(soulful country music) - [Becky Voice Over] Sometimes life gives you an opportunity to reflect on what you would do with a clean slate.

Our guest on this episode is Carey Bringle, an award-winning pit master and owner or Peg Leg Porker.

♪ But if done with a compass, done with the chart ♪ ♪ I'm tired of spinning around ♪ ♪ Looking for direction northern star ♪ ♪ I'm tired of spinning around ♪ ♪ I'll just step out, throw my doubt into the sea ♪ ♪ Throw what's meant to be will be ♪ - [Beck Voice Over] Carey Bringle is a Nashville native with deep family roots in west Tennessee and a serial entrepreneur who has built a successful empire, including four restaurants, a spirits company, a retail clothing and food products company, and multiple real estate holdings.

His flagship award-winning barbecue restaurant, Peg Leg Porker, located in the Gulf since 2013, is a Nashville staple.

Family owned and operated, Peg Leg Porker has been recognized by many media outlets, including Southern Living's Best Barbecue in Tennessee seven times.

The recipient of numerous awards and honors, Carey has also been a three time guest chef at the James Beard House and featured on numerous television shows and podcast, (cheery banjo music) but barbecue isn't Bringle's only passion.

His spirit's line captured the world's best bourbon, according to the 2023 Singapore World's spirits competition.

It would be no surprise then that both USA Today and Men's Journal list Carey Bringle as one of the nation's top 20 entrepreneurs disrupting the norms and redefining success.

His strength and determination started at a young age when he was diagnosed with aggressive bone cancer.

Resilient, joyful, and committed to living each day to the fullest truly defines Carey Bringle.

- Carey, what a treat it is to be right here at Peg Leg Porker.

Now we're not in the restaurant part, right?

- (laughs) That's right.

This is a little different up here.

- Yeah, yes.

- Yeah, we're in the apartment above Peg Leg Porker.

Most people don't know this is here.

- Well, thank you for inviting us and for giving us the opportunity to talk with you.

- Absolutely, I'm glad to be with you.

- So you are just an a Nashville icon and actually beyond Nashville in the barbecue world, but you're also just a really good person with generational ties to Tennessee.

What brought you to Nashville?

- Well, my family settled in Tennessee in 1827 in Covington and had the cotton gin down there and were farmers, and then my grandfather went to school at Vanderbilt, put himself through medical school selling pots and pans door to door, and then he was an OBGYN in Memphis, and my father and mother both grew up in Memphis and my father went to Vanderbilt, and then after Vanderbilt, he was a mechanical engineer.

He stayed in Nashville, and so I was born and raised in Nashville.

So I've been here all my life, and my roots are West Tennessee roots, but I'm born and raised here in Nashville.

- And how'd you get into barbecue business?

- Well, with my family being from West Tennessee, barbecue was always foremost on the mind, and so growing up, I learned how to cook barbecue from my uncle Bruce and from my grandfather Jack on my mother's side, and it was just a passion of the family.

Everybody revered and valued barbecue and the barbecue culture, and my grandfather delivered a lot of the children of a lot of the barbecue families in Memphis, and so it was something I started at a young age.

It was always a hobby.

It was always something that meant a lot to me, and after a couple of careers, I finally decided I would open a barbecue restaurant.

- Man, and so you built like your first floor, and that was it at the beginning?

- Well, yeah, this building was here.

It was an old cinder block building.

It was Shannon Electric, which is an old family business.

They're electrical contractors, and I was attracted to the building because it was cinder block, concrete floors, no windows, and that, to me, growing up used to Memphis Barbecue was sort of the vibe in the field.

In Nashville, the barbecue restaurants were all barnwood, tin, country music, and that was not familiar to me.

The barbecue I was used to were cinder block walls, concrete floors, blues and soul, and so for me, this matched that vibe, and we opened up with 3,000 square feet on the original footprint, and then after five years, we added an upstairs.

We went up and we went back and added a lot of square footage and made it a much larger building - That is, Well, it's smart.

It's just smart.

You talk about the difference between Memphis barbecue and Nashville barbecue, and I know there's Texas and North Carolina.

How would you describe the differences?

- Well, Nashville didn't have a barbecue culture or a barbecue style, and so Nashville had some good barbecue, but it was rare, and Memphis was the barbecue capital of the world, and there were more places between Memphis and St.

Louis with barbecue than there were in the rest of the world combined back in the sixties and the seventies, and so I grew up with that Memphis barbecue, and so we do a true dry rib here.

