| Barbecue spaghetti | |
| Image Upright: | 1.2 |
| Image Alt: | plate of spaghetti with red-brown sauce |
| Country: | Memphis, Tennessee, US |
| Creator: | Brady Vincent |
| Creators: | --> |
| Main Ingredient: | Spaghetti, barbecue sauce, pulled or smoked pork |
| Minor Ingredient: | green peppers, onions |
| Similar Dish: | Cincinnati chili, Filipino spaghetti |
Barbecue spaghetti is a dish from Memphis, Tennessee, that combines spaghetti with a sauce made from shredded smoked pork or pulled pork, vegetables, and barbecue sauce.[1] [2] It is served as a side dish in some Memphis barbecue restaurants.[3] Southern Living called the dish iconic and "perhaps the city's most unusual creation".[4] HuffPost called it "a Memphis staple".[5]
Barbecue spaghetti can be made with pulled pork[6] or shredded smoked pork. The sauce is "half marinara and half barbecue sauce", sometimes with onions and peppers included, and is simmered before adding the pork; the consistency is close to that of barbecue sauce. The spaghetti is cooked until soft, then tossed in the hot sauce.[7] This dish is served as a side and sometimes as a main course.
The dish was invented by former railroad cook Brady Vincent, who opened a barbecue restaurant called Brady and Lil's. In 1980 Frank and Hazel Vernon bought the restaurant and renamed it The Bar-B-Q Shop. Vincent also taught the recipe for barbecue spaghetti to Jim Neely, who opened Interstate Bar-B-Q in the late 1970s; Interstate modified the sauce recipe adding the "extra back flap meat" from a rack of ribs and cooking it in a pot with peppers and onions.
State Park restaurant in Cambridge, Massachusetts, serves a "Memphis BBQ spaghetti" that uses pulled pork in a marinara that uses a barbecue sauce as its base.[8]
According to John Shelton Reed, "Barbecue spaghetti is to spaghetti Bolognese as Cincinnati chili is to the Tex-Mex variety".[9] Filipino spaghetti is spaghetti sauced with banana ketchup and topped with hot dogs.[10]