A slice of barbecue heaven in Alabama’s Black Belt

Jamie Lee Mitchell was back home in Gainesville, a town of less than 200 people in remote Sumter County, near the Alabama-Mississippi border.

Mitchell left here when he was 19 and moved to Boston, where he met his wife, raised four children, and, for nearly 30 years, ran a barbershop.

He had returned to his little hometown on the Tombigbee River in Alabama’s Black Belt in the summer of 2019 to attend the funeral of an old family friend.

After the service, Mitchell changed into a pair of shorts and went for a walk on the land that he had inherited.

That’s when he had his “Field of Dreams” moment.

“I start walking around the property like I always do,” he recalls, “and this particular day, I heard this voice say: ‘Jamie Lee, this is where your restaurant needs to be.’”

Wait. What?

“And I told the voice, ‘Ain’t no damn way my restaurant is supposed to be in Gainesville.’”

In Boston, Mitchell had started a small catering business as a side gig, and word had gotten around Beantown about his sweet home Alabama barbecue.

Business was so good, in fact, that he was seriously looking into opening a restaurant up there.

Or so he thought.

“I kept walking around the property,” he continues the story, “and this voice said again: ‘This is where your restaurant needs to be.’

“I said, ‘Well, I’ll be damn. Ain’t this something?’”

He didn’t say anything to his wife and kids at the time, but he knew right then that he would be going back to Alabama to stay.

Sooner rather than later.

Alabama Rib Shack in Gainesville, Ala. — The Alabama Rib Shack sits along Alabama Highway 116 in downtown Gainesville, a town of less than 200 people.(Bob Carlton/bcarlton@al.com)

‘This is my heaven’

About a year after that voice beckoned him home, Mitchell moved his family to Sumter County on the Fourth of July 2020, a few months into the COVID-19 pandemic.

Ten months later, in May 2021, he opened the Alabama Rib Shack not in Boston but in historic Gainesville, which, in the 1840s, had been a major port with a population of more than 4,000 before a fire destroyed much of downtown.

The A-frame log cabin that houses the restaurant is partly surrounded by a thicket of trees along Alabama Highway 116, a shortcut on the way to the casinos in Philadelphia, Miss.

Mitchell -- who goes by the name “Pitmaster Jamie Lee’' -- did most of the construction work himself, building the restaurant from the ground up.

“I wanted my restaurant to be a real, true log cabin,” he says. “The best logs they make is these dovetail logs. I said, ‘I gotta have that for my restaurant.’”

A neat row of picnic tables -- flanked by freshly planted fig trees -- leads from the gravel parking lot to the side door of the restaurant, where a chalkboard sign greets customers: “Welcome to Alabama Rib Shack. Home of the Pig Tails.”

Inside, the restaurant is an homage to the people who raised Mitchell and the community that shaped him.

Framed photographs of old friends and family members cover one of the walls. Among them are pictures of Sarah and William Eddins, the couple who raised him from a baby; Lavell Burrell, the gentleman who inspired him to cook barbecue; and the Rev. Lewis Thomas, the preacher who taught him his carpentry skills.

“This is my Legends Wall,” the 52-year-old Mitchell says. “Everybody on this wall contributed to making me the man I am today.”

He has repurposed church pews from Gainesville’s historic Clark Chapel United Methodist Church to use as table benches, and the china cabinet that belonged to Mitchell’s great-grandmother is a display case for the cocktail glasses for the bar.

The trophy bucks mounted on the walls are gifts from some of the deer hunters who eat here during hunting season.

“You got all these hunters, like 148 hunting clubs (around) here,” Mitchell says. “People from all over the United States that come here to hunt. And to have a good restaurant here, and a bar, they really appreciate it.”

The pit room behind the restaurant is Mitchell’s sanctuary, where he tends to two custom-made steel smokers, one for the pork and the other for the chicken. Rows of white oak and pecan firewood are stacked floor-to-ceiling.

He’s planning to add a one-bedroom “pitmaster suite” upstairs so he can babysit his barbecue overnight.

“It feels so good out here,” Mitchell says. “I love it. This is my heaven.”

‘How impressive is this?’

Late on a Friday morning, sculptor and restoration artist Dale Chambliss, a former Baptist preacher who moved to Gainesville from Birmingham a dozen or so years ago, pulls up in the parking lot to deliver some old, rusted shovel blades that he figures Mitchell can use to make something for the restaurant.

“I thought you could hang ‘em up somewhere,” Chambliss suggests. “I know you’re creative.”

“I’m gonna wait on the calling,” Mitchell says. “I gotta listen to the spirits inside of my soul. They’ll tell me what to do with them.”

Chambliss, who, like Mitchell, knows how to take something old and make something new, marvels at what his friend has built.

“How impressive is this?” Chambliss says, motioning toward the rustic log cabin and its weeping willow-shaded patio. “It is a breath of fresh air for this community.”

Around noon, the lunch crowd starts to trickle in -- a group of folks visiting from Texas, two college students from nearby Livingston, and a couple of guys from Tuscaloosa out on their Friday drive.

“Me and my wife come through (here) on the way to the casino,” one of the men, O.V. Garner, says. “We watched them build, so every time we would come by, we would say we need to go.”

Garner ordered the smoked sausage, and his friend, Norman Davis, got the pulled pork. They each got a side of collard greens.

“It’s worth the drive,” Garner says. “These are the best collard greens I’ve had since I was a kid.”

Mitchell goes from table to table making sure everybody’s happy.

“How’s everything?” he asks. “What do you think?”

