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About Penguin Ed's Bar-B-QueFor more than 15 years running, Penguin Ed's Bar-B-Que has satisfied and impressed thousands of customers. We don't have an official tally on our customers, but we do know a lot of them keep coming back to see us. And we know why. At Ed's you can expect two things: that our staff will adhere to our motto "treat everybody right, every time," and that you will leave with a belly full of some of the country's finest barbecue. |
How do we do it?Part of it is our slow, mesquite-enhanced method for smoking meats. Part of it is who we are: a family. The people running our restaurants are either born into our family or they become part of our family once they join our staff. Unlike so many restaurants, Ed's has several managers and employees who have been with us for almost the whole journey. Because we have so many longtime employees, you can rest assured that the high quality of our food will remain unchanged from day to day.“If you build it, they will come.”Actually, I guess we should call this, “If you cook it, they will come,” because in our early days there was no building to speak of. Just a big borrowed tent on a patch of scorched earth by the parking lot of what used to be the Hot Wheels gas station. Ahhhh, those were the days…no ventilation, no telephone, no pesky cash register. Just us, the tent and the heat.Luckily, the tent days were short-lived, and we moved “up” to a trailer at the beginning of the summer of 1993. That little trailer was our center of operations for three interesting years. It was so tiny that two of us could not stand side-by-side at its width. To this day, some of us who toughed out the trailer days still walk sideways because that’s how we learned to avoid near-misses in the trailer. Was it the heat?The trailer was never too bad in the winter. You could put your hands over the grill to get warm, and (as we learned all too well in the summer), the trailer was great for retaining heat. The summers…well, those were a different story. We estimate that the inside of the trailer was generally about one-hundred and one degrees hotter than the ambient air temperature.A fleet of webbed feetSomewhere in the midst of all the heat and sweat of the trailer, the Pilgrim of all Penguins, Ed Knight, decided that he was going to create a fleet of emperor penguins out of paper-mâché. Whether it was too much heat or too much Discovery Channel, we’ll never know. All we do know is that the penguin thing took off in a way none of us could have ever expected.Once Ed started his fleet, kind people from all over began giving him penguins, and we can now claim one of the two largest penguin collections in the country. Oh, and the fleet of emperor penguins? Ten years later, that’s still “in the works.” Movin' on upFinally, in July of 1996, we opened the almost-first Penguin Ed’s BBQ. (The very first Ed’s was in a strip center that was torn down soon after we opened). After all, we had to put all those penguins somewhere. That first restaurant was just the middle portion of what is now Penguin Ed’s on Mission. Yet, at the time, it seemed huge. Although we were doing about one-fifths of the business we now do, it felt like the busiest restaurant in the world.Expanding exponentiallyAfter a few growing pains, we gained our footing were able to expand for the first time in January of 1999. At the same time, we were also able to purchase B&B Bar-B-Q from Fayetteville’s Basset family. This was a friendly purchase from owners who were ready to get out of the restaurant business, but did not want to see a Fayetteville legend disappear. That’s where Ed’s came in.We purchased B&B and added some of our own touches, but kept the things that make B&B the restaurant that it is: the wooden booths, the orange phones for placing orders, and of course, the fried pickles. In 2002, we expanded the Mission Boulevard location a second time to create Penguin Ed’s as you now know it. A long, strange tripWe have gone from a tent, to a trailer, to a strip mall, back to the trailer, into a restaurant that has grown to be over twice its original size, and then into a second restaurant. We couldn’t have done it without a lot of hard work from all of our employees, a cast of characters that has been frustrating at times, but more often, interesting and fortifying.We give our utmost thanks to all of these people who have joined our family—those who are still working in the restaurant as well as those who have moved on to other ice floes. We also give our earnest thank-you to you, the customer. Not just for patronizing our restaurant. We are thanking you in advance for something you may not have done yet. If you come into one of our locations and see something that needs to be changed or improved, we are going to expect that you tell us. We would do the same for you. So, just to get ahead of ourselves, we would like to say “thanks.” Want to know more? Contact us We can promise to talk your ear off. |
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