In the South, barbecue is a serious business with a variety of different barbecue styles. And few businesses take it quite as seriously as Jones Bar-B-Q Diner, located in Lee County, Arkansas. Serving Southerners since around 1910, this diner is one of the oldest continuously operated restaurants in America with secrets passed down generationally through the Jones family.

Believed to be one of the oldest Black-owned restaurants in the country, Jones Bar-B-Q Diner started with Walter Jones, the business’s founder and first owner. Selling meat from his back porch to locals, Jones saw his cooking steadily grow in popularity until he was able to open The Hole in the Wall restaurant in downtown Marianna. The Hole in the Wall sold takeaway-style food for over 50 years until, in 1964, Hubert Jones, the father of the current owner, opened Jones Bar-B-Q Diner at its current location.

Now James Harold Jones operates the business, and it became the first restaurant in Arkansas to win a James Beard Foundation America’s Classics Award on May 7, 2012. The diner opens bright and early and closes once it runs out of meat, sometimes even before noon. If you want some of what it has on offer, you’ll have to get there bright and early. But the James Beard Association promises it’s worth rising early.

What is served at Jones Bar-B-Q Diner

Jones Bar-B-Q Diner is a one-room building plastered with Americana and Arkansas memorabilia. Like all great barbecue restaurants, it focuses on simplicity, choosing to perfect its existing offerings rather than expand them. Arkansas-style barbecue is known for its barbecue sandwiches, topped with vinegar sauce and coleslaw and served on white bread, an essential pairing for Southern barbecue.

The restaurant’s main focus is on pulled pork. Serving the classic Arkansas-style sandwich, the diner goes through 900 pounds of pork in a regular week. Its shoulders are smoked for 10 to 12 hours in huge pits over smoldering logs to draw out flavor from fat, bone, and connective tissue. Vinegar sauces, as opposed to ketchup or mayonnaise-based ones, make the meat wetter and tangier. It complements the savory richness of pork shoulder marbling and lets the smoky flavor of the meat take center stage.

To be honored with an America’s Classics Award, a restaurant must be at least 10 years old, locally owned, “have timeless appeal, and reflect the character of their communities,” according to the James Beard Foundation. Few American businesses can match the quality of food, not to mention the age, of Jones Bar-B-Q Diner. It is a beloved local classic that has stood, in some form or another, for over a century, serving classic meals of the area to many, many satisfied customers.