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Feature article
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Pratt’s: Serving up smart barbecue
By Fred Sauceman
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| Jonathan Pratt |
Pink piggie hoofprints mark the pathway into Pratt’s Restaurant in Kingsport. Two tables are flanked by porch swings. “Honey” and “darling” divide servers’ recitations of the daily specials. “Darling” is the middle name of the restaurant’s cheese biscuits.
Alliterative T-shirts announce, “I Got My Pork Pulled at Pratt’s.” And for the more brash, “You Can Smell Our Butts a Mile Away.”
Look beyond the obligatory barbecue house cuteness — neon covered wagon, pig made out of a propane tank — and you discover a deep knowledge of food.
Owner Tom Pratt has logged over three decades of experience in the food business. His son Jonathan was educated at one of the world’s top cooking schools, the Culinary Institute of America. Rare credentials for a barbecue pitmaster, but not such an unusual fit, if you think about it.
“Barbecue is an art, and it’s a science,” says Jonathan. “Once you develop your palate, you know what a particular spice or seasoning is going to do.”
Pratt’s original barbecue sauce is older than Jonathan himself, but most of the other sauces he developed after all-night stints in the kitchen, usually between 11 p.m. and 3 a.m.
“We try to bring a little bit from all regions of the Southeast to the table,” he tells me. “Our Kernersville sauce originates in North Carolina. It used to be much more vinegary, but that just wasn’t flying around here, so we added a little more tomato product to it.”
There’s a South Carolina sauce that’s mainly mustard, with a little vinegar for “twang.” The Memphis sauce is sweet yet tangy, and its consistency allows it to adhere well to Pratt’s ribs.
“Texas Best is a little spicier,” says Jonathan. “It has some red pepper flakes in it and goes especially well with our beef brisket.”
Jonathan developed the mustard-based Signature sauce at 3 o’clock one morning while working in Western North Carolina. Before he entered the barbecue trade, he cooked at the Elk River Club and Banner Elk’s Louisiana Purchase.
Pratt’s uses a dry rub on all its barbecue products. One rub is designed for larger cuts and one for smaller ones. Butts and briskets are smoked overnight. Half chickens and ribs go on in the morning. Hickory wood and indirect heat are the basics. Butts smoke 14 hours. The meat is moist and pink, with a good mixing of bark, the dark brown, outer portions.
“As most barbecue places do, we take a lot of pride in our side dishes,” says Jonathan. “Our bean recipe has changed four times, and it just keeps getting more complicated. Now it’s to the point where I’m really happy with it.”
Five different types of beans are used, including butter beans, which, Jonathan adds, most people mistake for limas. All the beans are mixed and then baked off with a topping of bacon.
“The old bean recipe had too much garlic in it,” Jonathan adds. “We had a lot of requests for a sweeter bean, so we’ve juiced it up with some sugar.”
Greens cooked with bacon, dirty rice and a mustardy potato salad flecked with diced red bell peppers are side dish selections. The menu runs the gamut from fried dill pickle appetizers to the capstone dessert, banana pudding, bound with whipped cream.
“I eat that banana pudding every day,” says Jonathan.
He describes Pratt’s as a race fan favorite.
“We get comment cards back all the time saying, ‘Open one up in Bristol, open up one in Johnson City.’ We have people we see every race. We close at 9:30, but they’ll hang out with us until midnight.”
After last week’s column, I heard from David Sizemore, the nephew of Honest John Barker, sculptor of Pratt’s most identifiable icon, the 32-foot-tall, plaster and concrete “Big Indian,” who was transported to Stone Drive from Honest John’s original location on Memorial Boulevard.
David writes, “John and Mabel Barker’s daughter Montie was one of the first hippies around here, and she talked Uncle John into carrying incense in the gift shop, my first exposure to it. The rest of the family thought she was totally scandalous after the Times-News published a photo of her wearing a pseudo-Indian outfit complete with buckskin miniskirt and thigh-high boots.”
Such scenes capture the offbeat history of a celebrated concrete flower pot emporium turned Southern barbecue joint.
Pratt’s Restaurant
LOCATION: 1225 East Stone Drive, Kingsport, Tennessee
PHONE: (423) 246-2500
--------GoTriCities--------
Food writer Fred Sauceman, author of the book “The Place Setting: Timeless Tales of the Mountain South — from Bright Hope to Frog Level,” is senior writer and executive assistant to the president for public affairs at East Tennessee State University. E-mail him at sauceman@etsu.edu.
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