are trying to be everything to everybody,

and they're serving beef,

and they're serving a sauce from every region,

and they're serving burgers and chicken fingers.

And that's not what we do here.

At the Peg Leg Porker we are real Tennessee barbecue.

We cook pork and chicken.

When I was growing up,

if somebody asked for brisket

and they were in the state of Tennessee,

they'd be told two things.

One, that's not barbecue, it's a steak.

And two, go to Texas.

You know, Tennessee was always a pork-producing state.

There was certainly beef raised here in Tennessee,

but Tennesseans never considered beef barbecue.

I love brisket and I think it's great barbecue,

and that's no slide on the Texans.

But we stick to what is our roots and what's native to us.

For us, barbecue has always been pork and chicken,

and that is the West Tennessee tradition,

cooked over hickory charcoal or hickory coals.

That's a native wood to Tennessee

and that's what gives it the signature Tennessee flavor.

This is something that was passed down to me,

not only from a cooking standpoint,

but from a cultural standpoint

of something that was very important to our family

and the heritage of West Tennessee.

We do a dry rub here

which was originated by the Vergos family in Memphis

and they were actually Greek.

So that dry-style rib is actually Greek in origin.

It uses a barbecue seasoning rather than a rub.

And so we smoke that rib with nothing on it

except for kosher salt.

We probably cook our ribs shorter than most places.

You know a rib is not that big of a piece of meat.

You see some of these places that say we're smoking our ribs

for eight to nine hours.

It's gonna taste like your house burnt down.

So we cook 'em for about three and a half to four hours

and that's enough to give 'em a great color.

That's enough to give 'em a great flavor.

People need to understand that smoke is an ingredient

just like anything else.

You can use too much smoke or you can use too little smoke,

and the key is getting that balance

and having that ingredient in the right portion

to make sure that the recipe is a delicious one.

They come off the pit, they're moist,

and right when they hit your plate

we hit 'em with our dry seasoning

and it sticks right to that meat.

And that's how that traditional

West Tennessee dry rib is served.

A lot of people in Memphis claim to invent the barbecue nacho.

I'm gonna stand by the fact that Ernie Miller

invented the barbecue nacho.

And so we used to cook it on our barbecue team, Hog Wild.

Down in Memphis in May, we used to do 'em.

So it's just nacho chips,

which we fry up here in the restaurant.

We buy 'em locally.

And we use a nacho cheese.

It's not a fancy cheese.

It's not some colby-Cheddar blend.

This is nacho ballpark nacho cheese.

And then we put our pulled pork,

and then our sauce, and some sliced jalapenos.

And that's the way the original barbecue nachos

are intended to be served.

If you try and fancy 'em up, you're ruining it.

That's not where it's at.

(laughs)

Our pulled pork sandwich

is a traditional West Tennessee barbecue sandwich.

Now we like to use butts

and the reason that we use butts

over shoulders or over whole hog

is because we get more flavor, more smoke coverage,

and more bark on that butt

than we can get on a whole hog

or than we can get on a shoulder.

When you're talkin' about a large chunk of meat like that,

surface area is everything,

'cause that's where all of your flavor's gonna come from.

The smoke is only gonna penetrate that meat so much.

We like to have a little bit of bark in every sandwich.

By cooking a butt, we have a lot more bark

and surface area to work with.

We've got our regular standard white bun.

Then we pull that pork and we put it on top of there.

We put some sauce which is a traditional West Tennessee

tomato-based sauce.

A sandwich gotta be served with slaw on top.

That's the way that God intended that sandwich to be served

and so we believe in that strongly.

Now you can ask for it without slaw,

but you might get made fun of at the expo counter

on the microphone for ordering it that way.

The name Peg Leg Porker comes from the fact

that I have one leg.

I'm actually a right-leg, above-the-knee amputee.

I had bone cancer when I was 17 years old.

It was the summer before my senior year.

I had osteogenic sarcoma and went through chemotherapy

all during my senior year.

I had my leg amputated right there that summer

before that year.

I know a lot of families that have lost children

to osteogenic sarcoma.

I'm very lucky, I had a great support system.

And it's something that sorta shaped my personality.

It changed the way that I looked at the world.

It really brought out my personality.

I was pretty shy before

and this made me a lot more outgoing.

And we've taken what was a negative,

or could be a very dark negative,

and turned it into a positive.

And we have a lot of people that come in here

that are amputees.

If we can help inspire people

or let 'em know that there's life after cancer,

or that you can always make a positive

out of a tragic situation, then we're glad to do that.

We're a 100% family-owned and -operated restaurant.

We've got shirts that say, "Limpin' ain't easy."

I think I got one on right now.

So we like to have fun with it

and understand that we're just cookin' barbecue here.

We don't take ourselves too seriously.