5 more old Alabama barbecue restaurants our readers miss

Back in the summer, we were feeling a little nostalgic and started reminiscing about old Alabama barbecue joints that are no longer around.

So, we put together a list of seven shuttered smokehouses that we miss the most.

We knew there were plenty of others, of course, so we asked our readers to chime in and tell us which ones they still miss.

Here are five old Alabama barbecue restaurants that got a lot of love from readers, along with several others they remember fondly.

Thomas Pit Bar-B-Q in Madison had a 45-year run before it closed in 2014.(AL.com file photo)

Thomas Pit Bar-B-Q in Madison

Thomas Pit Bar-B-Q was a beloved barbecue restaurant that opened its doors on U.S. 72 West in Madison around 1969 and closed for good in 2014, after which the building was demolished.

During the restaurant’s heyday, long lines of cars stretched from the drive-thru to the Wall Triana Highway intersection, as dedicated customers waited patiently to pick up some Thomas barbecue.

“How good was this barbecue?” longtime Huntsville Times and AL.com journalist Lee Roop wrote in 2015. “It was so good the line in front of the drive-thru on Saturdays could last most of a quarter of a college football game.”

Roop said he missed the chicken and ribs plate the most.

“You sit at a table next to somebody you’d disliked for years just to eat it,” he wrote.x

Big Daddy’s Bar-B-Q in Warrior

At 6-foot-4 and more than 300 pounds, Paul “Big Daddy” Woodard lived up to his nickname.

And so did his barbecue.

“You expect some good barbecue from Big Daddy’s,” Woodard told The Birmingham News in 2008. “We aim to deliver.”

And deliver Big Daddy’s Bar-B-Q did, bringing home the gold for the best ribs in the seven-county Birmingham metro area in a contest sponsored by The News.

A Chicago native who learned to barbecue from his father, Woodard opened Big Daddy’s on Main Street in downtown Warrior in 2006.

Four years later, Big Daddy’s was forced to close for several months after a fire damaged the building.

“The people here (in Warrior) have been so supportive, just constantly coming by and checking on us,” he said upon the restaurant’s reopening. “It’s like an extended family.”

Big Daddy’s Bar-B-Q permanently closed in 2017.

Woodard — “the big guy with the infectious laugh and kind heart” — died this past January after battling cancer.

Webb’s 231 Bar-B-Q in Midland City

Webb’s 231 Bar-B-Q was a true dive, a ramshackle building along U.S. 231 between Ozark and Dothan, where pitmaster Rawls Webb presided from 2001 until he closed the doors in 2020.

Barbecue was in Webb’s blood, he told writer Annette Thompson for her book “Alabama Barbecue: Delicious Road Trips,” which includes photos by Art Meripol.

“My father was well known around Coffee County for his barbecue,” Webb said in the book. “He was chief deputy for 12 years. We’d cook for 300 to 400 people at a time.”

Webb used to pile so much meat onto his pork sandwiches that they would fall apart after a few bites.

“People get their money’s worth,” he told Thompson. “Nobody walks out saying they didn’t get enough to eat.”

Rabbit’s Bar-B-Q in Concord

Roger “Rabbit” Smith — who worked for the Pullman-Standard railroad car manufacturing company during the week and cooked barbecue for his family and friends as a hobby on the weekends — opened his barbecue place on Warrior River Road in the western Jefferson County community of Concord in 1980.

For 20-something years or more, Rabbit’s Bar-B-Q was the place to go not only for the area’s best barbecue but for the cheeseburgers, too.

In 2000, in fact, Rabbit’s was a finalist in The Birmingham News’ “Best Burger Around” contest.

“We’ve always had just as many people order hamburgers as we have barbecue,” Lisa Roberts, one of Smith’s daughters, told The News at the time.

Rabbit’s moved into a new, larger location across the street from its original home in 2003.

As part of a 2006 Southern Foodways Alliance oral history project on Southern barbecue, the SFA’s Amy Evans asked Cheryl Lay, Smith’s other daughter, what Rabbit’s Bar-B-Q meant to the Concord community.

“I guess they’ve enjoyed coming here to eat because they do support us, and they do come in on a regular basis,” Lay said. “I’ve had people in their twenties come in and say, ‘Well, I used to eat there all the time when I was a little boy.’”

Tired Texan Barbecue in Birmingham

Revered for its blazing-hot Dammit to Hell Sandwich (more about that below), Tired Texan Barbecue had a cult-like late-night following in western Birmingham for about a quarter of a century before proprietor Ira “Tex” Ellison closed the business in 1996.

Ellison got an early education in barbecue working around the pits at his grandfather’s joint in Houston when he was about 6 years old, according to a story Birmingham journalist Ed Reynolds wrote for Black & White magazine in 2002. Later, as a Marine stationed in Beaufort, S.C., in the late 1950s, Ellison and his wife, Madeline, started selling barbecue at their Tired Texan Country Club, which they opened on the base.

After he got out of the military and he and his wife moved to Birmingham, Ellison opened Tired Texan Barbecue in a tiny concrete building on Eighth Avenue North and 15th Street – “a smokey pit of intoxicating aromas and a late-night oasis for the uninhibited,” as Reynolds called it.

Ellison kept the place open until the wee hours of the morning, serving ribs to nocturnal carnivores whose faces and hands were smeared in his fiery barbecue sauce, which owed its five-alarm heat to generous dollops of Agent Orange sauce from Birmingham’s legendary Mancha’s Mexican restaurant.

“Patrons gnawed on ribs until sunrise,” Reynolds wrote. “Slices of white bread often functioned as napkins, when not used as edible sponges for sopping up barbecue.”

Ellison’s signature Dammit to Hell Sandwich was like a barbecue Sloppy Joe, with sliced pork scraps, bits of hot franks, and pieces of chicken necks, hearts, livers and gizzards all piled together and slathered in that tear-inducing sauce.

The sandwich didn’t start selling until Ellison raised the price.

“If they won’t buy it under one name, dammit, give it another name and raise the price,” he told Reynolds. “Make ‘em want it.”

In the 1990s, Ellison moved Tired Texan Barbecue to a spot near Legion Field, but he eventually closed for good following the Olympic soccer matches held at “The Old Gray Lady” in 1996.

He died six years later at 72.