THE QUESTION OF COMMUNITY: D&D’S BARBEQUE
“Joints and shacks offer witness to the environments where design and operation incongruities . . . often bespeak honesty. The creative responses of that grocery store manager and that breakfast joint operator confirm that humans are at the helm in such spaces, singular and complicated souls capable of responding to circumstance and necessity with brilliance.”
—John T. Edge, “Folk Witness”
John T. Edge, the director of the Southern Foodways Alliance and author of The Potlikker Papers: A Food History of the Modern South, has served as an Oxford American food columnist since 1997; under the shingle “Local Fare,” he interrogates trends, profiles innovative figures, and upends assumptions (sometimes his own previous assumptions) with passion, style, and intelligence. In his latest column, “Folk Witness,” he investigates the draw of the neighborhood joint.
For this video, filmmaker Ethan Payne interviewed Greg Dabney of D&D’s BarBeque, a family-owned and operated restaurant in Atlanta.