- [Bobby] The lunch hour is paramount. It's always been our biggest hour. We're running full tilt. - [Cook] I got two pork sandwiches. - [Bobby] Nowadays when we open, there's usually a line waiting to come in and that's a blessing. The necessity for people
to get their hands on the food before we run out drives that a little bit. A lot of times now, people
will try to get here earlier just in case we sell out of whatever it is that they want later in the day. (upbeat drum music plays) Bologna may have maybe a little bit more of a foothold in the South. It is a pretty darn good sandwich. So we thick slice our bologna, we slice it on a meat slicer. It's not like your typical Oscar Mayer package you see in the grocery store, about this thick. And then we actually put our rub on each individual slice front and back, throw it on the grill, and cook it up. - I'm a color guy. I like things to have good color because when the customer sees it, before you even taste food, your eyes are appealed to it, and I like the customers
to get that appealing look to it. So if I can get that,
say, let it get its color, let it cook about 15, up to 15 to 30 minutes. - I don't know what my
granddad's motivation was for putting it on the menu. However, if you taste it you will understand why it's on there. (upbeat pop music plays) These are our spare ribs, but in order to get the cut of ribs that we want, which is the St. Louis cut, we have to cut this portion
off on the side here. We do a little trimming
of some fat pieces. The ribs, by far are our bestseller. They're what people usually want. If somebody walks in the door and they see a "out of ribs" sign their composure completely changes, the look on their face changes, they get sad. It's not a fun thing to see 'cause you want to provide
everybody with food. This is the rib tip. After we cut this rib tip off, we'll take it, we'll cook
it on the barbecue pit, and then we'll bring it back here, chop it up into chunks and throw it in a pot with some sauce and simmer it the rest of
the way to get it done. So this is a pretty popular item. It's hard for us to keep these. And we're just gonna apply a light coat on the bone side, a little bit heavier
coat on the meat side. We don't actually pat or rub, we actually just sprinkle. There's nothing that we sell that doesn't get our dry rub. It's the same on the wings, it's the same on the Cornish hens, it's the same on the chickens. Oh, very secret. Most of the people in my
family don't know this recipe. And I was only taught
when I said, "Hey, I wanna run the restaurant." And that's when my mom took me to the back and showed me the secret sauce. Pun intended. It's an honor to be trusted with that, and it's pretty cool to be able to say I know something that's
really, really good and nobody else does. These are the ribs that
marinated overnight. Sprinkled the rub on 'em, throw 'em in the cooler and let 'em sit, let 'em marinate. Let that seasoning soak
in and kind of permeate, and then we just throw 'em on, like so, very neatly. So what we do down here, we start the cooking process here. We brown the bottom side, flip 'em, brown 'em again, and then we get ready to start putting 'em up to smoke. They finish their life here. They spend much more time up here than down here. From the dawn of time, I guess, in Cozy Corner we've had
these two racks set up. The only place to put a
whole lot of ribs is up here. And you gotta stack 'em, 'cause there's not
multiple layers to let 'em just sit independently from each other. On our pit, we have basically two racks. We have a bottom rack, and a top rack. We stack 'em up in rows of three. The bottom row, which
is closest to the fire, will be the ribs that will pretty much a hundred percent of
the time get done before any of the top, because they are stacked
right on top of each other. Once we pull the bottom row off, the next one just drops down and we just rotate,
and rotate, and rotate. So when the bottom row goes off, we add another row at the top and just just keep 'em going like that all day until we get down to a single row. The way it's set up is there is a firebox, or fire pit, whatever you wanna call it. The coal's about three
feet from the first grate. We kind of get a little
best of both worlds a little bit, because when this grate is filled, it blocks the heat and then creates kind of an indirect situation for the top row. So then here you have our two sets of racks right here. Window's a little different to cook with. It's a tempered glass, this is not regular glass. We like being able to look in at all times and see. And because we're
cooking over direct heat, it's really good to be able to look down and make sure you
don't have anything, too much fire or whatever. So it works for us. It's been working for
us for 45-plus years, and most people wouldn't
think you could cook like that with windows instead of solid metal doors, or a brick pit, or whatever. The pits have helped define our taste, and what we do here. It's a unique thing to cook on, but it's pretty awesome. Here we have our rib tips. We're about halfway through
the cooking process. We put 'em on the pit, we cook 'em, smoke 'em, kind of brown 'em. Then we take 'em off,
we chop 'em into chunks, and then we finish 'em
in our barbecue sauce and we just let 'em
simmer to really, really get tender, really fall off the bone. We're gonna put our
barbecue sauce in the pot and we'll put 'em on the stove, and in about 45 minutes or so they'll be finished and
at maximum tenderness and ready to go. And then here you see
