ways. I’m one of two webmasters on the team, and last year I took 700 photos for the team website. I also get our sponsors a lot of coverage via my blog, and I contribute ideas as I think of them. I’ve offered to pay extra for my membership since I refuse to do physical labor, but they haven’t taken me up on it.
That first year, about 35 of us paid to be on the team. One of the team members worked for Terex and got them to sponsor us. We built a large double-decker booth with images of Terex earth-moving vehicles on the front. Our head cook, Willie from Honky Tonk Barbeque in Chicago, brought his rig down and set up a kitchen. Thursday night was “sponsor night” as Terex invited a lot of their clients into the booth. They didn’t kick us out or make us wait on them as some sponsors do, but still, there were a lot of people in the booth we didn’t know.
We were each given guest wristbands to hand out, to people who weren’t team members but were people we wanted to stop by and enjoy our hospitality. A couple of months before BBQ Fest ’07, I met a couple of regulars at the Flying Saucer, Mark and Steve, who had just moved here for their sales jobs with Yellow Book. They asked me about BBQ Fest. I told them about it, then said, “You know, the only way you can really experience it is to be invited into a team’s booth. I’m going to make sure you have guest wristbands. I don’t want you guys to feel like outsiders like I did the first few years.” They showed up, ate, drank, met a lot of other team members and had a great time. That made me really happy, to help people new to the city have an experience that is uniquely Memphis.
Two other guests I invited were my friends Shane and Leigh. When I moved Downtown and started going to Sleep Out Louie’s, they were two of the first people to befriend me and make me feel like part of the gang. Now I had a chance to show them some hospitality in return. The three of us hung out on the upstairs level of our booth Saturday night and watched the crowd on the sidewalk. They had such a good time that they joined the team a couple of years later.
Although we partied nonstop, Willie was serious about the food. He cooked delicious ribs, shoulder, chicken, sausage and other goodies for everyone to enjoy. Furthermore, he cooked up pork shoulders to enter into the judging, and we came in 12th in shoulder out of almost 80 teams – very impressive for a team in its first year. “We’re going to do even better next year,” the team said. “We want to make the top 10 and get a trophy.”
BBQ Fest ’08 was even more awesome – but it was nearly a disaster. Terex didn’t return as our sponsor, and we were lazy about getting people to pay membership dues. Only a couple of weeks out, we were several grand in the red. However, the last week of April and the first week of May saw us turn things around. We landed exactly the kind of sponsor we wanted – Circa by John Bragg. Although they weren’t as huge a sponsor as Terex, they were the kind we wanted – Downtown people who would party with us, and at the same time promote their business, realizing their target audience would be in our booth with them.
We also went on a late membership drive. Team members put the word out that we were looking to expand the team roster, and I put out the word on my blog. It was pretty much “We’ll take anybody, we need the money.” To some extent, I regret us doing that – I wish we’d been a little more selective – but, to be fair, some of the people we met that way were cool people who became long-term friends.
The booth was a lot more basic than ’07. We used scaffolding that wasn’t as good (sorry Danny but it’s true) but was free because a team member owned it. We decorated with whatever fabric and carpet samples we could get for cheap or free. Finally, we got the booth to a point where it didn’t look half bad – and then a thunderstorm blew through on Wednesday and destroyed all our hard work. We rebuilt and had a good time anyway. The booth next to us was the Valero booth and we heard it cost $30,000. Swanky booth indeed, but we had a better time than our corporate neighbors next door.
My favorite memory of BBQ Fest ’08 was Thursday night. About 9-10 PM, the food was out, the beer was flowing, the music was bumping, and we had a lot of our friends in the tent as invited guests. Everyone just got down and danced and had a great time.
Saturday was judging day. Since part of the judging is presentation, every year I make it a point not to get to the park until about 2 PM on Saturday, well after judging occurs. I don’t want to be in the way. So Saturday of BBQ Fest ’08, I showed up and was immediately kicked out of the booth. “The judges are on their way back for a second round,” I was told. “That means we’re in the top 10.” By 3 PM we were still standing outside (someone had the good sense to pull a keg out so we wouldn’t go thirsty) because the judges were back again, meaning we had made the top three.
