{"id":47484,"date":"2025-11-21T16:38:14","date_gmt":"2025-11-21T16:38:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/47484\/"},"modified":"2025-11-21T16:38:14","modified_gmt":"2025-11-21T16:38:14","slug":"johnsons-bar-b-q-is-one-of-the-oldest-and-best-restaurants-in-the-bronx","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/47484\/","title":{"rendered":"Johnson\u2019s Bar-B-Q Is One of the Oldest and Best Restaurants in the Bronx"},"content":{"rendered":"

On a late Friday afternoon in September, in the Morrisania section<\/a> of the Bronx, two boys kicked a flat basketball back and forth over a basement grate on Prospect Avenue. Around the corner on East 163rd Street, a Bx6 bus hissed as it lowered to the curb in front of a three-story brick building with a faded red awning that read, \u201cJohnson Bar-B-Q; Open Since 1954<\/a>.\u201d The owner of Johnson\u2019s, Dwayne Johnson \u2014 son of the late founders, James and Pauline \u2014 sat in front of a window filled with spider plants, sporting short grey hair and a grey mustache, and wearing a grey T-shirt over a lean frame.<\/p>\n

\u201cBack for more?\u201d he said, and followed me inside.<\/p>\n

This was my third visit in as many weeks. After I ordered mac and cheese and fried chicken, I told him I\u2019d been reading about interesting Morrisanians. He quietly walked to the back kitchen without commenting.<\/p>\n

Laminated family pictures covered the kitchen door. In one, James, in a white T-shirt, long sideburns, and a short afro, looks forward, smirking, while Pauline stands behind him. She\u2019s pretty, smiling widely, seemingly at something he said.<\/p>\n

The lobby of the takeout restaurant is small. There are no tables: just a TV and two chairs that aren\u2019t for customers. On an earlier visit, I ate my ribs on a bench at an empty basketball court at the nearby McKinley housing projects. The ribs had a crisp bark, were chewy in spots, tender in others, but not falling off the bone. Johnson had spooned a ladle of red sauce over them, then the tangy mustard sauce \u2014 \u201cCarolina Gold\u201d as it\u2019s called in South Carolina \u2014 but not in Morrisania. Delicious.<\/p>\n

\u201cA lot of great people came from this neighborhood,\u201d Johnson said as he returned from the kitchen. \u201cWatch the chicken!\u201d he yelled to a cook, as he motioned for me to follow him outside. We walked to the edge of the sidewalk.<\/p>\n

Johnson said, \u201cMy father stood me here when I was eight and asked, \u2018What do you see?\u2019 I said, \u2018I don\u2019t know, a bunch of alcoholics and dope fiends?\u2019 My dad said, \u2018No, stupid! I see 11 Black-owned businesses, and 11 Black-owned properties on one block.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Johnson is 68, so that would have happened in 1965. He pointed at another three-story building across the street.<\/p>\n

\"Dwayne<\/a><\/p>\n

Dwayne Johnson out front of his restaurant. Scott Semler<\/p>\n

\u201cThat was a bakery, Mr. Hope\u2019s,\u201d he said. He began spinning and pausing with his arm out, like a clock\u2019s second hand. \u201cThat was Ms. Mary\u2019s beauty parlor. That was Dr. Rawland\u2019s office. There was a hardware store. That was my uncle\u2019s liquor store. That was a barber shop.\u201d He continued until he landed back at Johnson\u2019s, the only business left from that time.<\/p>\n

The Morrisania that Johnson\u2019s parents settled in toward the late \u201940s and early \u201950s was, according to a 1951 issue of the African American magazine Our World, \u201ca place of hope and unlimited possibilities.\u201d On an evening stroll, you could walk by Colin Powell\u2019s school, Morris High School, and Thelonious Monk\u2019s house. Visitors could slide into clubs like the 845 or Sylvia\u2019s Blue Morocco, where Miles Davis, Charlie Parker, Tito Puente, Mongo Santamar\u00eda, and other burgeoning icons played jazz, mambo, pachanga, boogaloo, doo-wop, or calypso.<\/p>\n

Outside, groups like the Chantels would sing dreamy harmonies on street corners while dapper numbers-runners hopped out of chrome-framed New Yorkers to take bets from checkers players on the sidewalk. Spaldeen balls bounded off broomsticks during stickball games into the evening, until neighbors told each other\u2019s kids to go inside for their respective dinners: chitlins, curried goat, arroz con pollo, and gefilte fish.<\/p>\n

