Savoring the Flavors of the Memphis in May Festival with The Home Depot
Every May, the barbecue world converges to Memphis, TN for Memphis in May — a celebration of all things Memphis. Food, music and culture are on full display during this month-long celebration. A huge highlight of this celebration is the World Championship Barbecue Festival. This celebration made a great environment to teach.
This May, I had the pleasure of attending the Memphis in May festival as part of a media team providing coverage for The Home Depot. The largest home improvement retailer on the planet was onsite offering cooking demonstrations on a wide array of grills, ranging from your standard backyard smokers to Gozney pizza ovens. All of this in an effort to educate and entertain the crowds.
The Home Depot event space was separated from most of the other event tents, giving vendors plenty of space to showcase their products. Whether it was Gozney, FOGO, Masterbuilt or Jealous Devil charcoal, they all had unique displays with delicious samples to draw the crowd in.
Highlights
Gozney slang mouth-watering pizzas and delicious meatballs. Shout out to Mark, who provided pizzas well into the night while we continued to work the event.
FOGO was another standout, with their emasculate display of a full alligator surrounded by fruit suspended over a cowboy grill. Their team was out in full force to support the product and their standout cook Al Frugoni who was competing at the festival.
Oh, and Al placed fourth in the smoked turkey category! Congrats to him and the always amazing Seattle Butcher’s Wife, Misty Banchero!
The Home Depot even went out of the way to hire a DJ to play tunes in between the on-stage demos. Overall, the entire Home Depot event area was wonderful!
Performances
At events like these, you will get more than a few memorable moments. Some that stood out from The Home Depot stage were the performances of Susie Bulloch of Hey Grill, Hey, and Rasheed Philips from Netflix's hit American Barbecue Showdown.
Susie demonstrated how to cook a brisket flat and engaged the crowd with a Q&A session. She even kept her poise when a raucous crowd goer began publicly questioning her expertise by telling her NEVER use a flat over a full brisket. But she kept her cool, kindly telling him everyone cooks their way, which is fine.
As the Saturday demonstrations began to wind down, the crowd began pouring in as Rasheed Philips took the stage. Rasheed prepared tomahawk steaks and entertained the crowd with PG-13 humor, flames shooting from his Masterbuilt Gravity Series smoker, and delicious samples. As the crowd continued to grow, he started in on the crowd work, even pulling audience members on stage to show them the cooker's capabilities.
Just when we thought the show was about to end, he helped wheel up a Gozney Dome over for his biggest trick of the evening — cooking a tomahawk in the oven for some additional samples before closing out the evening.
There were so many happy faces in the crowd, especially after having an opportunity to sample the food.
Behind-the-Scenes
Before the festival, The Home Depot secured media passes for both myself and my partner Lee to provide coverage for the event. We were already planning to be in town doing some work, so it was a great opportunity to gain experience covering a large event as part of a team. We split up to cover the demos from different angles and used the in-between time to capture other details of the event. This included vendor product displays, crowd interactions, and key moments with VIPs throughout the festival.
Full access allowed us to move in and out of areas behind the displays and get activity such as food prep that we would not have been able to capture without it. The access also gave us a bit more flexibility with where we could store our gear. It helped that we knew some people as well. The more I do this work, the more I realize the importance of relationships with people who can open doors.
Conclusion
Documenting this event was great. The people were wonderful. The demos were educational and informative. And the atmosphere from the crowd was one of wonderment. The coordination of that went in to planning this event was stellar and I am glad I had the opportunity to take part in it.
