Today marks 21 years since Gene's Barbecue in Brinkley opened. It has never been closed a day since Gene DePriest unlocked the doors on July 1, 1994. That includes every holiday, and even the day after a fire.
"Thanksgiving and Christmas are two of my busiest days," says DePriest, a man with whom I've hunted ducks on many a cold morning. He's 78 now and, to put it mildly, is a colorful character. As an old newspaperman, I'm attracted to both colorful characters and independently owned restaurants where people gather at all hours of the day and night. So naturally I'm attracted to Gene DePriest and his namesake restaurant.
DePriest was born near the farming community of Monroe and attended school at Moro in Lee County. During the 1960s, he ran a restaurant in Brinkley called the S&K Grill. The aging river rats who live along the lower White and Cache rivers know him best as the man who operated the 17/79 Club at Clarendon from 1971-94. The club was named for the intersection of U.S. 79 and Arkansas 17.
It's said that the 17/79 Club hosted its fair share of high-stakes card games through the years. "We would have several hundred people in there on a Saturday night," DePriest says. "There would be live music and lots of fights." Things settled down when DePriest went from running one of the most famous nightclubs in east Arkansas to operating a restaurant that attracts families. That doesn't mean there haven't been exciting times. The ivory-billed woodpecker search stands out. Gene's menu reads: "More than 60 years after the last confirmed sighting of an ivory-billed woodpecker in the United States, researchers have evidence that the majestic bird still lives. On Feb. 11, 2004, a kayaker caught a glimpse of a huge and unusual woodpecker in the Cache River National Wildlife Refuge. The encounter spurred an extensive scientific search for a species that many feared had vanished forever, driven to extinction by the destruction of Southern old-growth forests."
There was never another sighting, and some experts consider the original sighting a hoax. DePriest still bills the two-patty cheeseburger on his menu as the "ivory-bill burger" and has a large poster in the main dining room that honors the woodpecker. The late Ed Bradley and his CBS News crew ate at Gene's while doing a story about the search for 60 Minutes. An article in a Nature Conservancy publication in 2005 noted: "Gene's was a major hangout of the search team, a place where members sometimes met to dine after a day of working transects or checking cameras. We sit down and start to open our menus, but before we can order our waitress directs our attention to a board at the back with a new special, the ivory-bill cheeseburger."
Another memorable moment was the fire. A man driving down U.S. 49 noticed the flames coming out of the restaurant on Sept. 16, 2001. He called the fire department and then called DePriest at home. DePriest says: "I beat the firemen down here. The fire started in a fan in the women's restroom. They got it out before it affected the kitchen. It took us eight weeks to get things rebuilt up front. But we never missed a day of business."
DePriest worked all night to clean up after the fire. He moved the main dining area from the front room to what's usually the private back room. As soon as the state inspectors left at 10 a.m. the next day, he was open for business. When DePriest purchased the restaurant from his brother Louis, who died in 1996, it was known as Sweet Pea's, and had been in Brinkley since 1971. The formal name became Gene's Barbecue, but the restaurant serves much more than barbecue. There are Southern favorites that have become hard to find in other restaurants.
Several years ago, the Southern Foodways Alliance, based on the University of Mississippi campus, filmed a short documentary about the Sunday night wild-game dinners at Gene's. For years, the gravel parking lot would fill up with pickups late on Sunday afternoons. Men wearing jeans and camouflage would gather to eat and tell stories. They might have squirrel one week, crappie the next and rabbit the week after that. Duck, goose, dove, venison and baked coon would find their way onto the menu along with sides such as baked sweet potatoes, fried Irish potatoes, turnip greens and sliced tomatoes and onions from DePriest's home garden. An acquaintance of DePriest once described the menu as consisting of "whatever Gene shot, caught or ran over the previous week." As the Sunday night regulars aged and died, the dinners became more infrequent.
"I was killing a lot of squirrels," DePriest explains. "My wife wouldn't cook them at home, so I started to cook them here at the restaurant and invite my friends over to help me eat them. It just kind of mushroomed. But about everybody I hunted and fished with is now dead."
Like other men his age who live in the Delta, DePriest has spent a lifetime hunting and fishing. He also has been known to plant up to 125 tomato plants in the spring along with lettuce, radishes, onions, bell peppers and various kinds of peas and beans. He knows there's no greater expression of the Arkansas culture than through our food, which best can be described as traditional country cooking using the freshest ingredients possible. John T. Edge, who heads the Southern Foodways Alliance, says men like DePriest are among those "for whom food is a caloric fuel, sure, but also a means of cultural expression, on par with music and literature."
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Freelance columnist Rex Nelson is the director of corporate communications for Simmons First National Corp. He's also the author of the Southern Fried blog at rexnelsonsouthernfried.com.
Editorial on 07/01/2015