Morrisania, a base for union activity and left-wing activism, was more welcoming and integrated than the rest of the borough, but landlords only selectively accepted Black families. Postal workers and Pullman porters had better shots at a lease. James Johnson was a Pullman porter when he arrived from Sumter, South Carolina. After finding an apartment on East 163rd, he met Pauline. She came from a family of cooks in Virginia, and he came from a Gullah Geechee family, with a deep home-cooking tradition.<\/p>\n

Pauline moved in, and soon after, they purchased the current storefront space from their landlord for $3,800. James left his job, and the pair quickly established their food as a staple of the neighborhood: fried chicken, black-eyed peas, macaroni and cheese, collard greens, and, above all, ribs doused in tangy mustard sauce. They frequently traveled to a family farm in Accomac, Virginia, for fresh pecans, yams, watermelons, and more, so they could prepare food that was fresh and familiar for the many Black families arriving in New York from the Southeast, all following a well-established route of the Great Migration.<\/p>\n

Dwayne was born near the beginning of Johnson\u2019s barbecue story, but his earliest memories are of the 1960s, when he began seeing those \u201calcoholics and dope fiends.\u201d<\/p>\n

He told me, \u201cThe drugs were always here.\u201d Indeed, heroin arrived in the \u201940s, and the teen gangs were around even longer. But in the 1960s, the new Cross Bronx Expressway displaced thousands; over 600 factories left the city between 1958 and 1974, and white flight pulled over 400,000 away from the Bronx in a decade. In all, the South Bronx lost <\/a>more than 60 percent of its population between 1950 and 1980.<\/p>\n

\"A<\/a><\/p>\n

A regular customer at Johnson\u2019s. Scott Semler<\/p>\n

By the 1970s, building fires \u2014 about 40 a day \u2014 raged, due to disinvestment, arson, and neglect by landlords and the government; the city closed Bronx firehouses and subway stops right at the peak of the crisis and the Bronx lost 80 percent of residences<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Hetty Fox, an neighborhood activist who contributed to Fordham professor Mark Naisson\u2019s Bronx African American History Project<\/a>, recalled leaving town and returning as a young adult to find the building where she safely spent idyllic summer nights on the fire escape in her pajamas burnt to the ground. She said, \u201cIt was like an angel of death with a sword, moving from Vyse Avenue and slowly creeping up the hill.\u201d<\/p>\n

Back in front of Johnson\u2019s, Dwayne continued, \u201cThings were bad, but the Nation of Islam and the Black Panthers were on every street corner, telling people to buy Black, and open businesses. Have you heard of Hilton White? Hilton White was a god. He got dozens of people off drugs through basketball. Even the drug dealers were paying people\u2019s rent. Not just once or twice, but every month for dozens of people.\u201d He said of the fires, \u201cNobody ever fucked with us. That\u2019s the type of respect my father had.\u201d James Johnson was a fixture in the neighborhood, famous not just for his food, but for his all-night checkers tournaments.<\/p>\n

James invested his restaurant earnings in real estate. The family was well-positioned to leave, but they stayed. Johnson said, \u201cMy mother told me, \u2018Who would we be, if we didn\u2019t support the community that gave to us?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

As we spoke, a cook brought out a plastic bag with my food and passed it to Johnson. I realized I might have to sacrifice the crispness of the chicken skin for the sake of the interview; he was going to hold the bag until we were done.<\/p>\n

In all the literature about Morrisania from those years, Johnson\u2019s Bar-B-Q is the only restaurant that appears frequently. Thanks to it, mustard sauce has become as much a part of Morrisania culture as South Carolina culture. A former neighborhood resident, Quincy Brathwaite, recalled, \u201cI was watching a movie at the RKO Theatre when I was 11, in 1974. Somebody was eating chicken inside and somebody else yelled, \u2018Y\u2019all smell that?\u2019 A man called out, \u2018That\u2019s Johnson\u2019s,\u2019 and everyone laughed.\u201d<\/p>\n

