Pat Martin turned the top half of a bun upside down and poured a little vinegar-based barbecue sauce onto its toasted surface, watching intently to make sure the bread soaked up the pool of liquid. Only then was he ready to flip it over to complete a pulled pork sandwich, "as God intended," as Martin is known to attest.
There was already a mound of glistening smoked pork on the bottom bun, studded with bark and topped with a generous helping of slaw. Martin, who has spent the past 20 years building Martin's Bar-B-Que Joint around the traditions of West Tennessee whole-hog cooking, has strong opinions about how all these things should come together.
The slaw, for one, isn't optional. Neither is the order in which the ingredients are assembled.
The sauce belongs on the bun, where its acidity can balance the richness of the pork without overwhelming it.
For all his exacting attention to detail, Martin acknowledged that the key to the barbecue he's spent much of his life perfecting is largely out of his hands.
"Time," he said, acknowledging the well-worn cliché. "Everybody, especially home cooks, they want to rush it."
Twenty years after opening Martin's Bar-B-Que Joint in a 950-square-foot building in Nolensville, then a town of roughly 3,500 people, Martin has built a company employing approximately 450 people. He has five restaurants in the greater Middle Tennessee area and others in Kentucky, Alabama and South Carolina. He has two more restaurants planned for Dickson, Tennessee and Bowling Green, Kentucky.
Much like the barbecue that made him famous, the business owes at least some of its success to circumstances he couldn't have planned.
In May 2006, Martin was running a landscaping business when he and his crew made a potentially dangerous mistake. They failed to properly secure a trailer carrying their equipment, which came loose on Highway 96, flipping over an embankment and destroying his mowers.
That was around 7 in the morning, and by 10:30 a.m., he'd already met with the insurance adjuster and sent his crew home.
"I didn't know what I was going to do with them," he said. "I didn't know what I was going to do at all."
Martin was sitting in front of his barbecue restaurant as he recalled the story. Behind him, local workers cleaned the mud off their boots on a brush scrubber stationed permanently by the door as they wandered inside to join tourists for lunch.
He pointed toward his original location next door, a 950-square-foot restaurant now occupied by Outlanders Southern Chicken.
In 2006, it was a Mexican restaurant called El Texano, and Martin knew it as a reliable place for lunch. But when he arrived that morning, the lights were off and the chairs were stacked on tables, another apparent stroke of bad luck.
Martin walked down the hill to speak with the landlord, a mechanic named Vernon, who told him the restaurant's owners were several months behind on rent. He was looking for another tenant.
"I'll take it," Martin replied.
The decision was impulsive, but the ambition behind it wasn't.
Martin had previously worked as a Wall Street trader, a career that paid well but left him wanting something more. He'd spent years thinking about getting into the restaurant business, and considering working in one to learn the ropes.
Although he had little money and, at 34, worried he was too old to start a new career, he shook hands with Vernon that morning.
"Within a span of no more than five hours, I went from going to a job site to signing a lease on a restaurant," he said.
Martin put his house up as collateral for a small line of credit, bought a Home Depot home improvement manual and began figuring out how to turn the former Mexican restaurant into a barbecue spot. He built the counter and deck and worked with the kitchen he'd inherited from the previous tenants.
On Oct. 16, 2006, Martin's Bar-B-Que Joint opened for business.
Learning the business
Nolensville was tiny then. Beyond the post office and a landscaping yard was mostly open land. Martin had no experience running a restaurant, but he knew how to cook barbecue.
In college, he learned West Tennessee whole-hog cooking from Harold Thomas at Thomas & Webb Barbecue. In 1991, he cooked his first hog in a makeshift pit he built himself, launching a lifelong fascination with barbecue.
During the slower winter months of his landscaping career, he had broadened his culinary education by cooking through Julia Child's "Mastering the Art of French Cooking."
The book's complicated, classical techniques initially frustrated him, but it showed him the value of really learning to cook instead of simply following recipes, which ultimately made him a better pitmaster, he said.
The small-town setting gave Martin room to refine without the pressures of a more crowded market. It also meant customers had to make a deliberate trip to find him, something that became increasingly common as word spread.
"I know that opening up here was the right thing because if I had opened up in Nashville, Franklin, I would have gotten swallowed up," he said.
Martin remembers people who drove half an hour to eat, finding no barbecue to speak of after their journey.
