Making a forgotten Alabama barbecue joint relevant again

Charles Collat’s favorite barbecue joint was about to close.

And he couldn’t stand to see that happen.

So, Collat, a Birmingham businessman who helped grow Mayer Electric Supply Company into a $1-billion-a-year business, did something about it.

He bought Birmingham’s venerable Carlile’s Barbecue, where he had been coming for a barbecue sandwich (and, back in the day, a glass of buttermilk) for more than half a century.

It didn’t matter that he had never smoked a pig or waited a table in his life.

In fact, neither Collat nor his son, Charles Collat Jr., whom most folks know as Charlie, knew hardly anything about running a barbecue restaurant.

“Not at all,” Charlie Collat says. “We are weekend guys on the grill.”

They did, however, know something about running a successful business, and they just couldn’t sit by and let a Birmingham landmark that had been around since the end of World War II go quietly into the night.

“We just didn’t want it to close,” the younger Collat says over a smoked chicken sandwich and a side of Carlile’s famous crispy fries. “That’s why we bought it. Because we love the barbecue. We love the sauce. And (because) we could do it.”

That was in 2007, and in the years since, thanks to the father-and-son Collats, Birmingham’s second-oldest barbecue restaurant has made it through good times and bad, surviving the crippling Great Recession of 2008 and holding on during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic that has shuttered restaurants big and small.

“One day,” Charlie Collat says, “I’m going to sit down and write a book about what happened when we bought the restaurant, the trials and tribulations of owning it.”

The chopped pork plate with fries and baked beans is the essential dish at Carlile's Barbecue in Birmingham, Ala.(Photo courtesy of Carlile's Barbecue; used with permission)

That’s Carlile, without an ‘s’

Charles and Charlie Collat may not have known a lot about the restaurant business when they bought their Carlile’s more than 13 years ago, but they do know and love their Birmingham barbecue history, as well as Carlile’s long and colorful role in it.

The restaurant goes back to 1945, when, after serving in World War II, Warren Carlisle (with an “s) and his wife, Pearl, leased a building at the corner of Sixth Avenue South and 35th Street on Birmingham’s Southside, according to a family history.

Five years later, Warren and Pearl built a new place and moved their restaurant to his current location at 3511 Sixth Ave. South, and Warren went into business with his brothers Robert and Herman as Carlile Brothers Bar-B-Q.

The restaurant’s unusual spelling came about after Herman’s last name was misspelled “Carlile” (without the “s”) when he went into the service. And the brothers decided to go with it.

Charles Collat, who grew up in Georgia, discovered Carlile’s Barbecue soon after he moved to Birmingham and started working for Mayer Electric in 1953, the same year he married his long-distance sweetheart Patsy Weil, the daughter of the company’s founder.

His office was just a couple of blocks away, and Collat was enticed by the sweet hickory smoke wafting from Carlile’s brick barbecue pit.

He became a fan for life.

“They had a string of people that would be coming in, backed up at the door waiting to come in,” he recalls. “It was just a good barbecue joint.”

Some of those customers, like Collat, came for the barbecue. Others, he says, were there to place a bet, as Carlile’s back in those days, was just as well-known as a bookie joint, he says.

Various members of the Carlile family – including Warren and Pearl’s sons and daughters – ran the business until 1974, when, after Warren suffered his third heart attack, the family sold the restaurant to Zack Evans, a car salesman who had moved to Birmingham from Savannah, Ga.

(Meanwhile, other family members opened another Carlile’s location in Scottsboro, in northeast Alabama.)

Carlile’s would remain in the Evans family for the next 33 years.

A beer, a barbecue and a deal

Contrary to popular legend, Vickie Evans Fuller says, her father did not win Carlile’s Barbecue in a card game, although she’s heard that story too many times to count herself.

“He and my uncle and a friend had gone to Highland (Park) Golf Course to play a round of golf,” she says, “and they stopped back by there for a beer and a barbecue that afternoon.”

Her father struck up a conversation with Herman Carlile, who talked him into buying the business on the spot, she says.