Johnson\u2019s partner needed help inside. He passed me my bag of chicken and told me to walk down to \u201c23,\u201d officially known as Behagen Playground, where hip-hop pioneer Grandmaster Flash used to throw hip-hop jams.<\/p>\n

I walked down Tinton Avenue alongside the Forest Houses until I reached \u201c23.\u201d Six boys played basketball on a submerged court in the fading sunlight. Dembow music played from a smart speaker on the concrete amphitheater benches. I sat at picnic tables behind the court next to a baseball field fence.<\/p>\n

\"Dwayne<\/a><\/p>\n

Dwayne Johnson at the buffet station, packing food.<\/p>\n

An adjacent table was occupied by two women in their 30s. They were sharing a traditional joint (not the wax pens of the new generation of marijuana smokers). I acknowledged this, and they laughed. It turned out they were great-granddaughters of the late Eleanor Bumpurs, who was famously killed by a police officer when she was 66 in 1984. Bumpurs was immortalized in an Audre Lorde poem and in the credits of Spike Lee\u2019s Do the Right Thing.<\/p>\n

I opened my container of chicken over mac and cheese. Eleanor\u2019s namesake called out, \u201cThat\u2019s Johnson\u2019s.\u201d<\/p>\n

I nodded as I took my first bite. To my surprise, the chicken, fried as a half bird and cleaved into rough sections, remained crisp. The skin didn\u2019t shatter, however. There was moisture and air pockets, so each bite had delightful crackle, pull, and chew. The meat was hot, moist, and tender. It separated easily from the bone, and the mustard sauce was a perfect tangy complement. The mac and cheese was good, too \u2014 little elbows and a crisped cheesy topping \u2014 but the chicken was extraordinary.<\/p>\n

Dwayne Johnson took over the restaurant from his parents in 1986 and didn\u2019t miss a beat. The community has always centered art and activism. In Morrisania\u2019s worst times, the inheritors of jazz and Latin traditions created a music and art culture as vibrant as their parents\u2019 and grandparents\u2019 doo-wop and bebop. Johnson fed the movement, beginning with hip-hop\u2019s creator, Kool Herc, who still comes regularly. Rapper Fat Joe along with others like Showbiz<\/a> and Lord Finesse<\/a>, grew up in the Forest Houses<\/a> and was raised on Johnson\u2019s.<\/p>\n

This summer, Joe told Jadakiss on their shared podcast<\/a>, \u201cThey got the motherfuckin\u2019 mustard sauce from down South… DJ SNS<\/a> looks like he eats there every day; wherever he DJs, you can see the mustard stain on his shoulder.\u201d<\/p>\n

Johnson continues to cook for Old Timers\u2019 Day<\/a> each year (unrelated to the one at Yankee Stadium), preparing upwards of 140 hotel pans of chicken, ribs, black-eyed peas, and more, still, as always, for free. He told me that as many as 7,000 people come out to celebrate the neighborhood. He also cooks for the Bronx Graffiti and Street Jam yearly on Juneteenth.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Scott Semler<\/p>\n

The restaurant, maybe the last Black-owned business on the block, has never been in danger of closing, not during the fires or the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns, because the family behind it has been an eager participant in every phase and facet of neighborhood life.<\/p>\n

Decades ago, Johnson inherited the building from his parents. He also owns a rental property, and a house in Westchester, but from the looks of it, he\u2019s never at the latter. On my first visit, he told me, \u201cI\u2019m from the South Bronx. This is the place I love, it will always be my home.\u201d Johnson\u2019s daughter, Stacia, is a seventh-grade special-education teacher, but she seems poised to take over when the time comes.<\/p>\n

The sun was setting in the park, and I said goodbye to the Bumpurs. Walking toward Johnson\u2019s Bar-B-Q on my way back to the train station, I saw Johnson slumped in his chair by the dim light of the restaurant window. As I approached to compliment the chicken, he said, \u201cYou\u2019re still here?\u201d<\/p>\n

A man sat next to him in a motorized wheelchair, wearing oxygen tubes and a crisp black \u201cMcKinley Houses Day 2025\u201d hat. He was the McKinley House tenant manager of 50 years, Wallace Diamond. The leaves of a honey locust shook overhead like a baby\u2019s rattle as the two men sat quietly chatting. I couldn\u2019t hear them, but from the way they took turns making statements and nodding, it looked like they were discussing plans.<\/p>\n