Page 5 - Best of the Best Winners 2015

ADVERTISING SUPPLEMENT TO THE ARKANSAS DEMOCRAT-GAZETTE • FRIDAY, OCTOBER 23, 2015
BEST OF THE BEST • 5H
ANGIE DAVIS/CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHER Only top-quality meat makes it into Whole Hog Café’s cookers. Also, most of the meat is purchased
locally.
BEST BARBECUE; BEST BARBECUE RIBS
Whole Hog Café >>
Consistency is key for barbecue success
With world-champion bar- becue and a 15-store fran- chise, Whole Hog Café has come a long way since its beginnings in 2000. Now, it’s the customers who are the judge, and Whole Hog Café is the winner of Best Barbecue and Best Ribs as voted by the readers of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.
Co-owner Mike Davis, called “Sarge” by his employees, said he and a group of friends got together and organized a championship barbecue team that formed in 1999.
“We started out as a championship bar- becue team in the beginning,” he said. “Our championship team was called Southern Gentlemen’s Culinary Society. Basically, that was just a weekend of fun, going out and drinking a few tasty beverages and going out and seeing if we could compete with the big boys out there in Memphis.”
Davis said that since its foundation to to- day, the team has been across the big stage at Memphis in May for some type of top-10 finish and has had four top-five finishes in those 16 years.
He said he’s been keeping with the same philosophy for years, and that’s consistency. “Keep It Simple Stupid. K-I-S-S,” he said. The founders of the team were Davis, Ron Blasingame and Steve Lucchi. Blasingame
died in 2009, and his wife, Kathy, and son-in-law, Chris Maynes, have taken over co-owning duties with Davis. Lucchi retired from the business this month.
Davis and Blasingame were both in the military. Davis served in the Army, and Blas- ingame was in the Marine Corps. Davis said his time in the mess hall has helped him be somewhat military-minded when it comes to recipes.
“When I was in the Army, I ended up in the mess hall for about six months. I actually ended up running the mess hall because the day I signed into the mess hall, all the help left,” he said. “The training I received from that — learning how to run the mess hall from scratch and feeding 50 bodies — I had to learn how to requisition food, how to cook for large quantities of people and make it edible. Some of that stuff here, we incor- porate into how we made the recipes, how to forecast how much food we’re going to cook for each day and things of that nature.”
Davis said he thanks the customers so much for voting Whole Hog Café the Best Barbecue and Best Ribs. He said that if it weren’t for them, the restaurant wouldn’t be where it is today. When customers walk into a Whole Hog Café, he invites them to talk to anyone from the management team and offer feedback.