That is a dying art.

Not many people do it.

A lot of people will do a rib.

They'll pre-rub it.

They'll smoke it.

They won't put any sauce on it, and they'll say, that's a dry rib.

Well, that may be a great rib, but it's not a West Tennessee dry rib.

We smoke our ribs with nothing on 'em except for kosher salt, and then we hit 'em with a dry barbecue seasoning after they're finished and before they hit your plate, and that was originated by the Vergas family in Memphis with the Rendezvous, which has been open for 75 or 85 years, and Charlie Vergas was Greek.

He opened a sandwich shop in a basement.

He noticed that it had coal shoots.

Ribs were cheap.

So he turned those coal shoots into pits, and the difference between us and the Rendezvous is Rendezvous originated the genre.

They cooked their ribs hot and fast over direct charcoal.

We smoke our ribs, but it's the same finish, just a different seasoning blend, and that's a true West Tennessee dry rib, and that's my roots, and so that's what I grew up with and that's what I wanted to bring back to my hometown.

- I love that, and I just love your food.

- Thank you.

- I love the seasons.

You come up with that?

- [Carey] Thank you.

I did, yes.

- Yeah, all that.

We're gonna talk about your competitiveness and your family and really, your commitment to the community, but I know that you named this, Peg Leg Porker, for a very good reason.

- Yes.

- You wanna share that?

- So I'm an above the knee amputee, and at age 17, the summer before my senior year, I was diagnosed with Osteogenic Sarcoma, bone cancer.

It's a very aggressive, rare bone cancer that was probably only had about a 20% survival rate at the time, and I fought that battle.

I lost a leg and went through intense chemotherapy, and I came out with the support of my family and friends and church, came out winning that battle, which was, I'm a very lucky man, and so it never really bothered me.

It just kinda was a bump in the road, but when I was looking for a name for my barbecue team at the time, I thought Peg Leg Porker was a very appropriate name.

So then I turned that team name into a brand, and here we are.

- I love that, and you are extremely competitive.

In fact, you and your wife are both competitive, right, - Yes, yes, yeah, yeah.

- barbecue competition teams.

How did you get started in that?

And your wife, was she your sweetheart from high school?

- Yes, so my wife and I started dating in high school.

We dated for eight years, and now we've been married for 30.

So we've been together 38 years.

And my uncle had competed in the very first Memphis in May down in Memphis, and so I was familiar, but I had never been, and right after college or while I was maybe still in the finishing college, my wife's cousins, who were all from Memphis, had a team, and my wife's family is all from Memphis as well, and so we came down, and we visited them on the river at Memphis in May, and their team was called the Rolling Wonder Pigs, and anyway, we had a great time.

They actually got kicked out that year for some bad behavior, and so I said, well, they were like, why don't you join the team?

And I said, I'd love to, but we had to sit out a year.

We came back as Hog Wild, and I was an original member of Hog Wild, and then we did well in the competition for several years, and I cooked with those guys for, I think, 10 or 12 years, and then I broke off and started my own team, and so my wife introduced me to Memphis in May.

I've cooked down in Memphis for 33 years now, and now after watching me do it for so many years, she finally decided she wanted to start her own team.

So she started a all-girls team called I Only Smoke When I Drink, and they compete directly against me, and in fact, in the last two years, they've beat me, and so she will tell everybody that.

It's probably the first thing she will tell you if you meet her.

- I love that.

- You know, I beat my husband.

(both chuckle) - I love it, I love it.

I read a story about you that during the pandemic, you teamed up with Martin's Barbecue here and really fed people, like thousands of people.

- We did.

So we worked with Operation Barbecue Relief, and Pat Martin's a friend of mine.

We've known each other since before either one of us had restaurants.

We both work with Operation Barbecue Relief, So we had to put people back to work.

We had some of the PPP grant money, but there were stipulations on it that you had to spend it within six weeks.

So we were anxious to bring all of our people back to work.

Of course, they wanted to be back to work, and we teamed up with OBR, and we fed, I think it was 34, 32 or 34,000 people in a two week period.

So we did that for the first two weeks, and then we handed it off to Martins and they did it for the next two weeks, and so we were able to provide free meals for the community and for people in need for a very long time, and it was very rewarding, and we had just worked with Operation Barbecue Relief helping them set up a temporary kitchen for the tornado relief several weeks before that.