In addition to Texas, St. Louis and baby back ribs, the Alabama Rib Shack menu features pulled pork, smoked sausage, smoked chicken, jerk chicken, rib tips and pig tails. Sides include baked beans, candied yams, potato salad, collards, coleslaw, and mac and cheese.

Word of mouth is Mitchell’s best advertisement.

“If 10 people come in the door, I know when those 10 people go out that I’m gonna have 20 more people,” he says. “I know when those 20 people go out, it’s gonna be 40 more people. I believe in my product.”

‘Never worked for nobody’

Born and raised in Gainesville, Jamie Lee Mitchell was adopted at birth by Sarah and William Eddins, who were close friends of his late maternal grandmother. They were 67 years old when he was born.

It’s a complicated story, Mitchell says, but his mother was 13 when she had him, and the Eddinses raised both him and his mother.

Although they are not related by blood, Mitchell considers William Eddins to be his grandfather and Sarah Eddins to be his grandmother.

The couple lived in Gainesville but owned some farmland across the Tombigbee River in neighboring Greene County, where they grew peanuts and cucumbers, raised cows and pigs, and taught Jamie Lee the value of earning his own way.

“My grandfather couldn’t read or write, but he was the smartest man I ever met in my life,” Mitchell says. “He taught me how to use my hands.

“My grandmama, I think she said she had a fifth-grade education,” he adds. “But she was a great reader and great speller, and she was very successful.

“And they were entrepreneurs. They never worked for nobody. They were farmers. They always had a way to make their own money.”

When Mitchell was about 11, he says, he went with his grandmother to a Smith’s General Store, and he was mesmerized by a set of men’s hair clippers in a display case.

He pleaded with her to buy them.

“Something about them clippers just fascinated me, man,” he says. “And I told my grandmama, ‘I can cut hair; I know I can do it.’’'

She made a deal with him. If he could come up with half of the $7 that the clippers cost, she would cover the rest.

“Before that day was over,” Mitchell says. “I had half of the money.”

It wasn’t long before their little investment started paying off.

“I was cutting hair at 12 years old on my grandmother’s porch,” Mitchell says. “I had grown men coming to my grandmother’s house on a Sunday to get haircuts.”

Later, as a teenager, Jamie Lee got to tag along with his grandfather when he went over to his friend Lavell Burrell’s all-night, whole-hog barbecue cookouts.

“We called him Uncle Lavell,” Mitchell remembers. “He would cook pigs at his house, and my grandfather would go over there and hang out with him. I would be right there with him. I always wanted to go, just to see it.

“So, that was my first inspiration, is watching him do the whole hogs.”

Jamie Lee was too young to realize it at the time, but those two life events would shape his future.

Barbering would provide a means for him to make a living after he left Gainesville, and barbecuing would be the reason for coming back.

‘I love Alabama’

As it turned out, convincing his wife and family to move from metropolitan Boston to tiny Gainesville was surprisingly easy for Mitchell.

Their daughter Jaymie, who’s 19 now and works in the restaurant, was on board from the start, although the boys, 14-year-old Jayar and 12-year-old Jesse, needed a little convincing. Their other daughter, Jasmyn, the oldest of the four, stayed in Boston.

But it was Mitchell’s wife, Stephanie, who was born and raised in Boston, who had the ultimate say.

“Oh, I couldn’t wait (to move),” Stephanie Mitchell says. “I love the South, but I love Alabama specifically.

“We’ve been coming back and forth here for the past 20 years or so, and we were always like, ‘Oh, one day this will be a nice place to retire.’

“Then, an opportunity presented itself, and I just couldn’t think of a reason not to (move).”

When she first started coming here with Jamie Lee in the early 2000s, Stephanie was caught off-guard by just how remote Gainesville was. Then she grew to love it.

In their free time, Jamie Lee and Stephanie go fishing and kayaking on the Tombigbee River.

“At first, I was a little surprised at the infrastructure -- or lack thereof -- and how rural and isolated it was,” she says. “That was one of the things that initially struck me.

“But then, secondarily, was just the beauty of the place,” she adds. “Part of it being so rural is that it is untouched, people aren’t messing with the nature of it all.”

"TaTa the Bartender" serves one of her specialty cocktails at the Alabama Rib Shack bar. Inspired by local characters and critters, the cocktail menu includes such drinks as the Catfish, the Rattlesnake, the Hound Dog, the Lemon Harper, the Southern Girl, Red Dirt, Blue Panties and the Tombigbee Death Dealer. (Bob Carlton/bcarlton@al.com)

‘Let my mind go wild’

With her husband’s help, Stephanie, a certified nurse-midwife, is in the final stages of finishing a project of her own -- transforming a 187-year-old antebellum house on nearby Webster Street into Alabama’s first freestanding birth center. She hopes to open it later this year.

“It’s coming,” she says. “It’s like a snail’s pace around here, but it’s moving.”

Until then, she is pitching in around the restaurant, helping and supporting Jamie Lee.

“He likes to call me the manager,” Stephanie says. “I’ve just been in a supportive role mostly, just as an extra helping hand. I’m not a restaurateur or a waitress, but I support him.”

For Jamie Lee -- who is not lacking in confidence, vision or personality -- the Alabama Rib Shack is everything that he imagined, and then some.

“I wanted to create this amazing atmosphere that no other barbecue restaurant has and just let my mind go wild,” he says.

“So, when people come in here, they just say, ‘Wow, this just looks so different -- and the food is good on top of that.’”

The voice didn’t steer him wrong.

He built it. And they have come.

The Alabama Rib Shack is at 9316 State St. in Gainesville, Ala. The phone is 205-652-1115. Hours are noon to 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays and noon to 5 p.m. Sundays. For more information, follow the Alabama Rib Shack on Facebook, Instagram and TikTok.

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