By Steven Raichlen (Workman Publishing, 2003)

Whenever I go to Memphis I have a little ritual. I check into the Peabody Hotel, then duck down a dumpster-filled back alley, and rush to Charlie Vergos’ Rendezvous. This rambling basement barbecue joint is almost as hard to locate as it is idiosyncratic in its schedule (it’s closed Sunday and Monday, and the restaurant serves lunch only two days a week). But it should certainly be on the National Registry of Historic Places, for the Rendezvous is the birthplace of the Memphis dry rib.

The Vergos family immigrated from Greece in the early 1900s. Charlie’s father, John, tried his hand at many trades: bootblacking, running pool halls, even coal mining in West Virginia. Eventually, he moved his family to Memphis, where he opened a hot dog stand on Beale Street. By 1945, Vergos Sr. was famous for his foot long hot dogs, which he served with a pugnacious mustard coleslaw; they cost a nickel. Equally legendary were Vergos’s homemade pies.

Charlie Vergos followed in his father’s footsteps, eventually opening a sandwich shop in a basement. The menu was standard for the 1940s: sliced sausage and cheese, ham and cheese sandwiches, pickles, peppers, and beer. To distinguish his sandwiches from the stuff served at dozens of other Memphis lunch counters, Charlie smoked his hams and chickens in a pit fitted into a coal chute. Business boomed; soon Vergos was selling two hundred sandwiches a day.

One day, Charlie’s meat salesman brought him a case of ribs. Inspired by an old barbecue joint run by Johnny Mills, a Memphis legend, Charlie seasoned the ribs with the Greek American spices he grew up on – oregano, garlic, salt, and pepper – plus a dose of a uniquely American seasoning, chili powder. “Tastes great, but looks awful,” declares the meat salesman. “Barbecue should be red.” So Charlie added paprika, and the modern dry rib seasoning was born.

Ribs on the Rise

Charlie started cooking a case of ribs every week, then every two or three days. Gradually the rib sales came to surpass those of the ham and cheese sandwiches. Today, the Rendezvous dishes up something on the order of four tons of ribs a week. It still serves the fiery mustard slaw, and in homage to the old days, the house appetizer is a plate of sliced sausage, pickles, and cheddar cheese.

Over the years, the restaurant has grown from seventy seats to seven hundred. Vergos, and his sons John and Nick and daughter Tina Jennings, who now run the business, have spent a lifetime filling the subterranean dining room with every imaginable knickknack and antique – Indian arrowheads, Revolutionary War swords, Civil War muskets, vintage whiskey bottles, smoke-blackened kettles and cowbells, old wooden ship models – some of them priceless, some of them junk, all heaped in a hodgepodge. The floors have worn tiles; the tables sport red-and-white checked tablecloths; and on a typical night, you might wait a half hour or so for a seat.

The focal point of the restaurant is the open kitchen with its smoke-blackened pits. Some of the cooks, like Bobby Ellis, have worked there for more than thirty years, tossing ribs on a grate about eighteen inches above a bed of blazing charcoal and grilling them for about thirty minutes on each side. “Our fuel is Roy Oak one hundred percent hardwood charcoal,” explains Nick Vergos. “We start the ribs bone side down to protect the meat.” Once cooked, the charred, sizzling ribs are slapped on a cutting board, mopped with a mixture of vinegar, water, salt, and barbecue spices, then thickly sprinkled with Rendezvous seasoning (“We say seasoning, not rub, because it’s sprinkled on, not rubbed in,” explains John Vergos.) The ribs are served under a thick crust of spice, with nary a slather or dollop of barbecue sauce. The formula for the seasoning is, of course, a closely guarded secret….

Is It True ‘Que?

The Rendezvous’ dry ribs are the most famous barbecue in Memphis. But are they true barbecue? The ribs are cooked over charcoal, not wood, so there isn’t any smoke flavor. The cooking process is direct grilling, not individual grilling or smoking. Forget about the low pit temperatures of competition pit masters – these ribs cook in a virtual blast furnace. They’re not rubbed or seasoned ahead of time, nor mopped during the cooking. “The fact is, we use the fastest method we can simply to be able to cook the eight hundred racks of ribs we serve nightly,” Nick says.

But such fine pits are not debated by the 3,600 customers who dine here on a typical Saturday night. No, for most people – locals and tourists alike – the Rendezvous’ dry rib s are the very essence of Memphis barbecue.