So we had just come off of working with OBR and helping 'em there, and then the pandemic hit, and then we worked with them again to help feed a large number of people.

It was very rewarding.

My staff really enjoyed it.

We found out that we could make a lot more food than we thought we could make in a short period of time, and it was just something.

It was the right thing to do and it was a good thing to do.

- You're a giving person, and I know that, and I hear that about you within our community, and you talk about barbecue restaurant business like it's a family.

You treat your customers like they're family.

What is that about you and about the way you see business and what difference do you think that makes in a city that is growing just so exponentially?

- Well, the barbecue community is a family.

It's a business that, over the years, has proven and proven to me that it cares.

We care about each other.

It's not about competing.

I like to say it's not a requirement for you to hate somebody else's barbecue in order to love mine, and so if you want to come in here and dog one of my competitors, I'm not impressed.

They're probably a friend of mine, and so there's room for all of us.

Everybody does it a little bit different.

My family works with me and my business.

We've got a lot of families that work for us with multiple family members and multiple generations, and then that's true throughout the barbecue community.

So it's important to me, and we're a hundred percent family-owned and operated.

We like to say we're building a legacy and not a chain.

We don't have multiple Peg Leg Porkers.

There's one Peg Leg Porker, and although we have multiple restaurants, they all have their own identity, and they're all different, but the barbecue community has never ceased to amaze me at how giving it is, how family-oriented it is, how much camaraderie there is, and this is not just in Nashville, but across multiple states, and we're lucky in Nashville that the restaurateurs are generally very friendly and get along with each other.

I've been to other cities where it's just a head-to-head competition, and it's kill or be killed.

- Not fun, I bet.

- Not fun, but in Nashville, the restaurant community has always seemed to come together, and just like we did in the floods, the Nashville and the Tennessee volunteer tradition has always come through.

We come together.

We don't talk about where's our help or who's gonna come and save us?

We come together, and we help each other.

- I love that.

Now you know the name of this show is Clean Slate.

So I always wonder what you would do with a clean slate, whether it's professionally or personally, or maybe it's for your community.

- I think with personally, I don't know.

Maybe I would've started my barbecue business earlier in life.

I had multiple careers before I opened this restaurant and started this career.

I might've started it earlier, but I'm shaped by the experiences that I've had in my life.

I don't know that I would change 'em.

People say, well, if you went back and you could not have cancer, would you do that?

And I said, no.

I think it really gave me more of a sense of purpose and it showed me how short life can be, and so those experiences, mistakes, triumphs, all shaped who I am today and the business that I've built.

I think a clean slate for the community, I would say that Nashville should have maybe thought a little bit more about the growth and how we could, not contain it, but maybe navigate it a little bit more and be more fiscally responsible.

I think we've got a dynamite city.

Cities that aren't growing are dying, and so I don't have a problem with the growth of our city, but I think that we have to be cognizant of what brought people here in the first place and try and preserve a lot of that, and unfortunately, through some of our actions as a city and some of the decisions that we've made, we've lost some great landmarks and establishments.

When we lose a place like Roters or when an Arnold's closes or we lose a Pie Wagon or a Hat Town, then we've lost a lot of the soul of our city, and I wish we had thought that through a little bit more.

- What do you think we can do now?

- I think that we just have to continue to rethink the evolution of the city.

I think we need to rethink our spending and our growth, and we can continue to expand our airport, and we can continue to expand different things that we're doing, but as we do that, that's gonna bring in more people - More people, right.

- that may have different ideas than the native Nashvillians do, and it's okay to have different opinions and different ideas, but when you do that, don't start yelling about how you don't like the change if you didn't think through the change in the first place.

- Yeah, yeah, well, I think it is, I've come from a generational Tennessee family, and I think I told you my brother and family are big barbecuers, and my dad was a butcher, and so it really is this middle Tennessee, well, all of Tennessee is so different and so unique and so beautiful.

What is it that you love about this state?

- Well, one, the beauty.

Driving through up through Cookville and up to Knoxville in the fall is amazing.

I love the people.

I love the mindset, the camaraderie, the fact that we're called the volunteer state for a reason.

We have purpose as a state and as a community, and that purpose is to reach out and lift up our neighbors and our fellow Tennesseans, and if we need to go outta state and reach up and lift somebody up, we do that as well, and so I love it.

From from Memphis to Knoxville to Bristol and Nashville, I just love the whole state.

We've got a great community, and I think it shows, and I think we show it to the rest of the world.

