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| ALABAMA |
TOP
HAT BARBECUE
Dale Pettit
Top Hat Barbecue
8725 US Highway 31
Blount Springs, AL 35079
(256) 352-9919
“When people like me stop barbecuing the old way, it will die. And people that don’t try it while they have the opportunity will be sorry because one day it won't be here anymore.”
– Dale Pettit
Opened in 1952, Top Hat Barbecue is located in Blount Springs about thirty miles north of Birmingham. The Top Hat’s second owner decided to retire after only five years in the business. She offered to sell the place to her bread deliveryman at the time, Wilbur Pettit. When the company Wilbur worked for closed, he decided it was time to get into barbecue. He purchased the Top Hat in 1967 (the sauce recipe cost him extra), and he and his wife learned on the job. Their son, Dale, started working there four years later, the day after he got home from a stint in the Navy. Dale has manned the pits ever since. He, too, is passing the barbecue torch on to the next generation. Dale’s daughter, Heather Phillips, is the manager at Top Hat Barbecue.
Listen
to this 1-minute audio clip
of Dale Pettit talking about his typical day at work, which starts before
dawn. [Windows Media Player required. Go here
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NOTE:
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: Dale Pettit
Date: October 4, 2006
Location: Top Hat Barbecue – Blount Springs, AL
Interviewer: Amy Evans
---
Amy Evans: This is Amy Evans on Wednesday, October 4th
2006, and I’m in Blount Springs, Alabama, at Top Hat Barbecue with
Mr. Dale Pettit. And sir, would you please state your name and also your
birth date for the record?
Dale Pettit: My name is Dale Pettit. I was born July 4th 1949.
And I understand that your father [Wilbur Pettit] was a deliveryman
for Tip Top Bread Company, is that right?
He worked for Tip Top Bread for forty-nine years, and it went out of business;
and when it went out of business, then he bought this business.
And I also understand that he delivered bread or was employed by Tip
Top at the same time that Bob Sykes [of Bob Sykes Bar-B-Q in Bessemer,
Alabama] was? [Maxine Sykes mentions in her interview that her husband,
Bob Sykes, worked for Tip Top Bread Company until it closed.]
Bob Sykes worked for a different company; he got out of the bread business
about ten years before my 
dad
did. That’s why they’re ten years ahead of us when we’re
always advertising. We were forty years [in the barbecue business] and
they were fifty years [in the barbecue business], so they—they’ve
been out—they’ve been in business ten years longer than we
have.
Did they know each other, though?
Oh yeah, they were great friends. And were up until the time Mr. Sykes
died [in 1992]. He used to come up here often and see us.
---
And so when your father left Tip Top when it—when it closed and
he was looking for more work, did he always want to be in the restaurant
business, or how did that come about?
No, he—it was the year between my junior and senior year in high
school—that summer and so he and I bummed around that summer and
just did odd jobs, while he was trying to decide what he wanted to do.
He had several offers to do several things, but he really didn’t
want to. And the lady then, Miss Arilla Simmons, who owned the business
who—Dad sold bread to her. She was looking to retire and a lot of
people wanted her business, but she thought so much of my father, she
called him up and asked him if he would like to have it. And he and my
mother [Ruth Pettit] talked about it, and they bought it from her.
So she just had a trust in your father as a person that he would take
care of the business as she saw that it needed to be taken care of?
Yeah, she had known him for several years, and trust is a word that you
could use very easily with my father, yeah.
So how long had she had the business before she turned it over?
I’m not really sure, probably about five years. She hadn't been
here too long and it was just—it had grown—she didn’t
have very much help and—and it had grown beyond what she was able
to do by herself, and so she was at a time when she could retire, so she
did.
Did she start the business on her own?
No, she was the second owner. The first owner began in 1952, and we bought
it from Mrs. Simmons in ’67, so there was two owners between ’52
and ’67.
Has it always been named Top Hat?
When we purchased it, it was called the Top Hat Inn, but we changed it
to Top Hat Barbecue.
---
Did you grow up in Blount Springs?
No, I live in Garden City, which is about seven miles up the road. And
I remember as a kid coming down here and eating on Sunday, you know. When
we could we’d go out on Sunday and eat, and I remember coming down
here and Mrs. Simmons always had—always had a full house.
---
So when your father got a hold of the place, was there a learning curve
in working with the pit and smoking meat and working with food?
Neither one of them knew anything about barbecuing or working with food
or anything and had to sort of learn as they—as they went along.
