Primary Source #4: The Shed BBQ, within the walls of SoFAB

Bringing the structures and social life of a beloved restaurant into the museum context

Mar 27, 2024

The Shed, as captured during my June 2022 visit to the Southern Food and Beverage Museum in New Orleans. According to the museum signage that accompanied the display, after The Shed’s fire in February 2012, nothing was left standing “but the charred remains of the original 330 sq ft. building.” Yet the museum preserved the “floor that refused to be destroyed,” and the visuals of the space captured the beauty of the original Shed “that held so many memories and treasures from ShedHeds across the country.”

As I count down to the end of my dissertation journey over the next six weeks, I’m sharing one of my favorite primary sources per chapter for your reading enjoyment, to encourage you to give it a look and consider each source’s implications. This week, a single object from my fourth chapter, which considers how food content is presented within the parameters of public history institutions such as museums, and what it says about the transformation of culinary pedagogy in public life.

Much of my dissertation focuses on the way that Americans have been taught to care about cooking—the many mediated discourses that have flowed through our public institutions, newspapers, magazines, and television sets. The limitation of that mediation, of course, is its necessary marginalization of the materiality of food—the more we talk about food, the more the food itself slips out of view. The more substantial our food conversations become, however, the less the ephemerality of food seems to matter. The brief possibility of Smell-O-Vision aside, media consumers seem comfortable to adjust their expectations of tasting, smelling, or touching food for the sake of learning about it. Yet in recent decades, the presence of food-focused content in museum settings has created a new moment to debate whether such adjusted expectations are necessary, or merely conventions of the traditional museum-going experience.

It’s hard to acknowledge that, though I have been a lifelong museum lover, I can see the limitations of the museum format to fully engage with food culture and history. Though museums have a unique opportunity to engage the public on a localized and personal level, the long development period of museum exhibitions and programs can lead to lagging support of public interests, and even more so of public tastes. In addition, the surge of popular interest in food culture in the early 2000s left museums and other public institutions to shape initiatives around visitors already steeped in the “foodie” culture of restaurants, television, and social media. Visitors have been conditioned by what other forms of media serve up, and by contrast, the open-ended format of the museum gallery seems downright antiquated. A shift toward food content can also combat entrenched visitor perceptions of museums as inflexible, old-fashioned, exclusionary, and unapproachable institutions, especially as they put countless objects out of reach for sensory-forward interpretation. For much of their history, museums functioned as sacred spaces for the public, sites that asked visitors to stand back in awe and marvel at singular artifacts displayed behind velvet ropes and locked cases. Food, however, demands that we get in close contact, and reminds us that objects that seem sacred are also objects of significant social value.

In this chapter of my dissertation, I consider the exhibition and programmatic strategies of three food history exhibitions: FOOD: Transforming the American Table at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C.; the permanent exhibition at the Southern Food & Beverage Museum in New Orleans; and the exhibition African/American: Making the Nation’s Table by the Museum of Food and Drink in New York City (which ran from February to July 2022). Each of these museums responds to the burgeoning popular interest in food culture by offering what no other forms of food media can: immersive, multisensory experiences that engage visitors and challenge the conventions of typical exhibitions and pedagogical frameworks. These museums offer models of what effective multisensory pedagogy looks like, but also offer provocations about exactly who dictates the terms of effective pedagogy: the museum professionals, or the hungry public. In many ways, present-day food enthusiasts are teaching museums how to exhibit food and cooking, and as a result have gained unprecedented influence over the public history landscape.

I developed this chapter through multiple interviews with museum staff, past and present, across these three institutions from 2020-2024, and conducted several site visits to each of the exhibits in question. Before beginning this research, I had never before visited the Southern Food and Beverage Museum (SoFAB), yet was intrigued by how many had described it to me, as a space that felt like an antique store in which every object functioned as a portkey to Southern culinary history. Its founder, Liz Williams, has stated that a true food museum is not “a warehouse or a kitschy collection of cute paraphernalia” but rather a space in which food is represented as a vital force within everyday life. A visit to SoFAB’s space on Haley Boulevard, the former site of New Orleans’ Dryades Market, makes the vitality of food abundantly clear and sensorially present. Once the city’s commercial epicenter, Dryades’ social and cultural legacy is retained in the museum’s format, which evokes an open marketplace with stalls featuring each Southern state’s distinctive foodways. In doing so, the museum does not offer a singular, overly simplistic narrative about Southern cuisine, but tells a story of how food is shaped within and between communities.

