MIKE MILLS VS. THE SMOKE EATERS
by BRANDON CHUANG
Mike Mills surrounded by one-third of his trophies
In the pantheon of food culture, you’d be hard pressed to find anything as universally popular and beloved as barbecue.
Barbecue’s status atop the sushi and street tacos of the world stems from one thing: its simplicity. Barbecue doesn’t demand a laundry list of ingredients; it doesn’t take a complicated set of directions and procedures that only a CIA-trained chef could convincingly accomplish. All barbecue is, in its soul, is meat, wood and fire – more specifically and more commonly, beef or pork, wood and fire. But if barbecue legend Mike Mills hands you a chicken wing as his first offering of barbecue, you make damn sure to eat it.
Murphysboro, Illinois, is a small town. It’s the kind of town that highways tend to ignore; the kind where unique businesses – say, a combination hardware and pet store – can not only exist, but survive. According to the 2010 census, 7,970 people call Murphysboro home. And amidst the stores peddling goldfish and Allen wrenches, right on 17th Street, sits 17th Street Barbecue.
If you were driving down 17th Street in Murphysboro, there’s a fair chance you’d gloss over 17th Street Barbecue, possibly passing it up for the remodeled Dairy Queen up the street. The building itself isn’t much to look at: a basic rectangular structure with grayed siding and neon beer signs glowing in the windows. It’s honestly not that impressive. But what’s inside the building is: a smoke-ringed combination of ribs, brisket, pork shoulder and more, which many people far more accredited than you or I consider to be the best barbecue in the country.
If you ever get the chance to meet Mike Mills, it’s with absolute certainty that you will be fed. Within 10 minutes of shaking the man’s hand, he’s placed a chicken wing in mine.
“I want you to eat that straight,” says Mills in his graveled tone. Even his voice is smoked – a result, surely, of the Marlboro Reds saddled comfortably in his front shirt pocket. “See what it tastes like fresh out of the smoker.”
I do. It tastes like chicken, albeit pretty good chicken.
Mills then grabs another chicken wing out of the smoker, this time shaking on some of his proprietary seasoning rub. Magic Dust, he calls it. “Try it now,” he commands.
I do. It tastes like better chicken.
Grabbing yet another wing from the smoker, Mills places it onto a pan and tells me he’ll be right back. He returns to say he’s placed it on a grill out back.
In a few minutes, a grill-marked wing makes its way back to me – my third, and I haven’t even been in Murphysboro for 30 minutes. “Try that.”
I do.
Goddammit.
“That,” says Mills, smiling. “That’s what we do here. We build flavors.”
If you literally look past the humble exterior of 17th Street, you’ll see a giant warehouse. It’s hard to miss, because it spans the entire length of the block. Inside of this warehouse, you’ll find many things, all affiliated with Mills’ barbecue kingdom. The front houses office space for Mills and his staff, led by his daughter and co-owner of the business, Amy. Further in are two large banquet rooms with giant light-up signs that spell out words and phrases like “SQUEAL” and “PRAISE THE LARD.” Upstairs is storage space – tons and tons of storage space – filled with everything from football helmets to old cash registers. “I’m not a hoarder,” Mills jokes. “I’m a collector.” In another corner sit trophies, all collected from barbecue competitions past – and it’s not even all of them. The man has won so many barbecue awards he sincerely doesn’t know what to do with them all, so he shoves them into storage next to cases of never-opened jock straps (“My brother bought a sporting goods store that was going out of business,” says Mills).
But in the center of all this… stuff, on the ground floor, in the heart of the warehouse, sit Mills’ tools: three giant built-in smokers the size of Fiats. They’re each named, of course. Black Betty is the massive smoker in the front kitchen (yes, Mills has several kitchens), and he’s got two more in the back kitchen: Smokey and Bandit, naturally. This doesn’t include his armada of mobile smokers: the stand-alones and pull-behinds that he arms for various off-site events. Touring his facility and seeing smokers everywhere, there’s no telling exactly how many smokers the man possesses, but it’s easily in the high teens, if not higher. “I’ve got a few,” he chuckles.
Mills has been around smokers and barbecue for what seems like forever. Having grown up in a family that loved to barbecue, Mills took to it early on. “I grew up with barbecue,” he says. “I can remember standing in my crib, my dad outside barbecuing. I would holler until my mom came in and raised the blind so I could see what he was doing. I could smell the smoke.” Having grown up in Murphysboro, Mills took to making barbecue the Murphysboro way. “We have orchards all around us,” explains Mills. “So when I needed wood, I used the wood we had a lot of.”
Though Mike Mills might not admit it, he’s a driving factor behind why you can find apple, wild cherry and other fruitwoods in nearly any store that sells barbecue-related paraphernalia. Before Mills, the popular woods of choice for most pit masters were heavier, smokier woods like mesquite and hickory. The lighter woods that Mills was using were looked down upon – smoke, after all, is flavor. “I’ve always thought of smoke as an ingredient,” says Mills. “To me, it’s just part of the equation. You still want to taste the meat.”
