LITTLE ROCK — You’re standing outside a barbecue place. Any barbecue place. Anywhere.
Breathe deep. Ahhh. What do you smell? If you are “of a certain age,” if you have more gray than not in your hair, if you grew up in these parts, you smell The Shack. Doesn’t matter where you actually are, doesn’t matter what kind of barbecue, just matters that the smoky, hickory air is smoky, hickory air. The past takes care of the rest.
Smell may be the most powerful of the senses when it comes to evoking memories. A smell can transport you to a place, a day, a moment. Smell is a snapshot sense, stopping time in its tracks.
So when a few generations of Arkansans smell barbecue, they inevitably, instinctively, return to The Shack.
On this weekday afternoon at lunchtime, at Smokehouse BBQ in Conway, I breathe deep and find myself in the back seat of my father's old station wagon. We are parked on the gravel lot at Third and Victory, the last location of The Shack, after a forced move from West Seventh thanks to state government “progress,” and we are dining on pork sandwiches, the wrapping paper unfolded and spread out on vinyl seats. Dueling sandwiches separate my sister and I in the back seat, while mom and dad eat theirs on laps up front. It is late evening. Hot. Summer. Windows rolled down, which lets the sandwich smell out but The Shack’s outdoor smoker smell in.
The aroma will stay in the car for days, the interior thick with the hint of a sauce famous statewide and described variously by critics and ’cue connoisseurs as “moderately thick, rich, sweet and piquant,” “tangy fare,” and even “black-pepper-laden fire.”
All of this registers in the millisecond it takes for the scent to carry from nose to brain. The recollection may be a complete fabrication, a total revision, but it is real enough.
Here at the Smokehouse, the hickory-smoked-smell-to-Shack quotient is more acute than memory. That's because the Smokehouse has ties to the legendary barbecue restaurant in Little Rock that closed for good in the late 1980s after a five-decade run. Don Smith runs the Smokehouse. As a boy, he worked at the downtown Shack with his father, Cletus Smith.
When I ask about the connection, Don Smith leaves my table and fetches from a place of honor near the kitchen a faded, color photograph, framed for posterity. It is the staff of The Shack from way back, gathered around a small artificial Christmas tree, the restaurant’s logo (shingled roof over the word SHACK) on a wall in the background as if to verify the sacred ground.
Not good enough? Then taste the sauce. Don Smith says his spicy sauce is the old Shack recipe. Or at least one version of it; there seem to be more recipes for Shack sauces in circulation than Sacagawea dollars. And note: There is street-fightin’ controversy over the difference between original Shack sauce and franchise Shack sauce. According to Judi Slaughter, whose family opened the original Shack, when the restaurant was sold and subsequently franchised, the sauce recipe did not transfer with the sale.
The Smokehouse isn't the only barbecue restaurant in central Arkansas that claims Shack roots, original or franchise or some other latter-day version. By my count, the following restaurants claim a connection to The Shack: H.B.’s in Little Rock, Jo-Jo’s Barbecue in Sherwood, Smitty’s Bar-B-Que in Conway, Smokehouse BBQ in Conway, and the Smoke Shack in Maumelle.
There may be more, especially when it comes to who might be using the official, semi-official, or vaguely-reminiscent-of-the Shack sauce. Google Shack sauce and you're liable to get more recipes than you can count.
A few years back, Richard Allin, the late Our Town columnist for the Arkansas Gazette and the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, put out a call for the original recipe for Shack sauce and received four different recipes from four different readers. For years, the story was that the official, original Shack sauce was held secret by George Cook, who owned The Shack in its glory days before it was sold and spawned restaurants from Jonesboro to Fayetteville to Pine Bluff.
H.B.’s, tucked away down Lancaster Road off 65th Street in southwest Little Rock, is undisputed as a Shack relative. H.B.’s is named for the late Herbert Brooks “H.B.” Slaughter, who worked with his brother Casey, original owner of The Shack, in its early days. H.B. opened his own place in 1961, and it's still in the family, now owned by Bruce (H.B.’s son) and Judi Slaughter.
When I called for confirmation — yup, the lineage remains strong — I also asked if H.B.’s had any photographs of the old Shack. Surprisingly, the archives at the Democrat-Gazette turned up only three photographs of The Shack, including two of the bulldozed remains at the corner of Victory and Third, now home to a government building notoriously nicknamed The Pink Palace.
Only three? Yet it makes sense, no? After all, back in the day, conventional wisdom suggested that there would always be a Shack. Why would a newspaper need to take a random photograph of it? That would be like photographing the state Capitol on a regular basis. Some things we will always have with us. Perhaps that photo archive, or lack thereof, speaks to the enduring institutional popularity of The Shack more than anything else — that we couldn’t imagine a time without it.
Which brings me back to H.B.’s. Judi Slaughter said she’d search the family photo albums. But original Shack snapshots seem to be rarer than pictures of the Loch Ness Monster sunbathing on shore. H.B.’s still gets the request for Shack memorabilia all the time.
Darrell Wiley wouldn't be surprised. He's the owner of Smitty’s in Conway, having bought the restaurant a decade ago from Cletus and Don Smith. Wiley left a Shack recipe sauce on his menu, advertised as such, accompanying several of his own sauces.
“It’s one of our most popular sauces,” he said, “a best-seller.”
What made The Shack so special? That sauce, for one. And the way it teamed so perfectly with pork, smoked with hickory wood, which is terribly important as this is and always will be a pork-barbecue state. (We ain’t Texas.) But perhaps adding to The Shack legend is that familiar Arkansas emotional cocktail: stubborn pride in our traditions and an almost desperate yearning for legacy, which can elevate a restaurant to an institution. After a while, the food becomes secondary to the experience — and the nostalgia.
Note this letter to the Gazette upon being alerted to the demise of The Shack from Anne Fewell, a native of Little Rock who was living in Los Angeles at the time: “My sister Carol broke it to me as gently as she could over the phone, but in that next second after she told me, a lifetime of memories swiftly sifted through a kaleidoscope of emotions from grief to outrage.... I told her if I’d known ahead of time, I would’ve flown to Little Rock and done something, even started a picket line, or, if it got down to it, pled with whoever to keep it alive. After we hung up, I recalled my first taste.”
When the shuttering of a barbecue place reaches the status of death-of-a-loved-one, you know it was more than a barbecue place.
“The Shack was a legendary place,” said Rex Nelson, a regional barbecue expert if ever there was one who writes frequently about the state’s food-culture communion on his blog Rexnelsonsouthernfried.com. “The barbecue might not have been the best in Arkansas, but legendary restaurants are about a lot more than food. They're about history, ambiance, the people you see there. The Shack had all of that going for it.”
In spades. Why, at one point, even Orval Faubus — yes, that Orval Faubus — owned a piece of The Shack. You could meet him there for a pork sandwich and an interview.
The Shack also had the barbecue market much to itself. From the time Casey Slaughter first opened it in 1934 to the time the last interpretation of The Shack closed for good in July 1988, after changing hands what seemed like two-dozen times, central Arkansas just wasn't barbecue country. At least not barbecue restaurant country. These days, you can find barbecue shacks about everywhere — witness the 45 separate stops the Sync staff made in compiling its list for this issue.
“There weren't that many barbecue places around then,” said Cletus Smith, the old Shack hand. “Not near as many as there are now. We were known all over, for miles and miles around. We had that good sauce and that good meat. They have to go together. You can't have one without the other.”
Otherwise, we wouldn't have had The Shack. Which still influences barbecue in Arkansas as a gold standard for black-pepper-laden quality, as a popular sauce on several menus, and as a deliciously vivid memory for thousands of Arkansans.