Here's what Fred Sauceman thinks:
The Pig & Chick: ‘Home of Swine Dining’
By Fred Sauceman
L to R: Marty Beets, Cleo Woodward, Richard Beets
“The teenagers from Cherokee High School have helped build our business,” says Marty Beets as she emerges from the kitchen of The Pig & Chick, outside Rogersville, with a homemade bowl of banana pudding that is whipped cream-peaked and custardy.
Marty and her husband Richard talk barbecue with the best of them. They analyze side dishes keenly. They scrutinize sauces. But emblematic of their personalities, what they really enjoy spreading around the table, even more than sweet potato casserole, is gratitude.
Take those teenagers. Marty says she’s heard the griping about the younger generation, but she heaps praise on the students who wait tables at The Pig & Chick every chance she gets, including the Beets’ own daughter Ellen, who’s wisely pocketed enough well-deserved tip money to get a good jump on college expenses.
Marty and Richard turned their longtime catering endeavors into a full-blown restaurant in 2004. They admit they’re novices in the restaurant business, but their supporting cast is large. They acknowledge Rogersville resident Carolynn Elder for penning “The Tale of the Pig & Chick” on the cover of the menu. They give a nod to Debbie Beal for helping design the porcine and poultry logo.
And Richard says, “My mother-in-law is game for any business experience — she handles it all,” as Cleo Woodward, an 88-year-old former interior decorator turned cashier takes money and serves as the restaurant’s hostess.
It was Cleo who placed the wall hangings and advised on wall colors. She had a lot to do to turn the building into a family restaurant. It was built to be a topless bar by a professional Santa Claus from Macy’s department store. Richard points to the west side of the structure as the place where the “performances” took place.
Now, it’s about as homey a venue as you’ll find. Richard, Marty and Cleo are warm and welcoming folks who make it seem like you really are a guest in their own dining room. They’ll make sure they pass by your table and check on things at least twice during your visit.
Part of the reason for that comfort is the Beets’ calmness. They’ll soon cater an outdoor event for 1,200 employees of Cooper Standard and still keep the restaurant kitchen well supplied with cornbread salad.
The menu, with quotations from Erma Bombeck, Jackie Gleason, Virginia Woolf and Miss Piggy, is well-organized and tabbed, to take you straight to soups and salads, spuds, burgers and sandwiches. The middle tab, appropriately, reveals barbecue, the centerpiece of the menu.
Smoked chicken, hand-pulled pork from bone-in Boston butt smoked 13 hours over hickory, pork ribs, and sliced tenderloin are available.
“If you have good barbecue, people will find you out, so we’ve done very little advertising,” says Richard of his restaurant that’s about four miles east of Rogersville. “There’s a mindset that pork has to be cooked to death, but the pork of today and the pork of my youth are two different things.”
I’m leery of barbecuers who tell me their ribs are “falling off the bone.” A restaurant owner in Johnson City said that to me a couple of months back, and it was obvious the ribs had been boiled. Richard Beets’ hickory-smoked ribs, though, have just the right amount of “tooth” to them. They don’t collapse when you pick them up, but they’re plenty tender, and, as Richard adds, “Black, pink and brown are OK on ribs.”
In the kitchen, Richard maintains a pan of Carolina-style barbecue sauce to mop on the meat for moisture. At the table, diners can select from three different homemade, smoky sweet sauces, their gradations of hotness created not by Tabasco but rather by peppers. (The hottest sauce is kept in the kitchen and must be requested.)
Richard has developed his own spice rubs — separate ones for ribs, butt and poultry.
On the subject of side dishes, Richard says he’s been to barbecue restaurants where a lot of time has been invested in the meat, but the featured side dish is “warm pork and beans.”
If good marriages are built on equitable distribution of labor, it’s clear why Richard and Marty, the parents of five, are so compatible. Barbecue is his bailiwick; side dishes are hers. But Richard does interject that the hush puppies are his creation — studded with green pepper, oniony, sprinkled with the dry rub he uses for pulled pork, and slightly sweet with brown sugar.
Marty constructs the cornbread salad in layers, patterned after a church supper recipe. Corn, black beans, cheese, onions and sauce are the dominant ingredients. Sweet potato casserole resembles fluffy pudding. Potato salad is bound with sour cream. Cowboy beans, consisting of black, Navy and pinto beans and ribbons of pulled pork, are seasoned with dry rub and sauce and cooked in the smoker, below the ribs.
Marty lays claim to the dessert choices, too. The banana pudding’s based on the same recipe she served her family — real custard, Eagle Brand milk, cream cheese, real whipped cream, and “no non-dairy whipped topping,” she insists.
Near the cash register sits a basket full of chocolate chip cookies, each one about five inches across. These can be purchased and taken on the road. But better yet, order a cookie sundae and the Beets will warm a cookie for you, position two scoops of Breyer’s vanilla bean ice cream on top, rain chocolate sauce over the sundae, and cap it off with real whipped cream.
Richard says the name for the restaurant hit him one day when he was performing his day job, driving around East Tennessee selling industrial supplies.
And in the barbecue world, cute word play is expected. Hence the restaurant’s motto, “Home of Swine Dining.”
THE PIG & CHICK
LOCATION: 5020 Highway 11W, Rogersville, Tennessee
PHONE: 423-272-4448
HOURS: Open Monday through Thursday, 11 a.m. to 8 p.m., Friday and Saturday, 11 a.m. to 9 p.m., and Sunday, 11 a.m. to 3 p.m.
MISCELLANY: Checks and all major credit cards accepted
SAMPLE PRICES: Large pulled pork sandwich, $3.95; sliced pork tenderloin dinner with two sides, $7.95; half rack of ribs dinner with two sides, $10.95.
Food writer Fred Sauceman, author of the book “The Place Setting: Timeless Tastes of the Mountain South — from Bright Hope to Frog Level,” is senior writer and executive assistant to the president for public affairs at East Tennessee State University. E-mail him at sauceman@etsu.edu.