We went to the awards ceremony at 6 PM, and took the stage when we were announced as the third-place winners in shoulder. A little disappointing that we didn’t win the world championship, but to hit the top three in only our second year… that’s almost unheard of. After the awards, a lot of the teams, who are professional BBQers who travel from one event to the next, started tearing down their booths. Not us! We had one more big party, and everyone got their picture taken with the trophy. On Sunday we took the trophy to Circa for photos. Our third-place prize money took the team into the black financially.
Willie took the trophy back to Chicago with him, to display in his restaurant. It was such a big deal up there that Mayor Daley came out to make on official proclamation recognizing Willie and Honky Tonk Barbeque.
The big win made us the team everyone wanted to be on for 2009, which was a mixed blessing. Our team ballooned to nearly 80 members, so we had lots of funds from membership fees. We also picked up a new sponsor, The Silly Goose. Circa returned as a sponsor as well. In addition, we picked up Holliday Flowers as a sponsor – they didn’t provide money, but boy did they make a difference anyway. Event planner and booth designer Brent turned our booth from a nasty mud pit into a structure that looked like a Miami nightclub in a matter of days. The good scaffolding returned. The featured country for Memphis in May was Chile, and Brent crafted two maois from Easter Island who looked out the booth’s front window. We got second in Best Booth. I can’t believe we didn’t win.
We also entered the Miss Piggie competition, which had been named Piggie Idol for 2009. James Hyter, who had sung “Ol’Man River” at Sunset Symphony for years, had just passed away, so we decided to rewrite the lyrics as “Ol’ Miss Piggie” in his honor. Our inspirational leader/father figure stood on stage and sang the song that team member Skippy had hastily put together. “Memphis in May… sure is sweet… covered in mud from our head to our feet. ROAST that pork! …TURN that spit! Haven’t been home, so I smell like……. bacon…….”
I noted earlier that the size of the team was a mixed blessing. With 80 team members, if each of them invited 5 guests and they were all in the booth at the same time… well, you do the math. At some points we were so crowded that we had to refuse entry to everyone but team members, until the booth cleared out. The fire marshal made us keep count of how many people were on the upstairs deck and cut it off at 40. I worked a security shift at the door, which was stressful… I had to explain to people who’d been invited in the booth at 3:30 PM, when hardly anyone was there, why they couldn’t come back in at 9:00 when were packed to capacity. I even had to refuse entry to a tube top hottie. After someone else had taken over, I had to walk with the park entrance to meet one of the Saucer girls and get her in. When hot girls are being denied/are almost being denied entry to the booth, you know we’ve got a crowd control problem.
The excess of people also made it hard for the cooks to do their job. The shoulder we entered was not our best, and when the top ten were called for shoulder, The Ques Brothers’ name was not among them. “BULLLLLLL… SHITTTTTTT….” yelled our inspriational leader/father figure, who was extremely drunk by that point in the day. We found out later that we’d slipped to 33rd.
Now we’re gearing up for 2010. Circa is back as a sponsor. Silly Goose dropped out, but as I mentioned in an earlier post, we scored a major coup when we landed blogging/content management platform WordPress as a sponsor. Holliday Flowers will once again be designing the booth. Can’t wait to see it.
We’ve also got the team down to a more manageable size. A few of our members decided they wanted to branch off on their own, and they formed a Patio Poker team called Squeal Street. About 20 of our members jumped to the new team. It was an amicable split, and very good because now we all have two booths to hang out in.
Last year I had just started a new job, and did not have any vacation time yet. When I got hired, I had to negotiate to have Thursday and Friday of BBQ Fest off. Now, I’ve been there for a year, and have vacation time. I have all of next week off.
One of the team members was discussing the load-in of materials, which will happen Saturday, and the build and decoration of the booth, which will happen Saturday, Sunday, Monday and Tuesday. “You know I’m off all next week, right?” I commented. “So I guess I don’t need to tell you where I’ll be at 11 AM Monday morning.”
“Flying Saucer?” he replied.
“Yep,” I said, making sure team members are aware of my “no physical labor” agreement.
Stay tuned for BBQ Fest ’10 updates and pics throughout the week. It’s 9:14, so the team has been loading in for 14 minutes now. Think I’ll pop open a PBR and wait for the Saucer to open at 11.