by Stacey Osbeck, Staff Writer

If you want to understand the history and cultural significance of barbecue, tune in to the Cooking Channel. If you want to know about a restaurant where the servers sometimes sit down and eat with you or if a group comes with a bad attitude the owner will personally come out and deliver a good whooping, check out directors Jeff Dailey’s and Jack Lofton’s feature documentary The ‘Vous. 

Hitting its 70 year milestone, the owners and workers at this Memphis barbecue institution are known as a tight knit bunch. That feeling of family often spills over to the clientele, leaving many with the sense of a homecoming when they return. But times are getting tough for family-run restaurants and the aging waitstaff that helped create an experience like no other is slowly retiring. During this period of transition, the filmmakers give an inside look at The Rendezvous, or as the locals call it, The 'Vous.

Stacey Osbeck: Food is only touched on briefly and this is a movie about a restaurant. Why is that?

Jack Lofton: Because institutions are built by people. And the heart of an institution, especially this one, comes from the founder, the family, the waiters.  Especially in the barbecue culture, it’s always about who’s best. Who’s got the best ribs and who’s got the best this. Well, they have the best people.  

Jeff Dailey: Jack and I had gone independently to The Rendezvous over the years as younger people growing up, in college. It’s always been an experience for me to go with family or with friends. And we just went into this knowing that it was a special place and that’s really the foundation for how we both wanted to build this documentary, to show the humanity in the place.

Jack Lofton: You have a place where presidents, unprompted, mention the names of the waiters.  

SO: That was actually my next question. Just how all the celebrities and even presidents who frequent it know the waitstaff?

JL: When Percy was retiring, he was getting texts from Dale Earnhardt, Peyton Manning, John Daily, you know everybody you can imagine and getting gifts sent to him. I mean where does that happen?  

SO: They go to New York City or Europe and people recognize them on the street and want to strike up a conversation. Was that surprising to you?

JD: When you have Big Jack and Percy being called out in Italy, like the odds of them being in Italy and meeting people that just happened to have gone there, I think it shows the breadth of their work and the people that they meet in their lives doing their job.

JL: And the impression that they’ve made on the customers.

SO: Some documentaries on famous restaurants highlight this is a glamorous place in this glamorous time, like the Rat Pack would visit here. This seems not glamorous, but accessible to everyone.

JD: We spent time with these people and maybe that’s what separates it. Often times in modern documentaries there’s a kind of manufacturing process, an assembly line, that happens. And you get the story but maybe you don’t get all the way to the root. I think we did a good job of just being there. Whether with Big Bobby at his house and getting his sentiments of moving on and wanting to hang on as long as he could. Rob Cox coming up and just being at the restaurant with him. I think part of the secret for it is we were just there.  

SO: When was the bulk of it shot?

JL: From about 2017 to about 2020. Then we went into postproduction for almost two years. Which sounds like a long time, but we had 100 terabytes of footage. Which is a lot of footage.

SO: What would that translate to for the average Joe? 400 hours?

JD: That’s probably a decent estimate

JL: It’s about a month of watching it 12 hours a day. So yeah about 400 hours of footage.  

SO: Percy wins the waiter of the year award for Tennessee. A couple things clicked into place for me then. The third generation owner, Anna, calls him like some pleasant messenger. There wasn’t an excited ‘everyone knows you deserve this’, like the old guard would have done. Then there’s the busboy who’s screwing around and giving out free tacos in the back alley. So maybe on both ends, the people of the new establishment are not bringing what they should to build that fierce loyalty. Perhaps that’s why things are not the way they were?  

JD: I just think it’s different. It’s not that one is right and one is wrong. Percy opened his home, opened his heart, opened up all his stories. We have so much of Percy. And really many of the others as well, but he was emblematic of the loss that’s happening before us. And Anna, she talks about these guys, Percy and Bobby, being like a grandfather or her uncle and growing up with them. There're the struggles of the owner of the restaurant John and his wanting to hang on. I mean, we approached that directly in the film. I think the restaurant is safe. I think it is a question that’s posed in the film which is what happens after all these old timers are gone. Anna is going to take the reins, she already has, and is doing a good job so we believe that The Rendezvous' gonna be around for another 70.

JL: 100 years.  It’s not going away.