By Jim Beaugez
Locally sourced produce and ingredients are key to the culinary experiences awaiting patrons at the Tomato Place and Tommy’s BBQ, a pair of well-known Vicksburg restaurants whose dishes celebrate foodways native to the region.
“We were doing farm to table before anybody,” says Luke Hughes, who has been part of the Vicksburg culinary scene for decades as owner of the acclaimed Tomato Place on Hwy. 61 South. “As a kid, I can remember my daddy eating a tomato right off the vine. My grandfather would take cooked tomatoes and put them on the piece of bread with mayonnaise and you would think it was a gourmet meal.”
On July 11, he’ll join his son, Tommy Hughes, for an event at Catfish Row Museum where the duo will cook together using local tomatoes while sharing their story and discussing the importance of using ingredients grown in your home area.
During the demonstration, the latest installment of the museum’s annual Summer Chef Series, the Hugheses will prepare an entrée of mozzarella and parmesan baked tomato — showcasing the same local beefsteak tomatoes diners know from the Tomato Place — with a smokehouse tetrazzini made with chicken and turkey smoked using red oak wood. Roasted garlic butter bread and a dessert of Southern peach ambrosia with pecans will round out the meal.
“It’s an easy meal to prep ahead quickly and finish when needed with ingredients you probably already have on hand,” says the younger Hughes, who established his barbecue eatery on Hwy. 61 North in 2023 after retiring from a previous career.
The elder Hughes opened the Tomato Place officially in 2001, but for years prior he ran a roadside fruit stand on the same site selling fresh local produce such as watermelons, cantaloupes, okra, corn, and varieties of tomatoes.
“The tomatoes are what everybody wanted,” he says while preparing a succotash with tomatoes and okra at his restaurant. “When we didn’t have tomatoes, we were basically out of business.”
As Hughes tells it, one day a customer noticed him enjoying a tomato sandwich he’d made for lunch with one of his stand’s most popular items. He asked for one and liked it so much he came back the next day, giving Luke the idea that transformed his produce business into a restaurant experience built around tomatoes.
A few years after making the transition to a restaurant, Luke added his now-famous Fried Green Tomato BLT to the menu. Hughes was already well versed in the sandwich-crafting arts, after making a business out of it from a restaurant kitchen on Carrollton in New Orleans in the mid eighties. He’d make the sandwiches at night and deliver them to convenience stores across the city by day.
But the particular pairing of fresh tomatoes and crispy bacon used in his BLT at the Tomato Place has attracted attention from both patrons and food critics. In 2022, The New York Times included the sandwich on its list of “25 Restaurant Dishes We Couldn’t Stop Thinking About This Year” for its “perfect balance of salty breading and acidic bite.”
Tomatoes and other vegetables aren’t the only homegrown ingredients in the mix up the road at Tommy’s BBQ. He explains that even the wood he uses to smoke beef, pork, chicken and turkey at his Texas-style barbecue “meatery,” as the sign above its porch entrance states, is local — much of the red oak he uses comes from healthy trees felled during storms and recovered by friends in the area.
“It’s readily available in these parts,” he says. If you go to Texas, they use post oak, which is readily available there. Every 30 minutes we’re burning about six to eight sticks of red oak. If you come to my place, there’s a mound as big as a full-size truck beside the barbecue stand, all red oak.”
The fourth season of Catfish Row Museum’s Summer Chef Series will also feature Chris Fink and Sally Bullard of Main Street Market on July 25 and Ty Thames of Restaurant Tyler and Eat Local Starkville on August 8. All events in the series begin at 2 p.m. and are open to the public with no admission fee.
Read the Vicksburg Post Article Here
Jim Beaugez is a Mississippi-based writer whose work has been published by Rolling Stone, Smithsonian, Oxford American, Garden & Gun, Guitar World and other publications. He also created and produced “My Life in Five Riffs,” a documentary series for Guitar Player that traces contemporary musicians back to their sources of inspiration.
