Dreamland: Big Daddy's Rib Joint

John Bishop opened a barbecue restaurant in a hollow in the Jerusalem Heights neighborhood of Tuscaloosa in nineteen fifty-eight. The hollow gave the place something close to a nickname: people called it the Ditch. The sign read Dreamland Bar-B-Que.

Bishop, known around the neighborhood as Big Daddy, ran the restaurant himself for decades, serving pork ribs over an open pit, with sliced white bread and nothing else. No sides. No desserts.

Ribs, bread, and sauce. The original Dreamland is not a large place. It sits in a residential neighborhood far from the university's main commercial strip.

It became famous anyway. By the nineteen nineties, food writers and college football fans had turned it into something approaching a pilgrimage destination. USA Today called the original Tuscaloosa location the most famous rib joint in the east.

Sports Illustrated dispatched a reporter during the Alabama football season. The University of Georgia's athletic department tweeted approvingly about it before a game in Tuscaloosa, which is either a compliment or a sign of how thoroughly Dreamland had crossed the usual lines of football allegiance. The chain expanded.

There are now franchise locations in Birmingham, Montgomery, Mobile, Atlanta, and Tallahassee. The original is still in Jerusalem Heights, essentially unchanged in physical character from what John Bishop built in the hollow in the late nineteen fifties. The ribs are still cooked over a pit.

The bread is still sliced white. The sauce is a proprietary recipe that the company has never publicly disclosed. Big Daddy John Bishop cooked ribs until he was too old to do it, and then turned the operation over to his family.

He did not expand. He did not franchise. The franchise came later and under different management.

The hollow in Jerusalem Heights was, for him, exactly the right size for exactly what he had in mind.