[Garden & Gun] Since around 1910, Jones Bar-B-Q Diner has been a mainstay in the small Delta town of Marianna, Arkansas. Still run by the same family who founded it, the barbecue icon received an America’s Classic award from the James Beard Foundation in 2012. But on the morning of Sunday, February 28, a fire broke out in the pit, devastating roughly seventy percent of the building before responders could put it out.
"Jones Bar-B-Q Diner is one of the oldest barbecue joints in the country, one of the oldest Black-run barbecue joints, and one of America’s oldest Black-run businesses, period," says the culinary historian Adrian Miller, author of the forthcoming book Black Smoke: African Americans and the United States of Barbecue. "Black entrepreneurs have always faced obstacles in this country, often hurdles intentionally put in place, so to have a business endure this long is significant." |