Iowa Roots

George Battle: Transcript

You know barbecue came along long before sauce came along. The funny thing is, that years ago, the rumor is that when they was cooking barbecue, if they’d come up with some bad meat, they’d concoct something to put over it to camouflage it. But generally, in Texas, years ago—it’s a little bit different now—if you went to a barbecue place, you know, you don’t need no sauce! The same way as you went to a steak house, you know—the steak sauce’s going to camouflage that real genuine flavor of the steak!

I’m George Battle, and I am from Texas. I came here by mistake. I was on my way to Michigan. I got to Des Moines, and my car broke down. Didn’t have any money, couldn’t go any further, so one thing led to another. Got a job, went to work, and so I’ve been here ever since. I first come here coming from Texas—loving barbecue the way I did—I was disappointed when I didn’t discover any real good barbecue in Iowa, you know. So, somewhere in the back of my head, I planted a seed there, so maybe, this is something into the future.

I got started in Des Moines initially in 1977. Initially, I didn’t know anything about the business; I had a friend that come up and helped me with my first business when I first got open. I was scared to death because I had never done this before, you know. And so I stayed open in Des Moines for about seven and a half years. Didn’t make any money, but I learned a lot about barbecue. After a while, it became very frustrating because there’s a lot of hard work involved in restaurant business. And I really was in it to—despite the fact that I enjoyed what I was doing—I really wanted to make some money, too, you know.

So, after a while, after seven and a half years, I just closed the business down, and I moved back to Texas. I had been gone for quite a while and I wasn’t ready for the fast lane again. And I discovered, that well, I’m going back to Iowa. So, I came back up here. And there used to be a little ice cream store here in Ames; there was a “For Rent” sign in front of the window at the end of this building, you know. And so, lo and behold, here I am, you know, back in the barbecue business, you know. It took maybe a couple of years before the business really got rolling, you know. There used to be a beer, when I was a very young man in Texas: “Southern Select.” That hit it right on the head, so I decided that “Battles Bar-B-Q, Southern Select”—not just choose one particular locale, the whole area, you know. Some peoples are not happy with that, you know. I mean, you get a few peoples who might come down from the Carolinas up there—they might resent that, you know, because it ain’t right down to a T exactly what they serve, you know.

Different kind of cooking units—that makes a big difference, believe it or not. And here in this modern era, we got manufacturers that’s come up with all sort of modern ways to cook barbecue. Now it takes the beef longer to cook than anything else. You know, I would say that you can cook it fast, you can cook it slow. My beef, it takes about twelve hours to cook. The ribs, I would say it takes about three hours. Pork, I would say about three hours. And that’s it. They have tried to invent a machine to cook the barbecue faster and get the same results as cooking it longer, you know. The jury’s still out on that, you know. We don’t really know. You have to ask the barbecue connoisseur, and they differ too. And you know, you’d be surprised at the peoples who believe this here: if you don’t have the barbecue sauce, that’s what constitutes barbecue; it’s the sauce. You can get any kind of meat and put some barbecue sauce on it, it becomes barbecue. That’s the furthest thing from the truth, really.