Wednesday, August 20, 7:00 p.m.
Members $100, guests $125

There are few events on our annual Beard calendar that we are as pleased to bring you as our Sizzling Summer Barbecue. Here’s why: in a city that is arguably the culinary capital of America, real, live, honest-to-goodness barbecue remains one of the few foods that are tough to find. Each summer, we search out America’s authentic barbecue giants to try to make the quest for baby back ribs, pulled pork, and brisket a little easier in New York. This year, we’ve rounded up five-time Memphis in May Grand Champion Big Bob Gibson Bar-B-Q for your dining delectation.

First, let’s define our terms. For reasons that people from Kansas, the Carolinas, Alabama, and Texas cannot fathom, the English language makes no distinction between suburban back-yard barbecue (the kind where dad stands over the grill wearing a “Here’s the Beef” apron while flipping burgers) and the smoke-pit, dry versus wet rub, vinegar and tomato versus white sauce– type barbecue that is our subject here.

Big Bob Gibson Bar-B-Q has had more than 75 years and four generations to perfect its own recipe for the latter. Big Bob Gibson himself started the business in 1925 from his backyard in Decatur, Alabama. His smoked pork and chicken and his white sauce were locally famous faster than you could fire up the coals. Over the years and generations, the Gibsons have added potato salad, baked beans, barbecued beef, barbecued turkey, bar-b-qued baked potatoes (favorably compared by Chile Pepper Magazine to “a Nimitz-class aircraft carrier”), pies of all sorts, and a second location. And the bigger the restaurant grows, the better it gets. The Birmingham News judged the place as Best Barbecue in Alabama. The Wall Street Journal picked it for best BBQ pork in America, and The National Barbecue News voted Big Bob Gibson Bar-B-Q restaurant of the year.

Meanwhile, Chris Lilly, Big Bob Gibson Bar-B-Q vice president, has racked up a list of Bar-B-Q championships that makes our head spin: two pages of first places from the Memphis in May World Championship BBQ Cook-Off (a.k.a. “Super Bowl of Swine”); American Royal International Cook-Off and BBQ Sauce Competition (Best Sauce on the Planet); Alabama, Louisiana, and Tennessee state barbecue championships. “Barbecue is life,” Charles Coxe of Maxim magazine once said, adding, “and Chris Lilly is Barbecue.” Lilly, life, and barbecue are on the menu at the Beard House this month.