Shoot, that’s good barbecue! Southern gun range restaurant takes smoking seriously

There is a living rock star — who can’t be named for reasons which will become clear in a moment — whose dossier includes wrecking hotel rooms, drunkenly totaling trucks and slugging fellow musicians. We know these things because the performer hasn’t been shy about bringing them up in interviews.

But what this performer apparently won’t discuss publicly is patronage of Ferguson’s BBQ in Memphis.

According to those close to the 3-year-old restaurant, the wood-fired barbecue pit has emerged as a favorite of celebrities clued into the tenderness of its chicken and smokiness of its ribs by local roadies who work their shows. Yet they never shout out Ferguson’s on social media or leave behind an autographed picture for Ferguson’s to post on its plank-paneled walls.

As Ferguson’s owner sees it, would-be testimonial sources are troubled by the restaurant’s location.

Not its industrial neighborhood northeast of the city: The characterless surroundings could qualify as grittily cool. What’s problematic for some eaters is that Ferguson’s is housed in Top Gun, which bills itself as “the best automatic machine gun range in the Mid-South.”

“We’ve never had a writeup by anyone, ever, and we’ve been told it’s because of being in the gun range,” said owner Ben Ferguson, a native Memphian who grew up getting barbecue from Morris Grocery, still remembered for cooking pork over house-chopped hickory chips. “We went to The Commercial Appeal when we opened, and were like, ‘Hey, just give it a review.’ They wouldn’t touch it with a 10-foot pole.”

Plenty of people who value compassion, peace and understanding are fond of saying that food brings people together. But Ferguson’s BBQ — where the prime seats are at a counter affixed to bullet-resistant glass between the dining room and highly-regulated lanes on which shooters blast through the hearts of illustrated squirrels — may go to show that even the best food can only bring like-minded people together.

“People write us terrible reviews because of politics,” said Ferguson. He’s forever asking Google to take down reviews from gun violence opponents who he’s sure haven’t visited the restaurant.

“You’ll see if people post a picture, it’s almost always a five-star review. They love it,” he said, adding, “What’s cooler than eating a barbecue sandwich and watching people shoot guns? That’s America. That’s what we are.”

Obsessed with barbecue — and politics

If Ferguson seems practiced at pronouncing what it means to be an American, that’s because he’s been doing it since he was 13 years old. Ferguson, now 41, was the nation’s youngest conservative radio talk show host. These days, he co-hosts a podcast with U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz and records The Ben Ferguson Podcast daily.

The latter show’s tagline is, “If you hate the liberal media and antifa, but love President Trump, then this is the podcast for you.”

In other words, Ferguson’s didn’t end up in a Second Amendment haven because of bad luck or a good deal on rent. As a part-owner of Top Gun, Ferguson opened his dream restaurant as an amenity for fellow shooters. He believes so strongly in gun ownership that CNN calls him in when the cable channel needs someone to side with politicians proposing gun permits for people with low vision.

Before I talked to Ferguson, I listened to his podcast for hours and learned two things (not counting the regrettably catchy phrase “Bidenflation.”) One, conservative talk is way more propulsive for driving than the introspective podcasts in my feed. Two, Ferguson rarely delves into cultural issues, such as education and civil rights. He’s mostly interested in political conspiracies, as CNN host Don Lemon noted when he almost shooed him off his show for bringing up Hillary Clinton’s emails.

“Barbecue was my outlet from divisive politics,” Ferguson said. “In 2016, I became obsessed with it. I got a Backwoods Smoker and was competing with a neighbor. I worked on my sauce for I don’t know how long. Same thing with the rub.”

Made miserable by progressives standing up for Hunter Biden and alternative energy, Ferguson channeled his frustration into recipe testing. He tried close to 100 different French fries before deciding which product to bring into his restaurant.

And the work shows. While Ferguson’s isn’t in the same class as Memphis legends, its barbecue is excellent, with the pecan-smoked ribs sporting dark bark and flavor-packed fat that gleams through the complex sauce. If side dishes are an afterthought at many traditional barbecue restaurants, here they’re premeditated with indictable intent: Brawny baked beans, smoky mac-and-cheese, and finely chopped turnip greens in a head-clearing bath of vinegar would make a fine meal on their own.

But what should those who love—or belong to—the liberal media do with that information?

Target practice and a meal

Ferguson’s isn’t the first barbecue restaurant to prompt moral inventories.

Famously, Maurice Bessinger flew Confederate flags over his South Carolina restaurants. More recently, the owner of Smokin’ Po Boys in Winder, Georgia, contributed $1,000 to Herschel Walker’s U.S. Senate campaign. Other small-time pitmasters likely did the same.

Still, neither of those scenarios seem precisely analogous to Ferguson’s, since the first example is an overt demonstration of hate, while the second supposes that diners always know where their money goes. It seems like Ferguson’s is nearer in spirit to the bake sales that the nation’s top pastry professionals annually held in support of Planned Parenthood for a few years before the pandemic.

Ferguson will probably hate the comparison, but insofar as Ferguson is equally interested in deliciousness and protecting vulnerable populations, he and bake sale founder Natasha Pickowicz have something in common.

“We help save people’s lives every day in an extremely high crime city,” Ferguson says of Top Gun’s training and permitting programs. “The number of single mothers in our classes has skyrocketed, and we’re feeding them.”

Not everyone who eats at Ferguson’s picks up a gun, although Ferguson loves when a couple of Canadians tell him they chose the restaurant without knowing about the range and ended up taking their first-ever shots. On Taco Tuesdays, for example, Ferguson estimates 85% of guests are unarmed.

Still, deals combining barbecue and target practice are among the venue’s most popular offerings. The $24.99 weekday lunch special includes one hour on the lane, plus one sandwich, fries, and a drink.

“Valentine’s is one of the biggest nights of the year,” Ferguson said of a holiday shooting package priced at $74.99 per couple. “We dress the place up and do a romantic dinner, with choice of ribs or chicken, and red velvet cake. It’s awesome.”

What pulls people together

Bruce Hair, a Ferguson’s regular, used to bring his wife to the range. She eventually got bored of guns, so now he meets up with his friend Jeff Bechtel there. The former neighbors, who roll their own ammunition, appreciate having the restaurant on site.

“You got somewhere to relax after you shoot,” said Hair. “On a shooting day, you forget about breakfast.”

Bechtel, a Glock handgun owner, usually orders barbecue when Hair gets a hamburger. Motioning toward the window alongside the range, where a man in a gray Primanti Bros. t-shirt and ear guards was taking aim at a full-body silhouette, he remarked that the facility has been busier recently.

“With this crime going on here in Memphis, idiots will shoot you,” Hair confirmed. “People are buying weapons and coming here to learn how to use them.”

Hair and Bechtel look like the kind of guys you’d expect to see at a gun range. They’re older, white, and potbellied. But at Ferguson’s, they’re the outliers. During the afternoon I spent at the restaurant, half of the customers were women. More than half of the customers were Black. I’d wager there was at least a half a century between the youngest and oldest guests I saw. “It’s a very diverse crowd,” Ferguson said.

Perhaps pulled pork can’t bring people together.

But in America, guns do.

This story first appeared in The Food Section, a Charleston-based newsletter covering food and drink across the American South. To learn more about the James Beard Award-winning publication, visit thefoodsection.com.