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TENNESSEE |
“I wasn’t making any money the first couple of years and I said I’m going to give it one more year, one more year. Well one more year has turned into 27 years.” – Walker Taylor
Germantown Commissary
2290 Germantown Road
Germantown, TN 38138
www.commissarybbq.com
Tired of the corporate business world, Walker Taylor opened his Germantown barbecue restaurant in an old country store in 1981. Though at first business was tough, the Germantown Commissary became a favorite barbecue stop for the east Memphis suburbs. Besides favorites like the pulled pork and ribs, the Commissary prepares many pies and cakes, Brunswick stew, and deviled eggs.
What follows is a portion of the original interview that has been edited for length. To download the entire transcript in PDF form, please click here.
Subject: Walker Taylor
Date: July 21, 2008
Location: Germantown Commissary – Germantown, TN
Interviewer & Photographer: Rien T. Fertel
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Rien T. Fertel: This is Rien Fertel with the Southern Foodways Alliance. It is Monday, July 21, 2008. I’m at the Germantown Commissary with Mr. Walker Taylor at 2290 Germantown Road South. So, Mr. Taylor can you introduce yourself and tell us your name and birth date, please?
Walker Taylor: My name is Walker Taylor. I was born August 25, 1957 in Greenwood, Mississippi.
When did you open this restaurant?
August 1, 1981.
What is a commissary?
Commissaries back in the old days were little country stores that were mainly on the farms where the farm labor and help would often shop at and that’s where they would trade, so they were essentially just country stores which is what this was up until 1981 when we turned it into a restaurant.
And when you go into the restaurant business in 1981 did you have—did you own or operate other restaurants before then?
No; I had just gotten out of college two years prior and worked for a big corporation and didn’t want to do that, so I wanted to get into the food business.
And tell me about those first years in business. Were they difficult; was it an easy you know life from—from the business world to the restaurant business?
Well it was pretty lean back then. One, the economy was not in a great time back in the early ’80s, very similar to what’s going on now. Gas prices had gone through the roof and the difference was interest rates were extremely high then. As I say, it was not a good time in the economy. Germantown had not matured into a—where you had money spending people living out here. Primarily then people had moved out here back in the late ‘70s to escape the busing and they were still paying pretty high house notes and had children at home. So yeah; it was a struggle the first few years, and then I was able to buy the property in ’84. And then in the fall of ’84 we had a fire and we had to shut down for about three months to rebuild the building back. So yeah; you know, like any other business it’s a struggle in the beginning but I think you know it makes you leaner, meaner, and a little bit tougher.
Was it a barbecue fire?
Yeah; we had a pit fire one morning and got out of the pit and caught the pit room on fire and burned a big hole in the roof.
So tell me about 1981 when you started; were you the pit master?
Yeah; we had about three of us here who kind of did it all—everybody. Nobody had one job; yeah I’d run the pit, I’d take the garbage out and I’d bus the tables—whatever it took.
You have a saying I guess under your name, the business name; it says epicurean barbecue and ribs. What is epicurean barbecue?
Well epicurean barbecue just means fine. Epicurus was a Greek god of fine things and sometimes you hear the word. Sometimes white tablecloth will have an epicurean dinner which means it’s a fine multi-stage type dinner.
When you started doing the barbecue here were the recipes yours; were you doing them from scratch?
They were—they were my recipes and some that had been in my family. … They were just family recipes, backyard recipes we incorporated into the restaurant. … We had our—just family recipes that my dad had and stuff that I had developed over the years messing around in the backyard cooking and then just you know put them on a commercial scale.
Well let’s talk about what you cook here. Let’s talk about your shoulders. What’s the process?
Well we take fresh shoulders, never frozen and we trim them up—trim some of the excess fat off and cook them over hickory embers for about 12 to 14 hours until they fall off the bone. And then we chop it or pull it, pull all the skin and fat and bone out of it and put the sauce on the slaw and let it go out the door.
Do you season them at all before they go on the pit?
No; we put a little splash of vinegar—that helps draw some of the fat out of them but—but essentially no.
And tell me about the ribs.
The ribs—we use a St. Louis sparerib. It’s a sized rib; it’s a two and a quarter—two to two and a quarter rib. And we trim them and we put a special rub seasoning on them—unlike the shoulders; we do season them and then we finish them with a light base about 30 minutes, before they come off, and let that caramelize on them and they’re done.
And there’s a few other menu items that I think we should talk about, mainly because you don't see them in a lot of other barbecue restaurants here in Memphis or in Tennessee and one is the deviled eggs which I had a couple weeks ago and that are very good. Can you talk about them?
Well they’re just one of the many items that we’ve had for a long time and everything here is homemade—everything except for the French fries and I wish we could get away from that fry, but people like it. It’s a seasoned fry. But everything else here is homemade—the potato salad, the coleslaw, the deviled eggs are—chocolate coconut lemon icebox pies—everything is homemade and I think that’s something that’s really unique. It’s very labor-intensive; it—it’s hard to find the skilled labor to do it—to follow recipes correctly but we’ve managed to do that.
And you have a few items on the menu that are from other States including the Brunswick stew.
Right; I had been there down in Georgia several times and I really found the stew to be very good and I wanted another item on the menu that—that in the wintertime especially and I didn’t feel like running soups or anything, so I thought the stew would be—would go over well especially from people that come up from the eastern part of the United States. Where we have beans with our barbecue they tend to have stew. But it’s done real well and—and sells well and again that’s another homemade item. … It’s a tomato-base that we cook in big 10-gallon pots on the pit but it has the meat in it and the meat is cooked in it, but it’s—it’s a tomato-base and it has vegetables. It has potatoes and lima beans and green beans and corn.
Do Memphis people try the stew?
We sell a bunch of it yeah; yeah. We’ve won them over.
What do you think makes Memphis or this area—the barbecue here special?
I just think it’s a unique way that we do it. I mean barbecue—the way barbecue is prepared can change drastically in 100 miles and—but we have a lot—a lot of places in this city that—that are very fine barbecue restaurants and it’s just what we’re known by. We’ve kind of developed it; it’s a unique way of doing it that I think people find that they like very much, I think even more so than—you know take—you got probably four hotbeds of barbecue—Memphis, North Carolina, the Kansas City and the Texas and whenever there—there are contests that go on and they judge all four, Memphis walks away every time hands-down the winner. Now you are going to have some people’s tastes that are going to prefer the beef to the pork and probably the more vinegar-based sauce which is what Carolina is known for.
And you think there’s something very different about the Memphis or that it’s better?
Well—well let me just say I like ours better. You know it’s just different. In Texas it’s beef; in Kansas City it’s beef except for ribs. And in North Carolina they tend to slice it. It’s—they use the pork loin which is a wonderful cut of meat but it’s just different.
Back in ’81 did you think you’d be running the restaurant for this long?
No, because I wasn’t making any money the first couple of years and I said I’m going to give it one more year, one more year. Well one more year has turned into 27 years, so—but it’s been good for my family and the families that work for me.
Do you still love to eat barbecue?
I do; I still eat barbecue. In fact I just had a barbecue turkey sandwich.
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To download the entire transcript in PDF form, please click here.
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