Jim Neely Built One of America's Great Barbecue Joints. At 88, He Just Handed On the Pits.

On a corner of South Third Street in Memphis, inside a low brick building that once housed a rundown corner grocery, a man named Jim Neely has spent nearly half a century turning out some of the most decorated barbecue in America. This week, at 88, he sold it. As of Monday, Interstate Bar-B-Que belongs to someone else. The plates will keep coming, the sauce will taste the same, and Neely will still be there most mornings, because the deal he made was built to protect the food as much as to let him rest.

For anyone outside Memphis, the name Interstate Bar-B-Que may not carry the weight it should. This is the joint People magazine once ranked the second-best barbecue in the entire country. It is the place that put the Neely name on the Memphis barbecue map years before a single member of the family ever stood in front of a Food Network camera. Neely's decision to step back, after a hip injury and the death in 2024 of Barbara, his wife of decades, closes a chapter that began with a bandanna, a billy club, and a hunch.

An Insurance Man Who Could Not Find a Good Sandwich

Neely did not grow up planning to smoke meat for a living. Born in Memphis, he moved his family to Los Angeles in 1958 and built a career in insurance, then brought them back home to Memphis in 1972 and ran successful agencies across the South, with offices in Nashville, St. Louis, New Orleans, and Baton Rouge. He worked long hours. On the nights that ran past nine, he found it harder and harder to track down a good pork barbecue sandwich anywhere in the heart of the city he had returned to.

The push into the restaurant business came from family, not ambition. One of his sons had a spleen removed while in the military and came home disabled, his future uncertain. To give the young man a job, Neely bought an old grocery store at 2265 South Third in 1979. The place was a wreck. A rough element had claimed it for drinking and fighting, and the stench was bad enough that Neely and his wife cleaned it with bandannas tied over their noses. He leaned on a billy club and a .38 caliber pistol more than once to convince the loiterers he meant to reclaim the corner.

People asked him why he would bet on a location like that. His answer became a kind of motto. It is not the land, it is the man, he told them. He had a vision for what the wreck could become, and he had the stubbornness to act on it before anyone else could see it.

Two and a Half Years to Get the Sauce Right

At first Neely thought about adding a beauty shop to the grocery. Then he remembered the barbecue of his youth, when good smoke sat on every corner of the Black neighborhoods he grew up in, and he remembered a friend in California who ran a fine barbecue joint. He asked the friend for help. He did not want the man's sauce recipe. He wanted to learn how to keep a fire going for hours without it dying. Back in Memphis, he built special pits that cook with indirect heat, a mix of natural gas and hickory, so no flame ever touches the meat. The method holds moisture in the meat over roughly five hours, and two of those pits let him cook as many as 500 slabs of ribs at once.

The sauce was harder than the fire. Neely had no secret family recipe to lean on, so he started from nothing. He spent two and a half years talking to old cooks with good recipes, trying this and that until he landed on the blend the restaurant still uses. The verdict came fast and it kept coming. On top of the People ranking, Vogue called Interstate the best commercial barbecue in Memphis, the local Commercial Appeal named it the home of the best all-around pork barbecue sandwich in the city, and the Memphis Business Journal handed it Small Business of the Year. The grocery that seated 40 grew until the dining room could hold 275 and needed a drive-through.

One dish did as much as the ribs to make Interstate famous. Barbecue spaghetti, soft noodles bound in that hard-won sauce and folded through pulled pork, is a Memphis peculiarity, and no one popularized it quite the way Neely did. Order it at the counter on South Third and you are eating something that, by wide agreement, you can find nowhere else the way it is done here.

The Family That Grew Around the Pits

Interstate did more than feed Memphis. It launched a dynasty. Neely established the family name on the barbecue scene, and in 1988 his nephews Pat, Gaelin, Tony, and Mark opened their own downtown restaurant, Neely's Bar-B-Que, with Jim designing the pits and helping them get started. The brothers built a reputation of their own, and one of them carried it much further than the city limits.

Pat Neely and his then-wife Gina became national television stars. Their show Down Home with the Neelys debuted on Food Network in 2008 and became the highest-rated debut the network had seen for that class of weekend cooking show. They followed it with Road Tasted with the Neelys and a bestselling cookbook. Jim Neely's sister, Beverly, runs Jay-Bee's Bar-B-Que outside Los Angeles, in the same California barbecue world where Jim first learned to tend a pit. Trace any branch of that family tree back far enough and you arrive at the corner on South Third.

A Handoff Built to Protect the Food

What makes this week different from the usual story of a beloved joint losing its founder is the way Neely arranged the exit. He did not lock the door and walk away. He sold the restaurant with its name intact and its recipes unchanged, and he still drives up most days to train the new owners so the barbecue that carries his name does not slip a notch once he is no longer behind it. The food is the inheritance, and he is handing it over in person rather than leaving it to memory.

That is a rare thing in a business where so many institutions vanish the moment the person who built them steps back. Memphis has watched more than one landmark close for good in recent years. Interstate is doing the opposite. A self-made corner joint, dreamed up by a curious insurance man on a block nobody wanted, is passing to new hands with the founder standing guard over the pot. Neely gets to rest. The city gets to keep its barbecue. And the last word he offered his customers, after 47 years of feeding them, was the same one he has always used. Thank you, Memphis.

Sources

Interstate Bar-B-Que founder retires at 88, WREG Memphis.

Interstate Bar-B-Que company history (founding, pits, awards, expansion), interstatebarbecue.com.

Interstate Bar-B-Q profile and barbecue spaghetti, Roadfood.

Pat Neely, restaurateur and Food Network host (family and Neely's Bar-B-Que founding), Wikipedia.

Down Home with the Neelys, Food Network series, Wikipedia.

Interstate Bar-B-Que oral history, Southern Foodways Alliance.