“The difference between stepping stones and stumbling blocks is how you use them,” Mark White

This is more than a story about Moe’s Original BBQ. It’s a story about perseverance, leadership, music, finding your calling, faith, survival, being knocked down repeatedly, getting back up, and a big dream finally coming to fruition. Attitude and reflection are also a big part of this story.

There is wisdom in this story—and inspiration, too. This was not what I expected when I sat down with Mark White at his new Moe’s Original BBQ “complex” in Daphne. It has been a long time in the making, and we went back in time when Mark was a kid in Birmingham, Alabama, to see the road he’s traveled.

Full disclosure, I met Mark through my son, Bryan, who owned two Moe’s Original BBQ restaurants in New Orleans. We had only crossed paths briefly, but I felt I knew him before I met him. Now Bryan works with several Moe’s BBQ franchisees, managing their books. He adores Mark, so I was excited to sit down with him a few weeks ago.

The first time I met Mark, I was picking up food from Moe’s in Daphne just as Bryan was getting started by opening a Moe’s Original BBQ in New Orleans. “He’s married to it now,” Mark told me. “It takes a lot of work to run a restaurant business. The rewards come after putting in the time. There’s no other way around it. You have to be present.” He mentions the Paul “Bear” Bryant quote hanging in the new Daphne Store: 

“If you believe in yourself, have dedication and pride, and never quit, you’ll be a winner. The price of victory is high, but so are the rewards.”

The new Moe’s Original BBQ in Daphne is about 15,000 square feet, and Mark tells me it incorporates everything he’s always wanted in a restaurant. Drawing on experience from his five locations, including Orange Beach, Foley, Daphne, Downtown Mobile, and the Airport Boulevard at University Boulevard store in West Mobile, he has it all in the new location, which sits next door to the original Moe’s on Bayfront Park Drive. 

“After the Easter Egg Hunt that we hosted here on the Saturday before Easter, we will shut down the old place, clean all the equipment, and begin moving next door,” He tells me. the goal was to open by the end of the week on April 25 if all goes well. “It will be a soft opening at first, so not a lot of fanfare until we get on solid footing,” he says. You can see the years of experience and calm bubbling to the surface as we talk.

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Path to Success

How did this all begin?, I ask. Since childhood, the path was being laid, he says. He tells me about growing up in Birmingham, where he attended Briarwood Christian School, where his parents taught Sunday School. He was on the varsity baseball team at Briarwood in the 8th grade and played offensive and defensive line in football. “I ended up transferring to Hoover High School and continued to play sports.”

In 1995, when he was 15 years old, he went to a two-day Grateful Dead concert at the Birmingham Jefferson Civic Center. This started a music journey that embraced following Widespread Panic and the Allman Brothers concerts. He tells me he didn’t particularly like school. “I went to school to play sports.” 

Not quite in line with his parents’ thinking, he moved to Norman, Oklahoma, to live with his uncle in his sophomore year. There, he tells me he was exposed to horses, learned to bow hunt, and earned his spending money stringing barbed wire on fence posts. He played football and baseball in high school in Norman. “They made me a defensive back because of my size. There were about 10 guys who went to Division 1 college football teams.”

While he enjoyed his time in Oklahoma, especially spending time with his uncle, he was ready to move back to Birmingham to be with his friends. On his second day back at Hoover High, he says he was “tapped back in.” 

He tells me about a Hank Williams, Jr, and Lynyrd Skynyrd concert at Oak Mountain Amphitheater in Pelham, Alabama, that he attended soon after his return. As a huge fight broke out, it moved like a wave across the hillside seating area. The fight crowd came from behind, fell on him, and he found himself buried underneath people with his left leg bone sticking through the skin at a right angle. 

“It was the best of the ’good ole boys’ fight,” he says. “That set me back a while.” He spent four weeks in the hospital with four screws and a rod in his leg. His teachers would bring him his school work so he could keep up, and he was making As and Bs, but he later developed a staph infection that took several more weeks in the hospital. Because he missed so many days of school, they told him he would have to repeat the 11th grade. 

