By Jim Beaugez

Businessman Juan Mora applied an enterprising philosophy about food service nearly a century ago at the Big Apple Inn in Jackson.

“People asked my great-grandfather, ‘Why don’t you add chicken to the menu,’ or ‘Why don’t you add pulled pork to the menu?’” says Geno Lee, the current owner of the long-running Farish Street establishment.

“He didn’t want to be a copycat or second-rate,” he said. “He wanted to be the best smoke and ear maker. And that’s what we concentrate on.”

Lee is referring to the Big Apple Inn’s sandwich specialties — smoked-sausage sliders, known as “smokes,” and a pig-ear slider, which Mora created one day when the owner of a local sausage plant offered him the pig ears he was throwing out every day. 

“My great-grandfather figured out that if you boil a pig ear for a full day, you can’t eat it,” Lee said. “And if you boil it for two days, you still can’t eat it. But if you boil it for three days, it becomes tender enough to put in a sandwich and eat.”

While the Big Apple Inn’s menu also includes tamales, hamburgers, hot dogs and bologna sandwiches, Lee estimates about 95 percent of their customers today still come for the smokes and ears. And attendees to his free event at Catfish Row Museum Saturday at 2 p.m. will get to see how they’re made, and sample them, as well.

The story of the Big Apple Inn begins well north of Farish Street in the Mississippi Delta, where Mora arrived with other farm laborers from Mexico in the 1930s to harvest cotton. While some of the workers stayed in the fields to pick cotton, though, a smaller group of two or three people would set up on the side of the field to cook lunch. 

The situation called for a filling, nutritious meal that was simple to prepare, and the workers’ native tamale fit the bill. To boot, most of the ingredients were easy to find, and for the masa they replaced corn flour with the more readily available cornmeal. 

“They made hot tamales right on the side of the cotton fields,” Lee said. “And when the people would take their lunch break, they’d come over there and eat some tamales and go right back to work.”

Lee’s great-grandfather eventually made his way from the Delta fields to Farish Street, where he cooked and sold tamales on the side of the street until a storefront became available in 1939. The eatery’s moniker came from Lee’s grandfather, Harold Lee, who wore zoot suits and named the storefront after his favorite contemporary dance, the Big Apple. Soon, the menu expanded to include smokes, adding his own flair to a local smoked sausage with coleslaw and a special sauce.

“He took the skin off of the sausage, laid it on the griddle, and kind of stirred it up until it got to the consistency of hamburger meat,” Lee said. “Then he put it on a slider bun with the mustard sauce and ‘slaw. It became a hit, and the Big Apple Inn became known as the place where you could go buy your smokes.”

In the 1950s, the Big Apple Inn moved across the street to its current home. Their upstairs neighbor, blues musician Sonny Boy Williamson, was a fixture in the restaurant, as was Civil Rights icon Medger Evers, who later used the room as his office when he served as Mississippi’s first NAACP field officer. 

The intervening years have brought challenging times for the Big Apple Inn, and Lee has watched most of the neighboring businesses close. But all that is secondary to keeping Jackson fed using his family’s traditions and its simple, yet satisfying, menu.

“My grandfather sat me down one day and looked me in my eyes — and I’m waiting, like he’s about to really give me some wisdom, something that’s gonna help me — and he said, ‘Geno, you’ll never be rich, but you’ll always be satisfied,’” Lee said with a laugh.

“And that holds true to this day.”