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Last week I got a chance to do something that my wife and my doctor have strongly advised against for the last few years: I ate barbeque for lunch. 

It’s not easy being a southern man with a family history of heart disease when you’re surrounded by so many restaurants playing heavy with olfactory delight, tickling the taste-buds with secret-recipe sauces they spread across racks of ribs and pulled pork plates. 

Sometimes, it’s insufferable torture.

After finding out my cholesterol was “scary high” two years ago, I was put on a diet decidedly different from my previous 46 years of all things meat with whatever on the side. It’s now a very rare treat to be allowed that fatty pinnacle of southern food. Being restricted this way, and having only moved to the area six months ago, I haven’t yet sampled all the local eateries.

But last week, as I walked into A Slab and More BBQ in Demopolis, a lifetime of memories came rushing to me. It felt like going home to Grandma’s house. Everything about it drew me in, from the cinder-block walls, the small walk-up window, and the football memorabilia covering the walls inside, to the smell – that heavenly aroma filling not just the properly small dining room, but the parking lot and street out front. It was nostalgic perfection.

Most of my pulled pork memories involve my dad, who was not just an Auburn mechanical engineer and outdoorsman, but also a barbeque junkie. So many of our family road trips – whether a vacation to the beach, or just a weekend drive to visit relatives – were detoured to little hole-in-the-wall BBQ joints Dad had either eaten at before or had been told were good. 

It didn’t matter if it was an hour out of the way, or how many back-road turns we had to take by the crooked oak tree with a dead dog under it, we were going to eat there. Dad couldn’t help himself. It was an obsession that became a tradition. 

Even after I was grown and working a few blocks away from his office in Birmingham, we would often meet for lunch at the original Pat James’ Full Moon. We would wait in line and hope to get a table in the desperately small dining area, surrounded by people who were there for the same reason as us: tradition. 

It didn’t matter that you could get decent food quicker and probably cheaper down the street. It didn’t matter that you’d be more comfortable in a larger, less crowded dining room where people weren’t standing in line next to your table. This was where you ate.

Alabama is covered with places like Full Moon, Top Hat, Country’s, Jim ‘N Nick’s, Big Bob Gibson’s, Twix-n-Tween (RIP), and Dreamland. Some are famous, many are known only to locals and traveling sales reps, occupying small buildings in out-of-the-way places unlikely to have a restaurant at all. 

Even though I’m now restricted to sampling them only on rare occasions, I’m happy to add A Slab and More BBQ to my list. I’m sure Dad would approve. If he could come visit, it would become a tradition. 

Jeremy Crowson is a staff writer for the Demopolis Times. He can be reached at jeremy.crowson@demopolistimes.com.