“I was devastated. I had to have emergency surgery because of the staff infection. They removed the rod and screws, and I was in a wheelchair. I convinced my parents to let me drop out of school. I promised I would earn my GED and go to college. I was in school for the sports anyway, but I didn’t want to repeat the 11th grade.” 

He earned his GED while living with his girlfriend’s family in Mountain Brook, and attended Jefferson State Community College for his Freshman year. He recovered well enough to play American Legion baseball. His girlfriend at the time was also a music buff and was accepted into Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina, so Mark followed her there. “I fell in love with the mountains. I spent a lot of time mountain biking and on the rivers.”

Living with his girlfriend’s family, he was the man of the house and did most of the grilling and cooking. He had his first job at Fuddruckers when he was 14 years old. He was in the dish pit (dishwasher), and after his first shift, they moved him to the kitchen. Likewise, he also worked at Armand’s Restaurant and Ralph and Kacoo’s. 

“My girlfriend's mother suggested I look into culinary school. I didn’t even know what that was. I found out you could make money being a chef. He applied for college grants and loans, saved his money, and paid his way through Johnson and Wales Culinary University (Now located in Charlotte), earning a degree in the College of Food Innovation & Technology in Charleston, South Carolina. 

Mark tells me he has always been a grinder. “I’m a two jobs at once kind of guy,” he says. “In Charleston, after culinary school, he worked at two highly-regarded restaurants that have been around a long time, Magnolia’s Uptown Down South, and Hank’s Seafood. “I worked three straight months without a day off. Not one.” One of his buddies moved to Vail, Colorado, and had an extra room, and suggested that Mark move there. 

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Colorado and Moe’s Original BBQ

“I chased Widespread concerts to Vail and worked two jobs when I landed. One at La Tour, an upscale French bistro, and the other at Gore Range Brewery (now closed) in Edwards, Colorado. About 15 or so people from Alabama worked at the Brewery, so I was comfortable with the language.” Then came another mishap. Mark broke his collarbone while snowboarding, which required three more surgeries with plates and screws.

Vail is where Mark met Mike Fernandez, Jeff Kennedy, and Ben Gilbert, who were all friends at the University of Alabama. After graduating, they moved to Vail to ski. Mike had learned to smoke meats working with Moses Day (Moe’s is named after him) at Indian Hills Country Club in Tuscaloosa. He had been tinkering with smoking BBQ Butts while working at the Train Station because the bar needed to offer food to secure a liquor license. When Moses passed away, Mike entered Johnson Wales Culinary University in Colorado. 

After earning his culinary degree, Mike stayed in Vail, cooking at restaurants. Ben Gilbert was cooking at the Grouse Mountain Grill in Beaver Creek. Jeff Kennedy fell in love with the service industry while working at the Coyote Cafe. Jeff, Mike, and Ben noticed Southern folks living in Vail didn’t have any Southern cuisine, so the three went to junkyards, collected parts, and built a smoker. They began hustling BBQ to job sites, and Moe’s Original BBQ was born. 

The next phase of Moe’s Original BBQ was a concession trailer operated near Vail on a corner in Edwards, Colorado. Mark, just 21 years old, began helping the three friends out. The next step was renting a kitchen in Minturn, Colorado, to expand their operations. Mark quit his job at the brewery and began working full-time at Moe’s.

“It was a logistical nightmare,” says Mark. “There were lots of moving parts, and we were running all over town. They quickly put me on the log fire smoker. I was the first guy they hired, and I never quit. The four of us knew everyone in Vail, met lots of musicians, and started opening other locations and doing a lot of catering.”

Mark says he had reached the top of the pay scale and began looking for another location to open a Moe’s in the mountains, one he would operate and have equity in.  When his dad passed away after a long illness, he decided to move back to Alabama to be closer to his family.

The next installment of Mark’s journey will appear next week. Mark White and the Story of Moe’s Original BBQ, Part II, picks up in South Alabama. As Robert Earl Keen’s popular song says, “The road goes on forever, but the party never ends.”