But they had two ladies here who are—worked with Mrs. Simmons for
several years, and they knew the ropes. And they actually taught Mother
and Dad in the very beginning. Of course, they changed as time went by
to suit them, but those two ladies—in fact, I saw one of them today.
The other has passed on. But they became great friends—great friends
up until today, and both of them worked for us for almost thirty years
before they retired.
May I ask you to state their names, if you don’t mind?
One of them is Betty Dooley and the other one is Catherine Hooper.
And so when—how did you get—become involved in the business?
You were young when your father took it over, yes?
I joined the Navy in October and my dad bought the business in September
[of 
1967].
So I was only here about a month when it first opened. And I left to go
in the Navy, and I was gone for four years. And then once I got out of
the Navy, Dad retired about a year later, and I had it from then on.
And what did you think about being in the restaurant business—barbecue,
specifically?
Well I had always hoped—like I said, that one summer my father and
I just bummed around together doing odd jobs. I had always hoped that
he and I could have a business where we could work together, so this worked
out fine. Of course, he retired not long after I got out of the Navy,
and we didn’t work together than long, but yeah it was—it
was a great opportunity.
Before your dad purchased the business was the Top Hat, did it have
a wide reputation for good barbecue in the area?
Yes, it did. It had a very good reputation. That’s another reason
Mother and Dad considered buying it because Mrs. Simmons had a great reputation
of serving good food. And when they moved in, they had the same employees
and they just kept her standards. And hopefully, through the years, we’ve
improved on it. The building would seat about forty people when they bought
it, and we can seat about 265 now.
---
So was there much barbecue in the area early on, or was this like the
only place for miles that you could count on for good barbecue?
There was one in Cullman that’s about thirty-five miles away, and
then you had to go to North Birmingham, I think. And I don’t believe
there was one in Oneonta or Jasper at that time, I really don’t
know. But I do know there was one in Cullman and some in North Birmingham.
But we were kind of the center of all that. And we did a lot of business,
and we still do a lot of business…[Highway] 31 was the main road
through the center of the state until they built the Interstate, which
took a lot of the heavy traffic off of it, but there is a lot of people
that live around here. We don’t depend on people passing by. We—we
depend on—we’ve had customers—we’re into our fourth
generation of people that’s been coming here and eating now. And
we’ve known families and saw them have children and their children
have children, and now their children are coming, you know. So it’s—we’ve
known people a long time—made a lot of friends here.
Is your dad still alive?
No, dad passed away in 1990, and I lost my mother in 1997.
Before they passed, what did they think about you carrying on the family
business?
Well that—that was the idea. The idea was for them to retire and
me to operate the business and them draw a good salary and travel around,
which is what they did. Which I had no problem with that; that was great.
I hope to do that in my—with my daughters because they’re
in the business now. I hope to retire one day, and they’ll pay me
while I travel around. But I think—I think they were pleased with
the way everything went; we never had a problem and never—never
had a cross word the whole time we worked together. It—of course,
he was Dad, you know. [Laughs]
---
And your daughters, who you say are in the business, have they always
been in the business?
As—as soon as they were old enough [Laughs] they started, and it
wasn’t our idea; it was theirs. They wanted to start just as soon
as they could. And we needed something for Roxanne to do, and about the
time she got ready to graduate high school, that’s when we built
the antique store and started that, so she could run that and the other
daughter [Heather Phillips] run this one.
Okay, all right. Well when you started working with your father that
one year before he retired, did you immediately start working with the
meat or—or what did you do in those early days?
When I got out of the Navy, I intended to take a couple of weeks—see
friends and do around. And I got home on a Friday, and Dad woke me up
at five the next morning and said, “It’s time to go to work”.
So that’s all the time I got off after I got out of the Navy. And
the first thing he did to me—put me to doing is cooking the meat.
And he—we got it all on and got it cooking, and he went out and
drunk coffee; and he came back in a little while and he said, “Your
fire is not hot enough.” And I said, “Well I don’t know
it wasn’t hot enough; I never did this before.” So he had
to teach me, you know.
So had he been the pit master up until that time that he put you to
work?
Yeah. Mother cooked some of it in the beginning but as it—as we
grew—to begin with, we had one pit that would hold about sixteen—so
that’s all we could cook at a time. And now we cook eighty-three
at a time, so it—as the pits got bigger it got way more than Mother
could do and then Dad—then Dad took it over. And then I took it
over from him and then—then I’ve added onto that. So basically
every—from [nineteen] ’60—to ’71—I’ve
been doing the cooking basically, since 1971…just a lot of work.
You have to split the wood and make kindling. We only use hickory wood.
