Smokey John’s Bar-B-Que and Home Cooking turns fifty this year, and the story of how it got here is better than most restaurants could invent.
It starts with a mortgage broker. In the mid-seventies, John Reaves was juggling home loans, roofing, construction, and insurance businesses around Dallas, and every holiday season he thanked his clients with hickory-smoked turkeys and hams he cured himself. The gesture got out of hand in the best possible way. People started asking for them year-round. At one point the family had more than a hundred turkeys and hams stacked in the house waiting for pickup. A friend finally told him the obvious. You need to open a restaurant.
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