I’m sorry to report that the Nashville barbecue I championed last week—Dee’s Q on Riverside Drive—has closed. Its owner and pitmaster, Reggie Crowder, died in February of a heart attack, leaving his daughter and wife to carry on, a task which they eventually found overwhelming.
Dee Dee, daughter and namesake of the six year old restaurant, is in college, and stretched herself thin between school and the smokehouse.I was there one afternoon in August when she (at least, I assume it was her) was working the register and tending the smoking meat at the same time, which is a lot of work even if you don’t have a textbook open on one knee. A routine check on the smoker revealed it to be over-heating, or so we surmised by the six foot flames that began to dance on its sides. Completely unruffled, she padded back to the main building and lifted a hose to tamp down the nascent inferno. She put it out easily, but not before her mother arrived, drawn by the thirty foot column of black smoke, to explain why the restaurant isn’t supposed to be on fire.
Besides meat, Dee’s had personality, one very much derived from the family that ran it. The restaurant was an extension of the owners, and if their hearts were out of it there was no point in going on. More sad would have been selling out, or carrying on the late husband’s dream at the expense of their own happiness. Tracey Crowder, widow of Reggie, said that her husband appeared in a dream to bless the closure of the restaurant. It’s lunchtime, and I was all geared up to drive out 65 to pick up a rack of those fabulous ribs, but if the Crowders are happier being closed, then so be it. They’ve been in mourning since February, and I hope that this new year, which comes without the burdens of barbecue, can be a brighter one than 2009.
The Scene article I linked to above said that before opening Dee’s, Reggie worked at Prince’s (of course) and Mary’s Old Fashioned Pit Barbecue, a take-out rib joint in Germantown. With his place closed, Mary’s short rib sandwich be the next best thing. I’ll let you know.
