Bringing Barbecue to the Streets

Smyrna residents don’t have to go to Atlanta for a world-class meal. They can find it right on the corner of Atlanta Road and Church Street or while they’re picking up nails at .

Every Friday, Joey Bridgers, owner of Golden Maple Food, pulls his pick-up truck into the Wells Fargo parking lot on Atlanta Road and sells slow-cooked barbecue out of his portable smoker. Barbecue enthusiasts can enjoy brisket, ribs, chicken and baked beans. There’s even macaroni and cheese, but only if they get there before it sells out.

Bridgers is a classically trained chef and until last fall he’d always worked in restaurants.

“I’ve cooked professionally since the early-90s,” he said. “I learned on the job. I started peeling potatoes and pretty much the only jobs I’ve ever had have been restaurant stuff. It’s been my whole life pretty much.”

For Bridgers, cooking is more than just a job. It’s also a passion. He loves the food of his Southern heritage and began experimenting with Sothern cuisine outside the restaurant. 

“Being a Southerner, slow-cooked stuff, Southern flavors and all, I really like it,” he said. “So when I wasn’t cooking for a real job, I was building cookers and mess like that in the backyard and making food like this in the backyard.”

In the fall of 2010 Bridgers quit his job as chef du cuisine at Babette’s Café to combine his career and his hobby full-time, a combination he calls Golden Maple Food.

“I quit the real job to do this full-time in September, but I had been doing this quite a bit before that,” he said. “But I just started getting too busy for both.”

Golden Maple Food provides more than barbecue. Bridgers also offers on-site cooking, catering, custom menu creation and personal chef services.

Bridgers has earned a few die-hard fans.

“The guy that was here when you guys drove up, he comes every weekend regardless, so I’m starting to have quite a few of those folks,” he said. “And that’s cool.”

Currently Bridgers can be found at the Wells Fargo parking lot on Fridays and at Vickery Do It Best Hardware on Saturdays. He eventually hopes to set up more food trucks throughout Smyrna.

 “I want to have more food trucks in parks and stuff up here,” he said. “We’re sort of working on that. It takes a while to get approved, but Smyrna is open to it. The mayor has been extremely supportive and so have small businesses up here. That’s one reason I stay up here, kind of out of loyalty to them and vice versa.”