While people might have shunned Mills’ fruitwood barbecue at first, they didn’t for long – especially when he started winning barbecue competitions with his team, Apple City Barbecue. However, for most, only one competition matters.
The World Championship BBQ Contest occurs over a single weekend every year during Memphis in May, a month-long festival of music, food and culture in Memphis, Tennessee. While the festivities are many and varied, nearly everyone identifies Memphis in May with the barbecue competition. If it’s any indication of its import, the competition also goes by the nickname “the Super Bowl of Swine.” Some of the best pit masters from around the country come to Memphis to compete year in and year out. Few win.
Mills has won seven times.
It’s part of the reason Mills has a Rolodex of barbecue restaurants under his command, including two restaurants in Las Vegas (Memphis Championship Barbecue), and two in southern Illinois (17th Street in Murphysboro and Marion, respectively). Originally, Mills was uncertain about expanding to Marion. “As an excuse, I told them I couldn’t come because they didn’t have a 17th Street,” admits Mills about the situation. So the mayor of Marion built a 17th Street for Mike Mills and his barbecue.
The praise and accolades keep coming for Mills. Bon Appétit magazine anointed 17th Street Barbecue as having the best ribs in America. Food & Wine magazine recently said it has the best wings (yes, those wings) in America, too, which is odd, considering 17th Street Barbecue is, well, a barbecue joint. But that’s when you realize, 17th Street Barbecue isn’t really just a barbecue joint. That’s when you realize the place, until recently, didn’t even have the word “barbecue” in its name. And you start to look a bit closer.
You see the Formica tables and the old oaken bar, but you also see the pimento cheese appetizer on the menu that’s made from scratch. You notice that even though Mike Mills gave you ribs, he gave you much more in wings and fried pickles and pork steaks – things that normally do not a barbecue restaurant make. And finally, now, as Mills lovingly guilts you into eating yet another piece of food, with his primary argument being temperature loss (“eat it before it gets cold”), you realize that Mike Mills isn’t so much a world champion barbecuer, but a man at peace.
In this humble location in a humble town of 7,970 people, Mike Mills has quietly built a culinary giant, a barbecued colossus built on golden 8-foot-tall trophies. His talents have brought him everywhere from Memphis to Manhattan, where he helped shape the vision for Blue Smoke, the barbecue restaurant owned by famous restaurateur and St. Louis native, Danny Meyer.
“Mike’s baby backs put a huge smile on my face,” says Meyer. “I’ve never seen anyone have an argument while eating them.”
Today, Mills continues to run his successful restaurants across the country. He cultivates his ever-growing mail-order business and nurtures the company’s barbecue consulting agency, OnCue Consulting, all in partnership with his daughter/PR director, Amy. Tomorrow, or in the very near future, he plans on opening a sauce-bottling facility next door to the restaurant and warehouse in Murphysboro, adding several much appreciated jobs to the small community. “I’m from here, so I want to give back to here. I want to see my town succeed.”
In fact, Mills says he wants to see everyone succeed, his barbecue competition included. “I don’t want you to open across the street from me, but there’s room enough for everyone.” Granted, this is a bit like LeBron James saying that it’s cool for you to play basketball too, but still; the important thing is that Mike Mills actually believes what he’s saying. He welcomes new barbecue restaurants with open arms – hell, his barbecue consulting agency’s main purpose is to help start new barbecue restaurants that aren’t his. And when he feeds you fried pickles and pimento cheese and pork steaks instead of the barbecue you expected when you came here, he knows exactly what he’s doing.
For Mills, there are no more fights to fight, mainly because he’s won them all. In the end, Mike Mills knows that you know he knows barbecue. He doesn’t have to tell you or make you eat it. You want to eat it. So go, fill up on all the non-traditional items at 17th Street. Try all the non-17th-Street barbecue joints that you want. Sample their sauces. Eat the smoke. You’ll still come back for the ribs and chicken and anything else Mike Mills and company come up with. They all do.
Building an Empire
The barbecue kingdom that Mike Mills oversees wasn’t built on meat alone. The man has crafted his signature flavors based on three time- and patron-tested cornerstones.
FRUITWOOD. While Mills’ explanation for why he first began using wood from apple, peach and other fruit trees is humble, the results speak for themselves. Extruding far less smoke than more traditional, harder woods, fruitwoods lend a much milder flavor to smoking, meaning the pork on your plate still tastes like pork.
MAGIC DUST. The ingredients list of Mills’ all-purpose seasoning reads like a free-verse poem for the hungry: salt, sugar, paprika, secret spices. What it tastes like, is barbecue in dry form: a smoky salinity that sees itself onto everything from brisket and ribs to chicken wings and pork rinds.
BARBEQUE SAUCE. Mills’ barbecue sauce is as old as, if not older than, the war – as in the World War. The first one. What began as a passed-down family recipe, which saw his mother selling it by the gallon to feed her five children, has become its own self-sustaining industry, driving the creation of a bottling facility next door to Mills’ Murphysboro restaurant so his team can make the Memphis in May-winning recipe on-site.
(ORIGINAL ARTICLE)
A BARBECUE EMPIRE