Because SoFAB is a museum of many disparate stories, there are a few spaces within SoFAB where its guiding principles feel more commercial than curatorial, leaving some visitors more inclined to shop than they are to learn. (It’s hard to visit the museum without craving Popeye’s—a point that the independent curators of the Al Copeland portion of the exhibit surely intended.) However, SoFAB uses its marketplace aesthetic as a metaphor for what it means to exhibit food as a regional, and multisensory story. From its open-display exhibits to its in-museum tastings, SoFAB’s central innovation is to lean directly into visitors’ present-day encounters with food as an entry point to the complex history of Southern cuisine, and to facilitate SoFAB’s flexible layout enables visitors to have self-directed experiences, empowering them to reshape the museum space to facilitate a multisensory experience. Instead of wall signs or fixed placements within cases, curators often placed object labels on case surfaces using clip-ring style card holders like those used in restaurants, allowing visitors to move signs with ease to view objects up-close. The wall separating the exhibitions from the demonstration kitchen is made of charred wood like that of a bourbon barrel, while cans, crates, and milk cartons are used as pedestals for objects. Many objects sit entirely outside of cases: bags of Carolina rice and sandwich-sized paper sleeves from Gendusa’s bakery are set atop rather than inside cases, giving the illusion of foodstuffs out for handling, ready to pick up and carry away.

The museum is genuinely compelled to use objects not just as evidence, but as provocative props, and isn’t afraid to include a taste-based component of the visitor’s experience. The artifact at the center of the museum’s taste-oriented experience is the salvaged bar from Bruning’s Restaurant, one of the oldest restaurants in New Orleans, left barely standing after the devastation of Hurricane Katrina. Received in 171 separate pieces, the bar was reconstructed in the SoFAB space and now functions as a central component of the museum’s pedagogical approach. All guided tours of the museum stop at the bar, both to tell the story of its acquisition and to let visitors place an order. In many ways, the bar mirrors the Museum of the American Cocktail (MotAC) located at opposite ends of the museum, a floor-to-ceiling display of antique bottles, barware, historical photographs, and patent drawings chronicling the history of the American cocktail. y juxtaposing the real bar on one end of the museum and a display bar on the other, SoFAB reminds visitors that little distance exists between the watering holes of the present and the historical artifacts of the past, and that they have a role to play as both museum visitors and consumers in preserving institutions like Bruning’s for the rest of New Orleans, either as storefronts or in museum spaces. The display of local objects creates a sense of shared responsibility in the work of historical preservation and the construction of historical narratives.

But perhaps my favorite object in the whole museum, and the one that most stuck with me during my research, was the partially recreated space known as “The Shed.” This structure was gathered from the remains of the Shed BBQ & Blues restaurant in Ocean Springs, Mississippi, after it burned to the ground in February 2012. (According to the museum’s object label, the Shed’s owner, Brad Orrison, went to the restaurant to survey the damage after the fire and found that, though the building was destroyed, the meat left in the smokers was cooked to perfection.) The floor of the destroyed Shed was transplanted to the museum, along with the reconstructed walls of the Shed built by the restaurant’s fans, self-declared “ShedHeds,” who came to support the owners after the fire. The museum allows visitors to step fully into the recreated Shed, shattering the illusion of a period room separated by velvet ropes and explicitly inviting them to see the space as a composite object, made by a historic event and in response to it. For those many patrons who visited the Shed in its heyday, they felt themselves as co-contributors to its legacy, with their dollar bills acting like ceiling tiles throughout its original space. When encountered in the museum, with an unusual degree of physical proximity, visitors have a palpable sense of the food object as social history, and are reminded that what makes museum objects rare is not necessarily their singular provenance or their valuable composition, but the community investment that transforms a simple restaurant into an unmissable destination.

I loved spending time in SoFAB’s space, and thinking about how each object invited me to act as a museumgoer with an aesthetic, critical distance, but also as a local patron of the region’s renowned foodways. Indeed, much of the museum’s success rests on manipulating visitors’ sensory perception, creating a shifting verisimilitude between the consumer spaces in which one buys food and the pedagogical spaces in which one learns about food. It’s not that SoFAB wants visitors to imagine themselves in eating-oriented spaces like bars or restaurants; apart from Bruning’s bar and the gift shop, there are few spaces to exchange money for food or beverages. Instead, the deliberate removal of the boundaries that demarcate the eating space from the learning space put visitors in a productive state of interpretive limbo, blurring the boundary between one’s consuming self and one’s museumgoing self. The SoFAB space does not elevate local culture to the level of high culture by enshrining it in cases. Instead, it makes museum-worthy artifacts as accessible as the objects that flow through everyday life. It makes the lived experience of museum visitors as important as the authority of the museum curators—and in this fashion, makes us all co-authors of American food history.

Have you ever visited SoFAB, or another food museum? How did your experience in the food museum differ from that of a more conventional art, history, or science-museum? What can we gain from food museums that differs pedagogically from the experience of watching a cooking show or reading a magazine column? Looking forward to hearing your thoughts on museumgoing, food-loving, and the bounds of public food pedagogy!

French Fries and Martinis

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