“My dad came back and told my mother it was for sale, and she said, ‘No, no, no; don’t do it,’” Fuller says. “And what did he do? He bought it.”

About six months later, though, Zack Evans opened another car dealership in Columbus, Ga., and he left his wife, Anita, to run the restaurant while he worked at the car lot.

“She had never worked (before),” Fuller says. “She had always been at home raising the kids. She ran it by herself for years because my dad died not too long after that, in ’81.”

In 1994, Vickie bought the restaurant from her mother, who continued to help at the front register until just before she died in 2012, even staying on for a few years after the Collat family bought Carlile’s from her daughter.

“It was her life,” Vickie says. “That was everything to her.”

A marriage made at Carlile’s

For 13 years, Carlile’s was Vickie’s life, too.

If not for owning it, in fact, she might never have her husband, Joe Fuller.

A friend had told Joe that he should ask Vickie out, so one Saturday, she recalls, he came into the restaurant and worked up the nerve to do it.

“Normally, I don’t work on Saturdays,” Vickie says, “but I just happened to come in that day.”

Joe asked Vickie for a Miller Lite, and he sat down at a front booth.

“He said, ‘Are you wondering why people are asking about you?’” she remembers. “I thought, ‘Am I in trouble? Is there an IRS audit or something? What’s going on? What’s this all about?’

“He said, ‘It’s about you and me.’ He wanted to know if I would go out with him. And I was like, ‘Oh, if that’s all it is, then yes.’

“He asked me out, and the first night he cooked dinner for me and ever since then, we’ve been together.”

A few years later, Vickie Evans Fuller, who calls her time running Carlile’s “some of the best and worst years of my life,” decided to get out of the business and go to work with her husband at his insurance agency.

When the Collats read a story about Carlile’s imminent closing in The Birmingham News that April, they stepped in to try to save it.

By the following September, they owned it.

“On the Friday before Labor Day, we closed the deal,” Charlie Collat says. “On the Tuesday after Labor Day, we opened it as our restaurant, and no patron knew the difference until (they saw) the person who was cashing them out, which was me.”

The Carlile’s wall of fame

Over the decades, Carlile’s Barbecue became a lunchtime gathering spot for state and local politicians, radio and TV celebrities and assorted musicians and sports stars, as well as bank tellers and construction workers.

“It’s not uncommon to see a judge sitting here and an electrician sitting here -- two tables, side by side,” Charlie Collat says.

Nina Miglionico, the trailblazing lawyer who was the first woman to serve on the Birmingham City Council, met there with a group of folks who always sat at “Miss Nina’s table.”

Mike Hale, the former longtime Jefferson County Sheriff, was a regular customer who also hosted campaign events at Carlile’s, as did former U.S. Senator Jeff Sessions and others.

“It’s always (been) just a place to talk politics for lunch, which is what they did every day, wherever they went,” Natalie Davis, professor emeritus of political science at Birmingham-Southern College and an Alabama political analyst, says.

Plus, they, like she, just love the barbecue, Davis adds.

“I always ordered the pork plate,” she says. “It’s interesting because they (servers) knew what you wanted when you came in. The waitresses knew you by name. They would save a little pork for my dog.”

During President George W. Bush’s visit to Birmingham in 2001, his Secret Service ate lunch at Carlile’s, and the restaurant delivered the president some barbecue aboard Air Force One.

A couple of years later, when Texas troubadour Lyle Lovett performed at the Alabama Theatre, Joe Fuller, Vickie’s husband, arranged to deliver the barbecue-loving Lovett and his crew some Carlile’s ‘cue backstage before the show.

“He came out onstage,” Joe Fuller recalls, “and the first thing he said was, ‘Well, we might be a little sluggish tonight because we just ate Carlile’s barbecue backstage.’”

Photos of many of Carlile’s celebrity guests, as well as all the regulars, used to cover the walls of the old restaurant.

“I mean, you couldn’t even find the wall,” Joe Fuller says. “It was just wall-to-wall photographs of everybody who had been there, from U.S. senators to governors to House members.”

Many of those photos had been on the wall so long that they left their own footprint from the smoke stains that surrounded the frames.