We're not shy about showing people our pride and our graciousness and our ability to help, and that's important to me.

- Yeah, Carey, I think it's important.

I think it's just important, and I think if our community could feel that kind of comradery and feel that just the support all around would just be such a healthier place.

Now you said you work with your family, and sometimes a family business is really tough.

Your wife clearly is an incredible woman and partner for you.

What advice would you give to someone who's maybe starting a business right now in Nashville or Tennessee, and they wanna do it with their partner?

- It's tough.

(both laugh) So my wife originally worked in the restaurant with me, and that did not last very long at all.

So she didn't want me telling her what to do, and I had to be the boss and tell people what to do, and so the way that my wife has been involved in this business is that she's a confidant.

She is very supportive.

It's not easy to be an entrepreneur.

It's not easy to start up a business.

It's not easy to run a restaurant.

For the first three years that we were open, I was here 24/7.

If we were open, I was in the building.

Sometimes I slept in the kitchen on a cot.

If the children wanted to come and have dinner with dad, she would make dinner at home and bring it, and we would sit in the dining room and eat, and then they would leave and I would stay and work.

So for us, the relationship is that she is the bedrock and the support for me to be able to go out and do what I do.

Now I have young Carey, who's my oldest, is working with my spirits company as a rep out in the field.

Conley, my middle child, is a structural steel welder, and I helped him start a business and own a welding company with Conley, and then Katie, my youngest, is in my back kitchen working with the catering department and now focusing on desserts, and so it's great to see my children on a daily basis and to work with 'em.

It's never easy.

Many of them have been fired many times, but it's very rewarding when you have those successes, and you've got your family there to share it with you, but it's not an easy road.

Working with family is very difficult.

- But you probably wouldn't change that piece of it.

- I wouldn't change it, no.

- Yeah, yeah, tell me about your other businesses.

You mentioned the spirits company.

- Right, so we have multiple businesses.

So we have four restaurants now.

We have the spirits company, which has Peg Leg Porker Tennessee straight bourbon, and we actually just bottled a vodka on Tuesday.

So we're about to release PLP vodka.

The bourbon is now in 17 states.

In 2023, we won Best Bourbon in the world, and then we just bought the old Jake Sausage plant to work with our Peg Leg Porker food products company, and we've partnered with McCormick's, and now we have our sauces and rubs in over 2,000 stores across the southeast and across the country.

- Wow, and your other restaurants, like you don't have any beef in this restaurant, right?

- No beef at Peg Leg Porker.

It's all pork and chicken.

It's straight real Tennessee barbecue.

- And then you have a place you do Texas brisket.

- We've got a place over in the nations called Bringle's Smoking Oasis.

It's Texas style barbecue.

We do brisket.

We do smoked pastrami.

We do smoked Turkey, and we do beef ribs, and then we have Pig Star in the airport, which is kind of a little mix between the two, and then we are partners with Levon and Kim Wallace, another family with Fat Belly Pretzel and Deli over in East Nashville.

- Wow, you're a busy man.

- Yeah.

- So what's next for you?

- (laughs) I don't know, I dunno.

I've got my hands full.

So we're about to launch this vodka.

We continue to expand the spirits company across the United States.

I think next is just trying to continue to identify good quality people.

We've got a great team here, and that team has really helped make all this happen, and if I didn't trust them, then this wouldn't be possible, and so, again, just like a family, it's important to relinquish some duties and trust the people that you work with to be able to grow, and fortunately, I work with some amazing people.

- Well, I think they're probably really, really happy to be working with you, and I'm so grateful that you gave us this time, and I know Nashville PBS has been your PBS station right here.

So I hope you'll come see us.

- Well, absolutely.

Thank you so much, Becky.

I really appreciate the time today.

(calm country music) ♪ Done with the compass, done with the chart ♪ ♪ I'm tired of spinning around in one direction ♪ - Carey, you're the master of barbecue.

So what tip would you give to the home cook?

- I think the biggest tip I'd give is have fun.

We're not curing cancer here.

It's barbecue, and so some people get too serious.

They do it in the bourbon world, they do it in the barbecue world, and they just get so focused, and they think, I'm Mr.

Barbecue or I'm Mr.

Bourbon.

Have fun, relax.

Again, we're not curing cancer.

We're just cooking barbecue for our family and our friends.

So if you don't enjoy it, then don't do it.

Don't get too stressed out about it.

It's just barbecue.

- It's just barbecue.

(bright country music)