“This is my style,” says Majure Markow, who drove his family about twenty minutes north out of Jackson, Mississippi, to Sacred Ground Barbecue for a Saturday lunch of fat-rimmed smoked brisket, plush smoked turkey, and more, served on sheet pan trays lined with pink butcher paper. Majure grew up on pork ribs slathered in red barbecue sauce. “All that sweetness was too much; this is what we want,” he says of this new Texas-inspired destination, kitty-corner from a thousand-plus-year-old Native American mound in the railroad community of Pocahontas.
As Majure and his wife, Amanda, talk with friends, their children, Sudie, age eight, and Manning, eleven, play Ping-Pong in a metal barn out back, beneath a vintage sign for the Big Teepee B.B.Q. scrolled with the slogan BARBECUE SO GOOD IT STOPS THE TRAIN. Five shade sails, tethered to a repurposed telephone pole, flap at the center of the gravel yard, a gesture to the restaurant and roadside attraction that towered over the landscape here for three decades.
Life in Pocahontas has more recently revolved around a Dollar General store, a deer processor, and the seventeen trains that rush through town daily. Sacred Ground, which opened in November 2024 in a corner building painted with a mural of a tiny girl riding a giant armadillo, changed this place. What husband-and-wife owners Derek and Jennifer Emerson are doing here is also reshaping what we think of as Mississippi food culture.
Photo: RORY DOYLE…