When the Collats bought the restaurant in 2007, they became the temporary caretakers of Fuller’s prized photo collection.

“We didn’t want to have to redecorate, repaint, redo right away,” Charlie Collat says. “We wanted people to see this was a seamless transaction where the food and the service is all the same, and they never realized it changed owners. That was the purpose.

“We agreed to lease the pictures from them for a dollar a year, and we called this the Joe Fuller Museum.”

Most of those pictures finally came down when the Collats eventually did have to refinish the walls a few years ago.

Three generations of servers

Tammy Witt, who started waiting tables with her mother, Alice Peoples, has been a constant presence at Carlile’s for the past 25 years, bridging the transition from the Evans family to the Collats.

At one point, Witt and her cousin, fellow server Tammy Hicks, were tag-team partners in the dining room. Regulars affectionately called them “Tammy 1” (Hicks) and “Tammy 2” (Witt).

“They were the two servers, and they ran circles around everybody,” Charlie Collat says. “They would handle (as much) business as probably four servers. That’s how good they were.”

These days, Tammy’s daughter, Crystal Waldrop, also waits tables at Carlile’s, the third generation in her family to do so.

“I was always in trouble when I was young, so I got to come down here and help,” Crystal says. “I think that kind of made me used to it. It’s natural.”

Witt, her mother, has done a little of everything at Carlile’s.

“I started out as a server and then went from there,” she says. “Cook, pit, dishwasher, bus tables – everything.”

So, a year and a half ago when the Collats were looking for a new manager, they turned to the person who knows Carlile’s Barbecue inside and out – Tammy Witt.

“We’ve been asking her for years to run the restaurant,” Charlie Collat says. “Finally, she stepped up and said, ‘I want to run it.’”

A Birmingham institution

Since the Collats bought Carlile’s Barbecue more than 13 years ago, newer, trendier barbecue restaurants with bigger brands and larger followings have sprung up all around them.

“We’ve not been a factor in the barbecue business for years,” Charles Collat acknowledges. “We’ve had some high-flying competitors open up. They were good, and they would draw business away from us.”

Only Golden Rule Bar-B-Q in Irondale, which goes back to 1891, has been around Birmingham longer than Carlile’s, though.

“It’s just an old institution,” Charlie Collat says. “When you think of Birmingham, I would hope people would think this is one of those old-time restaurants where you can go out of town, come back in town, (and) it’s going to be the same.”

Charles Collat, who has retired as president and CEO of Mayer Electric, eats lunch at Carlile’s every Tuesday with his second wife, Joanna, whom he married following the death in 2015 of Patsy, his bride of 62 years.

His son, Charlie, is still involved in the family business, serving as executive vice president of Mayer Electric, as well as president of the family real estate and investment business, Bay Pine Holdings.

Every day, though, Charlie carves out time to drop in on the Carlile’s crew to make sure things are running smoothly.

And he’s constantly coming up with ideas to drum up new business, reminding people that not only is Carlile’s open for both dine-in and take-out service but that the restaurant also delivers and caters.

“We have an active website where people can make online orders,” he says. “We’ve never stopped delivering. Delivery and catering are a huge part of our business.

“That’s how we continue to keep our business afloat,” he adds. “Because I see something, and I push it.”

Last year was the 75th anniversary of Carlile’s Barbecue opening in 1945, but the COVID-19 pandemic ruined any plans of a celebration.

“We wanted to do something special for our 75th, but staying alive ended up being our 75th anniversary party,” Charlie Collat says.

“Staying alive,” his father adds, “was the nicest thing we could do for this place.”

Thanks to a father who didn’t want to see it die and a son who keeps it alive, though, Carlile’s Barbecue is still smoking.

“It, in my mind, is an institution,” Charles Collat, the father, says. “I just think it’s been a place that people have enjoyed, a place that people still can enjoy if they will just think about it and come down here.”

Carlile’s Barbecue is at 3511 Sixth Ave. South in Birmingham. The phone is 205-254-9266. Hours are 10:30 a.m.. to 3 p.m. Mondays through Fridays. For more information, go here.

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