Right on ‘Cue

Writer: Stephanie Maxwell Newton | Photographer: Rett Peek

In her new book, food writer Kat Robinson spotlights hundreds of restaurants statewide while telling the story of Arkansas barbecue

As a food writer, you’d think tasting each dish would be the highlight but, for Kat, telling each restaurant’s story is much more than describing spices and seasonings. After photographing a few dishes and packing up the leftovers, she digs into the part she loves most. “This book has deeper interviews than anything I’ve ever done before,” she says. “And I’m not just asking for words. I’m getting a sense of the place I’m in. I’m listening. I may ask three questions and the interview lasts two hours.”

As with all of Kat’s projects, she’s not interested in singling out superlatives. She takes a more completist approach to her work. The Arkansas Barbecue Traveler: A Roadside Companion for Hungry Wanderers, which is set to release this month, contains the names and details of what Kat claims to be every barbecue restaurant in the state—totaling more than 350. “Everybody’s got different taste buds, and it’s not up to me to determine who makes the absolute best,” she says. “Every barbecue joint that’s out there is somebody’s favorite, and I want to give them that representation.”

In addition to cataloging the breadth of Arkansas barbecue, Kat’s intention with this book is to define the dish. “I’ve had a lot of chefs say to me, Arkansas barbecue is just pork barbecue. And I say, where’s your research? It’s usually a book by some guy that’s in North Carolina or New York City; somebody that doesn’t understand the food culture of Arkansas.” Kat’s out to change that. So, what is Arkansas barbecue?

The Bigger Question

Seventeen years before she set out to define Arkansas barbecue, a broader question was posed to Kat during an interview: What is Arkansas food? This was during a 2007 conversation with Lee Richardson, the New Orleans-bred chef then at the helm of Ashley’s and Capital Bar & Grill. Having started her career in radio then television, Kat had recently taken on writing for traditional print outlets and was interviewing Lee on assignment. “I said, Well, I know we do catfish, we do greens, we do tomatoes, we do pickles… Let me get back to you. I sort of made this my side quest,” she recalls. “Then later it became my main quest: What is Arkansas food? Because nobody who actually lived here had defined it.”

During this time Kat was also starting to populate her personal blog, Tie Dye Travels, which chronicled her road trips around the state. Little did she know this hobby would become her foray into culinary tourism. “The first thing I would do when I walked into a community was Google every restaurant’s sign. If they didn’t pop up in the search engine—because, remember, this was the early days of the smartphone and Wikipedia—I’d go write about it,” Kat says. In that way, her blog turned into a register of the state’s small-town diners and mom-and-pop restaurants, and it was often the single mention of these places online. This strategy was a boon for traffic, both digital and in person. “It wasn’t just that I was getting hits,” she says. “These little bitty places, some of which had been around forever, started getting people who found them through the internet. And all along the way, I’m learning things. I’m asking questions like, Why do you serve this? Why do you do it this way?”

Before long, when people needed an expert on Arkansas food, they started looking to Kat. She had bylines in almost every outlet in the state. Food Network Magazine and Forbes Travel Guide assigned her stories. One year, at the Southern Foodways Alliance’s symposium, John T. Edge himself introduced her to a friend by saying, “This is Kat Robinson. She preaches the gospel of Arkansas food.” Thanks to her curiosity, Kat was positioned to write the book on Arkansas food. Instead, she wrote 12.

Subject Matters

When The Arkansas Barbecue Traveler comes out this month it will be Kat’s 13th book. Several are cookbooks, but most are indexes of a specific subject—such as pie, dairy bars, and now barbecue—and meant to be used as travel guides. “My restaurant books are divided by region under the idea that you read the books twice,” Kat says. “You read the book front to back, and then you put it in your glove compartment. And when you’re somewhere, you pull it out and can say, Where’s the closest dairy bar? Or, I wonder where I can find pie around here?” 

Most of her books have come out under her own micropress, Tonti Press, which has afforded her the freedom to follow her gut when choosing her next subject. “I know it’s the next project if I have that feeling of, Oh, I’ve got to do this right now,” she says. “Then I’ll read everything that I can about the subject, and then I’ll actually start going out.” For The Arkansas Barbecue Traveler, this process started in May 2023. Nine months later, she launched “The Great Arkansas Barbecue Questionnaire,” a crowdsourcing resource aimed at restaurant owners to help identify and locate every single purveyor of barbecue in the state. In summer 2024, she hit the road, coolers at the ready, to start her interviews and photography. 

Because Kat doesn’t like to do anything halfway, she plans for this book to be the first in a series. The next, which she hopes to release in spring 2025, will contain oral histories of some of the oldest barbecue spots in the state. “I’ve spent four hours sitting at Jones Bar-B-Q Diner just chatting with Mr. Harold,” she says, referring to James Harold Jones, whose Marianna eatery was Arkansas’s first James Beard Award winner. It’s in these moments Kat sinks her teeth into stories in a way she wasn’t able to earlier in her career. “For those who have gotten their training in the television or radio industry, you have to produce so much content so quickly. You have to grab the information and then let it go, and you’re on to the next story,” she says. “But there are deeper stories. There’s so much more to say.”

The Natural State of Barbecue

Texas has brisket and Missouri has ribs. Alabama’s barbecue sauce is a white, mayo-based concoction, while the Carolinas favor a vinegary accompaniment. Meanwhile, Arkansas’s reputation is that it sits at a crossroads, reflecting the traditions from every direction. But that’s not quite the case, Kat argues—to claim Arkansas is simply a melting pot of outside influences would be to miss the historical contexts that make our story so compelling. 

In her research, she found that different styles of barbecue align with different geographic regions of the state. A bias toward beef in the Ozarks comes from that region’s history of cattle drives and leather making. The Delta’s preference for pork can be traced back to the scarcity of land available to post-Civil War tenant farmers. “At that time, pork barbecue becomes the barbecue of the Arkansas Delta, and it influences Memphis—not the other way around,” she says. Then, there’s the way early transportation systems—first the river and later the railroads—affect barbecue over generations, and how Arkansans’ preference for sauce varies from thick to thin in different parts of the state. 

The long and the short of it: Nuances abound in Arkansas barbecue. To see the full picture, you’ve got to hop in your car and go tasting. “When it comes to supporting food and Arkansas foodways, people need to understand this is a destination,” she says. “Within a two-hour radius, you can have four or five different styles of Arkansas barbecue, and you can meet some very interesting people. Part of my goal is to bring people into Arkansas to enjoy these things, because then we get more money into the state, all boats rise with the tide.”

Secret Sauce
H.B.’s Bar-B-Q in Little Rock, one of the  restaurants listed in The Arkansas Barbecue Traveler, is a hole-in-the-wall destination best known for its chopped pork, ribs, and fried pies. Try it for yourself at 6010 Lancaster Road, and don’t forget to bring cash—no cards accepted.

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350+

Number of barbecue restaurants visited

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Thanks to H.B.’s Bar-B-Q for providing a location for this shoot.