"There were some Saturdays we'd be out of barbecue by 6," he said. "I do remember so many faces that told me they were never coming back."
But those same customers often returned, drawn by the food's reputation.
"Real barbecue joints do run out, and they don't run out for the romanticism of the story of like we're out, we're out, you know, and all that," Martin said. "They run out because they're in effect guessing how much they're going to need for tomorrow."
For Martin, that uncertainty was part of the appeal. On Wall Street and at the Chicago Board of Trade, he had thrived on the noise and controlled chaos of the trading floor. On busy nights in his restaurant, the kitchen could feel just two tickets away from failure.
"The drug is not the falling apart," he said. "The drug is keeping it from falling apart."
From Nolensville to national attention
Word soon began to spread even further after former Tennessean food writer Jim Myers published a glowing review of the restaurant.
"Then they started coming in droves from Nashville," Martin said.
National attention followed when Bon Appétit's Andrew Knowlton included Martin's among his favorite barbecue restaurants in the country. An invitation to New York's Big Apple Barbecue Block Party, which brought together a group of the country's most respected pitmasters, wasn't far behind.
"That was like the holy grail of barbecue," Martin said.
As the restaurant's reputation grew, so did the business. But Martin, who had built his first restaurant around exacting standards for absolutely everything, had to learn that he couldn't personally oversee every detail.
In the early years, he described himself as a "loving dictator."
Fittingly, Alex Chader, a longtime customer turned employee for more than seven years, remembers initially thinking Martin seemed like "a bit of a hard-ass."
But Chader came to understand what was behind the demanding standards.
"He really, really cares," he said.
Martin could spend hours discussing the execution of a single menu item. He was quick to correct mistakes, but also capable of acknowledging his own, with a crooked grin, Chader said.
But Martin realized he couldn't oversee everything after opening a new restaurant in Mount Juliet. He found himself ricocheting between locations two or three times a day. He was crossing the bridge over Percy Priest Lake — again —when he knew it had to stop.
"I can't keep living this way," he said.
He learned to trust his employees to maintain the standards he'd established, which extend to the type of open-door hospitality Martin grew up with in the South.
"There was never a time that I remember anybody in my family ever being irritated that somebody just stopped by," he said.
For Chader, that culture is part of what has kept him at the restaurant. He describes the work as taking care of "Pat's people."
"Martin's is just a happy place for me," Chader said.
Twenty years later
Martin doesn't remember ever regretting his decision to open the restaurant, even during the early years when he routinely worked up to 100 hours. He made an oath to attend as many of his children's games as he could, though he missed many nights at home.
"It did cost me," he said. "There's a price to pay for everything. I don't think there's any other way Martin's would have made it. And they understand that."
But the work was invaluable for his mental health and overall sense of joy, he said.
"I needed to have a reason to get out of bed every day," he said.
Over the past two decades, Martin's has pushed his attention to detail into other avenues.
In 2022, he published his cookbook "Life of Fire," a guide to traditional live-fire cooking. His television series, "Barbecue: Life of Fire," debuted in 2024 on Outdoor Channel and Tastemade, following Martin as he explores regional cooking traditions with pitmasters, farmers and chefs. Selected episodes are now available on Netflix, and a third season is expected in early 2027.
The restaurant is still growing, with locations planned for Bowling Green, Kentucky, and Dickson, Tennessee, within the next year or so.
But even despite his success, Martin still wrestles with imposter syndrome.
"Every day," he said. "I have no business being here. Zero."
What gives him the greatest satisfaction is having built something without abandoning the principles that motivated him in the first place alongside people who have helped make it possible.
"I'm incredibly proud of the people that have helped me see my vision and my dream come into fruition," he said. "A lot of them are still here. A lot of them are gone. But they all, in some form or fashion, had a hand in continuing to mold what I wanted to do."
Martin still moves between his desk and the restaurants, paying attention to details that customers might never notice: a chair out of place, a straw wrapper on the floor or the expression on someone's face.
"I'll always be fanatical about the little things, the day-to-day, all the little tiny things that most people will never notice," he said.
He hopes the people who carry Martin's into its next 20 years will be just as particular.
"It's about consistency and executing all the little things better today than you did yesterday," he said.
Mackensy Lunsford is the senior dining reporter for The Tennessean. Reach her at mlunsford@tennessean.com.
This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: 20 years of Martin's Bar-B-Que Joint began with a wrecked trailer