We don’t use any gas or anything like that, and it’s a lot
of work. We use about a cord of wood a week. It’s all got to be
split and got to be shaped, and it takes a lot of work.
And when you say shaped, can you talk about that?
Well it has to be the correct size. You want a piece of wood that will
almost burn up in a day’s time; you don’t want it so big that
it won't burn, and you don’t want it so small that it will burn
up and go away to nothing, so you split them to the size that will burn
all day long. And like I said, as the day goes by you, want the fire to
get—slow down and slow down until the last couple of hours that
they’re cooking it’s just a bed of coals and not really wood
left. So you have to—you have to make them the right size. And if
they’re great big ones, you split them and split them down until
you get them to the right size.
Can you describe what the right size is?
About eight inches in diameter—a piece about eight inches in diameter
and twenty-four inches long will burn all day.
Do
you have a local vendor for your wood?
They come out of Pelham; I buy some from local people. I have a—a
friend who is in the logging business, and when he gets a tract of timber
that has a lot of hickory on it, he’ll bring me a whole 18-wheeler
load at a time. But most of it I get from Pelham.
-----
So can you describe a little bit what your day is like when you get
here at the crack of dawn and how you work?
We start at five o’clock; it takes about an hour to get everything
ready. And our delivery truck normally gets here at six [in the morning],
and we begin at six and then we start the fire. We put the fire out every
night and start clean every morning with a fresh fire. And it takes—it
takes about an hour to get all the meat [pork shoulders and ribs] prepared
and the fire ready. And then we put it on at seven and hopefully by somewhere
between two and four o’clock, depending on how big it is, it gets
done and it’s something that takes constant attention. You can never
leave it; you don’t want it to ever flame; you just want it to smolder
and it’s very work-intensive, but this is the only true way to do
barbecue. Everybody does it in a rotisserie now—you turn the gas
on and come back tomorrow—but this—this is the only way to
cook barbecue.
Can you explain why that is?
Well you don’t get the flavor. This—it’s the difference
between cooking a hamburger on a gas grill and one on a charcoal grill.
That’s just the difference; the juices and the fat drip down into
the fire and it burns and the smoke comes back up on the meat. It just
gives it a better flavor. Plus the smoke gets, you know, all the way down
into it, where if you’re cooking with a rotisserie and you have
a couple of logs that make a little smoke and it doesn’t get into
the meat. It just gets on the meat and not in it.
Well I’m jumping ahead of myself a little bit, but can you speak
to what you think the future of barbecue is with a lot of people changing
over to gas and getting away from the really time that you need to dedicate
to the process?
When it gets to the point—I’m 57 [years old] and when it gets
to the point that I can't split the wood anymore and work—work—I
don’t work as many hours as I used to; I just work 45—50 hours
a week now. But when I get to where I can't do that, I may have to have
a rotisserie. It’s just too labor—and the last load of wood
I got was $1,300, so the wood costs a lot more than the gas, and it’s
a lot more expensive. And I have to have at least two helpers, and most
of the time I need three. But it’s—it’s—it’s
very costly to cook it the way we do, but that’s the only way to
get the product. That’s the only way to get the quality out. I hope
I never do. Maybe—I have one daughter that is not married yet. Maybe
she’ll marry some guy that’s six [feet] three [inches] and
weighs 240 [pounds], and I’ll put him to splitting the wood, and
I’ll do like my dad did, “Y’all write me a check, and
I’ll come by once in a while and pick it up.”
Has there not been anybody that you’ve been working out with
there thus far that would be an apprentice and would be interested in
kind of following behind you?
I’ve—I’ve had several that have been with me for a good
long while, but for one reason or another they moved onto do something
else. The last one I was training decided to go into the Navy and he’s—he’s
in the Navy now in Hawaii. But I may be a little demanding—is—may
be the problem. [Laughs]…I made—I expect them to do what I
do and—and it’s hard to get people here at five o’clock
in the morning. A lot of people don’t want to get up and get to
work that early.
Well then tell me about your sauce, too, because I understand today
is your sauce-making day.
Right. I got a batch going now. When we bought the business, we had to
buy the sauce recipes separate from the business. The original recipe,
strangely enough, comes from the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York. I
still have it. Now we’ve changed it somewhat from what it was when
we bought it—as when we bought the business we added a little of
this and a little of that to it and we’ve changed it, but that’s
where the original recipe comes from. I still have it.
And that was listed as a barbecue sauce?
Yeah, it was a barbecue sauce from—whoever the chef was at that
time at the Waldorf.
How did it make its way down here?
The original owner bought it from him; the lady we bought the business
from bought it from him, and then we had to turn around and buy it from
her. We had to buy it separate from the business.
