Frugal Traveler: Memphis on the Cheap: Elvis, Barbecue and Baseball

Written By Unknown on Jumat, 26 Juli 2013 | 17.35

By John Woo

Discount Elvis in Memphis: Finding the admission fee for Graceland's tour beyond his budget, Seth Kugel goes hunting for cheap Elvis souvenirs.

"Mawl medium hot?" asked the server at Craig's Bar-B-Q, a white clapboard shack with church basement furniture, smoke-tinted walls and a cash-only policy in DeValls Bluff, Ark., about an hour and a half west of Memphis, Tenn.

"Yes," I said. Wrong answer. Other customers took pity on my Northernness, and intervened: It was multiple choice, and "mawl" meant mild. I chose hot and had my first example of this region's perfect frugal meal: the barbecue pork sandwich with coleslaw for the beautiful (if disconcertingly unrounded) price of $3.93, $4.34 with tax.

It was just a lunch stop en route from Louisiana to Memphis, where finding good, cheap barbecue was one of three goals I had set for myself. But thanks to Craig's I realized cheap was as much a function of the right order as the restaurant. So a pork sandwich, served hot, with slaw, would become my order for the next three days. It never cost me more than $5. Add a bottomless iced tea, some sides even, and I rarely broke $10.

My other two goals? With tours of Graceland starting at an astonishing $33, I'd search instead for the best — by which I mean tackiest — Elvis souvenir for under $10. I'd also skip the blues clubs of Beale Street to look for local spots where Memphians outnumbered tourists (see below).

But the barbecue task is what shaped my days (and possibly my waistline). In about 60 hours, I had eight sandwiches in places both famous and not. I could focus on the sandwiches themselves: Bar-B-Q Shop's meat was particularly moist; Brad's had the spiciest sauce; Central's was packed with both meat and slaw; Payne's was the messiest and sweetest.

But to a barbecue amateur like me, culinary differences did not matter quite as much as atmosphere. And Craig's, an hour and a half outside of Memphis, had set the minimalist bar: if a smoky kitchen, some bare tables and a no-nonsense one-person wait staff would do, why aim higher?

That's why I found myself giving demerits to the slicker, more commercialized operations, no matter how good the end product. When I sat at the bar at Corky's (corkysbbq.com), the bartender who served me couldn't stop talking about how they ship their ribs everywhere and how well their book sold on QVC. I'm not sure whether that took the zing out of the sauce, or whether it was lacking zing to begin with.

Signs outside the Bar-B-Q Shop (dancingpigs.com) obnoxiously trumpeted its product as "Best in Memphis" (twice); inside I was greeted with "I'm Jim, and I'll be taking care of you today" — a bit too Olive Garden for me. But this was largely made up for by the zippy, almost Buffalo-like sauce on the sandwich and the Texas toast they served it on, replacing the traditional hamburger bun. Central BBQ (cbqmemphis.com) kept it realest: you order at the counter, where a quarter-slab of ribs was just $6. I greedily broke my sandwiches-only plan to take advantage of the great deal.

But the finest example of the sort of atmosphere I found at Craig's in Memphis proper was at the much-celebrated Payne's, in a former service station across the street from a tire shop called L'il Gipson (or L'ill Gipson, depending on which sign you believe). The menu board showcased an absurd lack of variety: side dishes include only beans and chips (60 cents, in the bag), and they don't even have tea. The kitchen, if you can call it that, consisted of a stove behind the counter with a simmering pot of beans and two bedraggled yellow refrigerators.

The sandwich itself was a $3.95 mess, heaped with chopped pork, showered with "hot" sauce more sweet than hot, and overflowing with yellowish-green, mustard-laced coleslaw. It may not have been the Platonic ideal of a Memphis barbecue sandwich, but if it was good enough for the guy grabbing a bite with his cement mixer parked outside, it was good enough for me.

Those spots have all achieved some level of fame, but the farther out I drove (and Memphis is one sprawled-out city), things got friendlier. The young woman behind the counter at Three Little Pigs, a shack in the parking lot of the Quince Station Shopping Center, a 20-minute drive southeast of town, was chatty and seemed interested in hearing why I was in town; an older man on his way back from his bowling league was open to chatting. The pork was just O.K., but I did appreciate their motto: "We Will Serve No Swine Before Its Time." Even better were Tom's Bar-B-Q and Deli (tomsbarbq.com) and Brad's Bar-B-Q, the first near the airport and the second just across the border in Bartlett, Tenn.

At Tom's, on a nondescript corner on State Route 176, I ordered the pork sandwich platter, which came with two sides and a drink for $8.49. But something told me I should also try the rib tips — perhaps it was the multiple oversize posters showing Guy Fieri posing with the owner and the rib tips. The rip tips were $8.99 a pound, so I asked the smallest amount I could order; a man behind the counter overheard me and said, "I'll put some in there for you."

And he did: four dry-rubbed, irregularly shaped, leathery, peppery, chewy pieces of rib tips. I gnawed my way through them and then realized I had no idea what rib tips are. So I went back to the kitchen to ask my benefactor. Turns out rib tips are the leftovers you get when separated off when you cut ribs St. Louis style. "They're like jerky," he told me. "I call them game food — something to nibble on when you're watching the game."


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