we already have a couple that have started to come to a boil. We'll just roll them, we'll roll 'em till they get done. They'll be really good. (upbeat music plays) So my granddad, Raymond Robinson, started this place August of 1977. The rub, cooking style, the methods, everything was him. I feel it's my duty to just uphold what he did, as best I can. I don't want to try to change anything. I don't think it's broken, so I don't think it needs to be fixed. And so it's my goal to just continue to maintain the legacy that he started. Once he passed, my grandmother came out of retirement to come and run the restaurant with my mother. She's definitely made a big mark on a lot of the people. Obviously she's made a big enough mark to get inducted into the
Barbecue Hall of Fame. Wonderful woman, I think she's well deserving of it. In terms of donenness, there's a couple of ways we check. Sometimes we do a little flex test, which is, I'll grab it
here and let the weight of the slab bend. Depending on how it bends and what I see, I just know if it's done or whatever. Other than that we're gonna
flip it over to the bone side, or whatever side that was facing the heat, and we'll do some little
feels and finger pokes or whatever, and just kind of check
tenderness that way. (upbeat music plays) So we got our pasta, our spaghetti noodles have been cooked, drained and rinsed, and all that stuff. And now we're putting our seasoning directly to the noodles, and we'll just mix it up. And then once we do that, it'll be ready for our barbecue sauce. Most people not from the region are pretty surprised, pretty intrigued, like, "Hmm, barbecue spaghetti, never heard of it." Our version doesn't have meat. My grandfather created it as just a side. So it's just got noodles, our barbecue sauce, and some other spices. You notice there wasn't too much measuring going on there? I mean we know the recipe obviously, but she's just been doing it so long she doesn't have to follow one. A lot of weird reactions, but most of the time it's more like, "Never heard of it, I'm so interested, what could it possibly taste like?" And that does get a lot
of people to try it. So here, this is Sid. He's gonna start seasoning
our chicken wings. They're basically our second bestseller, up under the ribs. This is our food-safe sink. And what he is doing is just washing the wings off first, getting them prepped to put our rub on. We run through about 350
to 450 wings every day. On busier days, scale
that up to meet demand. But on an average, 300 to 400, somewhere around there. He'll just keep going and get through all four or five cases that we're getting ready for tomorrow. And then we'll move on
to the other poultry. - The chickens have been already seasoned. You see they're whole chickens. Make sure the wings are tucked back, and we wanna lay 'em flat. Flat on the pit, legs up. That's the way they'll cook. I like the legs straight in the air and I like the chicken laying flat. Going to let those cook
probably for about an hour, maybe an hour and a half probably. So we're just gonna add heat to it and see what kind of course it takes and go on and get 'em done
and get 'em off of there. - [Bobby] Here we have our wings, they've been marinating overnight. And we just stack 'em, stack 'em on there in nice, neat rows, 'cause every wing gets
flipped, checked individually. Very labor-intensive
process of cooking them. I don't know who started doing this. I just like for the tip of the wing to go all the same direction. And when you line 'em up together sometimes they hit each other, and it just doesn't make for
easy flipping and moving. So if you'll notice
they're all facing one way, and on the other side of the pit the other tips is facing the other way. It just makes it a little
bit easier for handling. - Yeah, especially when you're pulling, or you're flipping 'em. We just turned our wings, and you see they got a nice color to 'em. Very pleasing to the eyes. My pet peeve is to always make sure that my food
is pleasing to the eyes. We're going to let those cook about a few more minutes. - So it's getting pretty close to service, and hopefully we'll have a line. So it's time to snatch the chickens off to make sure we're
ready to feed the people when they come in. Yeah, we'll cover 'em in foil and put 'em in a warm box, and put 'em in a warmer. And they won't last long, because when the crowd comes in, we're just throwing food out, you know? We wrap it to keep it warm, and kind of hold some of the goodness in. We also do it in portions so it's easier for us to fix plates and get food out as quickly as we can. So if a person has
ordered a four bone plate, often times we have four
bones wrapped in food wrap and it's ready to go, and we just have to grab it and unwrap it, put it on the plate. Here we are in the thick of it. Our biggest crowd is
definitely our lunch crowd. There's a line going halfway
in the dining room right now. And so we're in full swing. Everybody's working,
everybody's getting it in, and this is what it looks like in a full service. A lot of people say Memphis is one of the best barbecue cities in the country. Obviously you have the Carolinas, you know that region, you have Texas. There's several other regions that are doing really good at barbecue but Memphis is up there, it's always in the conversation. And so when people come
to us and say stuff like, "Hey we think you have the best barbecue in Memphis," then it pretty much means maybe we have some of the best barbecue in the country. It's a thing that
definitely makes me proud. It helps to get me
through some of the days that are a little harder. - Get that red pan down for me? - [Bobby] The most important thing? Just trying to uphold the standards. I'm trying to fill some pretty big shoes, in my opinion. First my grandfather and my uncle, and then with my mother and my grandmother and the mark that they made. It's pretty big shoes to fill, so I'm just trying to
maintain a certain level of quality as much as humanly possible. Try to give good service, hopefully make people leave here with a full belly and a smile. (classical music plays)