It must have been a good recipe.
It was good; it’s better now. We’ve improved it.
So how has the recipe changed over the years?
We’ve—we’ve added one, two, three, really—three
basic ingredients and some smaller stuff. But it’s changed a good
bit in the way that we cook it. We cook it now in a big steam kettle;
I can cook ten gallons at a time, which makes it a lot easier. And you
have to cook it—you put all your ingredients in it, and you nev
er
boil it. You just simmer it. If you boil it, it breaks the ingredients
down; but if you just simmer, they just combine, which that may not sound
like a big deal, but it is. It’s—if you boil it, it has a
totally different flavor than it does if you just let it simmer and the
flavors combine rather than separate.
Without giving too many secrets away, can you describe kind of the—the
basic ingredients of your sauce and what kind of style it is and flavor
it has to it?
It’s a tomato-based sauce; it’s based on ketchup, and we add
some stuff to it to make it sweet and some stuff to it to make it sour
and some to it that makes it tart and some that makes it hot. [Laughs]
There’s—there’s about twenty ingredients altogether.
Can you describe how it compliments your barbecue?
It does in the fact that the barbecue sauce stands alone. We—people
want it—a cup of it and they dip chicken fingers in it and French
fries and stuff like that. It’s good enough to eat by itself with
something else. We also use it on ribs; we use it on chicken; and it’s—it’s
a—it’s a sauce that, like I say, we have developed it and
tweaked it over the years—a little of this and a little of that
and take some of this away and add something else ‘til when you
add it and the barbecue together I think, well—I sent some to Germany
here what—not—about three months ago and then about a month
ago I sent some to Saudi Arabia. There’s some of the troops over
there—their mother comes by and she freezes it and puts it on an
airplane; I’ve sent it pretty much all over the world.
---
So when you came into the business and you had the trial by fire and
were working the pit and everything, and now all these years later you’re
still doing it and are a master of your craft, if I may say, is your passion
for what you do about the barbecue or about it being a family business
or about the reputation? Can you talk about that a little bit?
I’d have to say a combination of all of them. My father and mother
got into it late in life. And they were people of very modest means; we—we
had everything we needed, but my mother and father never really any money
in their life, and in the last eight or ten years of their life they did—once
they got in the restaurant business. And that’s why I say my dad
used to come by and pick up a check and 
tell
me everything I was doing wrong, you know, and then he’d go back
home. But I bought the restaurant from them simply for that reason. I
purchased it and—but I’m going to give it to my girls because
we’ve been in it, you know, since [nineteen] ’71 so I’m
going to give it to my girls, so they won't have to purchase and they
won't have to pay for it. But like I say, we’re in our third generation,
and we’re known everywhere. Well there’s a lot of things I
can say. I’ve had people in here from governors to Hank Williams,
Jr. to—you name them, you know. I’ve had everybody in the
world in here. But yeah. we’re known far and wide and there is—there
is some pride in being one of the last few people who actually cook barbecue
the old way. You know. really nobody does that anymore simply because
it’s too much work. In the summer, July and August especially it’s
110—115-degrees in there all day long. and it’s tough. But
there’s no other way to produce that product.
-----
And on your menu you have barbecue sandwiches, of course, and then
ribs; can you talk about your ribs a little bit and what you look for
when you’re cooking ribs and describe that a little bit?
Ribs are really a bigger secret than barbecue. I’ll take you in
the pit and show you how I do the barbecue, but the ribs are totally something
else. Everybody has a way—they either skin them out, they rub them
with salt, or they have a dried rub; everybody has a way that they do
their own ribs, and we do ours in a way that they turn out extremely tender.
They fall off the bone; you just pick the bone up, and they will fall
apart. But that’s one of those secrets, you know, I can tell you,
but then you could leave Blount Springs again. You’d have to stay.
Well is there anything about your place here and what you do and how
you do it that I haven’t asked you that would be worth adding?
I always include this: I’m a Christian—a Deacon in the Baptist
Church—and my wife is a Christian and my children are Christian
and we run a Christian business. You
can come here; people come here and bring their families, and they don’t
have to worry about hearing foul language or being treated, you know,
in an untoward way at all. And we’ve always give God the glory for
all our success, and he’s been faithful to us, and we’re forty
years here and still going wide open. So yeah, that’s something
else I’d like to include in this.
-----
Any final thoughts?
When people like me stop barbecuing the old way, it will die. And people
that don’t try it while they have the opportunity will be sorry
because one day it won't be here anymore.
---
To download the entire transcript in PDF form, please click here.
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