"give folks good food and plenty of it, and they'll keep coming back."

Soulman's opened its doors in Pleasant Grove, a Dallas neighborhood, on October 19, 1974. One store, one pit, running the same low-and-slow hickory smoke Don had been cooking on rainy days at the carpet shop, except now it ran seven days a week instead of whenever the weather cooperated.

Don had the barbecue itself figured out. What he didn't have, a few days out from opening, were sides. He called his mother, known to everyone as Memer, and she showed up with a stack of family recipes: ranch house beans and buttermilk pie, homestyle Texas cooking that belonged next to smoked meat. Most of those recipes are still on the menu today, including the buttermilk pie that carries her name, and every year, Soulman's marks Memer's Pie Day in her honor.

The goal from day one was plain: cook barbecue worth trusting, and treat the people who walked in like they mattered. Don used the same recipes at home and behind the counter, and the way he smoked meat on that first rainy day at the carpet shop is close to the way Soulman's still smokes it now.

We load the pits and get the smoke rolling the night before, using seasoned hickory and nothing else. No gas, no pellets. One cut goes all night, and the rest come off the smoker the same day they go on. The ribs go on every morning and come straight off the pit to the block to be cut. Chicken smokes by the half and gets carved to order.

We cut every meat to order at the block, sliced or pulled, whichever that meat calls for, the same way Don did it in 1974. We hand-bread our fish, and we make the sides from scratch every morning, using the recipes Memer wrote down before that first opening.

It's a slow way to cook, and it's the way the Hallett family has always done it — customers who've been coming back for decades can taste the difference.

The first Soulman's regulars walked into Pleasant Grove late in 1974 and, in a lot of cases, never really left. Some of them still eat with us decades later, at tables not far from the ones their parents brought them to, now with grandkids of their own in the booth.

That kind of loyalty starts at the counter. It happens because the people working it learn your name and treat you like a regular, first visit or fiftieth.

None of that shows up on a menu board. It shows up every time a regular sits down and somebody already knows their order.

Soulman's is still a family business. Don's daughters, Amber and Austin, grew up around the pits and now help lead the company their father started, working alongside a leadership team that's spent careers behind these counters and at these pits.

The chain has grown well past that first Pleasant Grove store, spread today across the Dallas–Fort Worth metro and the surrounding North and East Texas communities, with more on the way. The recipes and the wood haven't changed. The hickory still burns close to the way it did on that first rainy day at the carpet shop, when Don was just cooking ribs for whoever showed up.