A year after closing, Lannie’s Bar-B-Q Spot, a Selma institution and one of the oldest barbecue restaurants in Alabama, is reopening in a new and bigger home in the same neighborhood where the business began about 80 years ago.
Lannie’s, which closed last June, will open the doors to its new space this Friday, June 7, according to a post on the restaurant’s Facebook page.
Initially, the Hatcher family that owns the historic Selma barbecue joint was planning to expand and remodel their old restaurant, which suffered some damage from the Jan. 12, 2023, tornado that ripped through the heart of Selma.
After adding up the costs of a renovation, though, the family opted to do a complete rebuild instead.
“We decided to just tear the whole thing down and just make it much bigger than what I had,” Floyd Hatcher, one of the grandchildren of the restaurant’s late founders, Lannie and Will Travis, told AL.com. “It’s two or three times bigger than what I had.”
The new restaurant will seat between 160 and 180 guests, Hatcher added, including a separate banquet room to accommodate large groups that visit Lannie’s on their Selma civil rights tours.
“I have a lot of tour buses coming in,” Hatcher said. “That’s one of the main reasons that we did that, because I have big buses coming in from everywhere. And I made extra room so they can come in and sit together.”
The Lannie’s menu includes pork plates, ribs, wings, catfish and cheeseburgers, and Hatcher said he plans to add a hot bar with daily meat-and-three options.
Lannie’s signature, though, is its pulled-pork sandwich, which is doused with a house-made barbecue sauce, topped with crispy barks of pork skin and served open-faced with two slices of white bread.
The pulled pork sandwich at Lannie's Bar-B-Q Spot in Selma is served between layers of white bread, doused with a house-made sauce and topped with a crispy fried pork skin.(Photo by Art Meripol, from the book "Alabama Barbecue: Delicious Road Trips")
The pork skins are a Lannie’s tradition that go back to the days when Will Travis butchered his own hogs and smoked them in a cinder-block pit next to his and his wife’s house in Selma’s Tuxedo Park neighborhood.
After her mother and stepfather died, Lula Hatcher, who started working at Lannie’s when she was 12 years old, ran the business for decades.
Now 91, Ms. Hatcher lives in the house across the street from Lannie’s, where she still keeps an eye on things from a rocking chair on her front porch.
Four of her eight children -- Floyd Hatcher and his siblings Charles Hatcher, Alfonsa Hatcher and Deborah Hatcher -- keep the fires burning at Lannie’s now.
(Earl “Butch” Travis, Lula Hatcher’s brother, opened a separately owned barbecue business, Lannie’s Bar-B-Q #2, in 1992 and worked there until he died in 2022. His wife and daughters continue to run Lannie’s #2, which is located at 205 Medical Center Parkway in Selma.)
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The new building is the third location in Lannie’s 80-year history, Charles Hatcher said.
“My grandmother built the first one, and my mother built (the next one),” he said. “This is the third one. It’ll be here a while.”
Tucked away in a historically Black neighborhood in eastern Selma, Lannie’s Bar-B-Q Spot has always been a place where both Blacks and whites felt welcome, Lula Hatcher told AL.com in a 2018 interview. Even during the turbulent 1960s, when Selma was on the front lines of the Civil Rights Movement, Lannie’s was a calm in the storm, she said.
“They wanted the barbecue, so they came and got it,” Ms. Hatcher said. “They were welcome, anybody that came. They were comfortable.”
In 2015, voters in the Alabama Tourism Department’s online Alabama Barbecue Battle chose Lannie’s Bar-B-Q Spot as the winner in the “Legends” category, and that same year, Lannie’s also was one of the inaugural inductees into the state tourism agency’s Alabama Barbecue Hall of Fame.
Also, in 2017, former late-night television host David Letterman and Georgia Congressman John Lewis, who was beaten and bloodied during the 1965 Bloody Sunday march on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, had lunch at Lannie’s while they were in Selma to tape a segment for Letterman’s Netflix series, “My Next Guest Needs No Introduction.”
Lannie’s Bar-B-Q Spot is at 2115 Minter Ave. in Selma, Ala. The phone number is 334-874-4478. For more information, go here.
