Ten thirty in the morning and thick smoke, wonderfully rich-smelling thick smoke, is billowing into the pale blue Dixie sky from the two chimneys atop the Dreamland Cafe Bar B Que.
Outside the time-worn red-brick one-story cafe, the sun is already baking everything into a real summertime sweat. But inside where owner Jeanette Bishop-Hall is standing behind the long wooden bar that runs the length of the small room, it is cool and dark and entrancing.
Strings of Christmas lights flicker on and off. Several neon beer signs are lit. Not a space on the wall is empty. Every great coach, every great player the University of Alabama has had in recent years must have their autographed pictures on the walls.
So, too, do a lot of others, who were just passing by or who live nearby and have a love of ribs.
At six-thirty in the morning, Bishop-Hall showed up to make sure the two barbecue fires were lit. An hour and a half later Raymond Nevins, who has been cooking at the cafe for a good long time, started putting the ribs on the fires.
He is hurrying now, the ribs sizzling and smoking.
Eighteen slabs to a pit. Thirty-five minutes for every group of slabs. When they are done, Annie Jones cuts the slabs and pours over them a special gravy, a sauce that has a curious light tang and a bittersweet kick. Then she wraps the ribs and puts them into a warmer. They will be gone, memorialized in a few hours.
The breadman has already made the daily delivery of hot soft white bread. Every portion of slabs get a handful of the bread and a heap of napkins. In a while, cars will fill up the large parking lot as the lunchtime rush begins.
For almost 40 years the Dreamland Cafe has barely changed, a small building up a tree-covered, sharply winding road and a hill on the outskirts of Tuscaloosa in a hard-working black community known as Jerusalem Heights.
Drive five minutes from the Dreamland Cafe and it is the New South, cookie-cutter America: gas stations and franchised fast food joints, and a big mall, all sweltering in the sun, and all in sync with a relentless drive to make the country look and feel alike from coast to coast.
The drive hasn’t touched the Dreamland Cafe, and never will if Bishop-Hall has anything to say about it. She learned the business from her father, John Bishop, who founded the cafe and sat out front most days on his green leather-topped wooden stool until he passed away last year in his ’70s.
When people would come by, John Bishop, a squat, muscular man who always smoked a pipe and wore a small white chef’s cap, would make sure he stopped them, and ask how they and their family was doing. People who weren’t even hungry would stop by just to talk to him, standing beside his chair out front.
Bishop had been a cement mixer who was driven by a dream. He wanted to either open a barbecue or a funeral home. Because his wife, Lillie, would not work with him in a funeral home, he opened the barbecue, and that’s how it got its name, the Dreamland. His rules are the same ones that Bishop-Hall follows. Always use three kinds of wood in the pits so that there is an extra-special flavor on the ribs. Always treat people specially. Always buy the larger size ribs. And always sell ribs and white bread and chips, and beer or pop–that’s it. No coleslaw, no beans, no potato salad. Don’t ask.
That was his motto, and it is repeated on a T-shirt the cafe sells out of regularly. Actually, Bishop-Hall has made a few changes. For the church people who come on Sundays, she now provides coleslaw because they asked for it. And at the two Dreamland Cafes in Mobile and Birmingham, she offers all of the regular fixings.
Over the years there have been other changes. When the cafe opened, its clientele was mostly black. Now it is mostly white. Now it also caters to weddings and birthday parties. After the Mercedes-Benz plant opened up a few years ago in the midst of nowhere, workers and executives from the upscale gleaming white auto plant a few miles away began flocking to the cafe.
Thinking she would accommodate her new German clients, Bishop-Hall ordered German beer. But the Germans stubbornly refused to change. “Gimme a slab and Bud,” they would say. So, she stopped carrying German beer.
For over a decade Bishop-Hall had lived on Chicago’s South Side, but several years ago her father asked her to come home and take over the cafe, where she had starting working as a child, making sure there was enough pop and wood on hand.
With all the attention the cafe in Jerusalem Heights has received, business has been very good. But even if it weren’t Bishop-Hall would do her best to keep it open. That, she says, is because of the generations of customers who flock to the Dreamland. But it is also because of her father.
“The first thing is keeping my daddy’s dream alive,” she says as the front door swings open, letting in a burst of sunlight and blistering heat with the first of the day’s lunchtime crowd. “I care so much of what my daddy thought of me.”
“Two slabs,” cheerfully say the suburban-looking couple as they slide up to a rickety old table.
