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Photo courtesy of SAW’s BBQ.
Mike Wilson, founder of SAW’s BBQ in Edgewood in 2009, died unexpectedly in September.
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Photo by Ingrid Schnader.
Customers walk into the Edgewood location of SAW’s BBQ on Oct. 5. The Edgewood storefront is the original SAW’s BBQ location.
Mike Wilson was more than the founder of the legendary SAW’s BBQ restaurant: he was the type of guy who could get along with anyone.
Wilson, who was a longtime Edgewood resident and who recently moved to the Hollywood neighborhood, died unexpectedly in early September. He started SAW’s BBQ in Edgewood in 2009 and spent the past decade building the brand into what Men’s Journal called one of the 25 best barbecue restaurants in the country.
Brandon Cain, who is executive chef of SAW’s Soul Kitchen, said Wilson told him he bought the Edgewood restaurant after Broadway BBQ announced it would go out of business. Wilson took two weeks off his job at a cooking magazine to open his new restaurant.
“From the stories he told me, he never went back to the magazine after his two weeks of vacation was over with,” Cain said, laughing. “Then he was doing it every day.”
Wilson named the restaurant SAW’s BBQ after his high school nickname, which stood for Sorry A** Wilson. He worked exclusively at the Edgewood restaurant for about three years before inviting Cain on one of his business ventures.
Cain was getting ready to leave Birmingham to move to Nashville. It was 2011, and Cain thought he needed to go to a bigger city — this was before the Birmingham food scene exploded. He was getting together his final arrangements to leave when he got a call from Wilson “out of the blue.”
“Heard you’re trying to leave Birmingham,” Wilson told Cain that day.
“Yeah man, it’s just not a good time to be here right now.”
“Well, we need to talk.”
They met up at Avondale Brewery, which is right next door to what is now SAW’s Soul Kitchen. They had a beer together, and Wilson walked Cain over to the Quick & Split Cafe building, which was a soul food restaurant at the time. Wilson told Cain he was thinking about getting the building.
“It’s going to be SAW’s BBQ, but I want you to evolve it and turn it into more than just barbecue,” Wilson told Cain that day. Cain had been a chef de cuisine at Ocean and would be able to help come up with craveable menu items. Cain said he wasn’t a barbecue kind of guy. He told Wilson he would need a couple of weeks to think about it.
Wilson said, “No, you can’t have a couple of weeks, but you can have ‘til the end of that beer.”
Cain laughed, chugged the beer and said, “Let’s do it.”
They didn’t have any money, and they went to the site with shovels after work to do the demolition themselves. They opened in March 2012. Within 15 minutes of opening, Cain said the whole world showed up, and they’ve been busy ever since.
“We had no clue what we were creating,” Cain said. “We were just hoping that we could make the bills here. We were talking like, ‘If we can at least make $600 a day, we can pay our staff, pay ourselves, and we’ll be fine.’”
This memory of how they started is one of Cain’s most unforgettable with Wilson. But many of their best moments were just hanging out as friends.
“A lot of my great memories with him are in the car talking about the next thing, or going to pick up signs at an antique store because they had some cool stuff we could put up on the walls,” Cain said. “We just got along. We were partners and friends for 10 years, and it felt like we had known each other our whole lives.”
Taylor Hicks, a singer from Birmingham who won the fifth season of American Idol, has been business partners with Wilson since SAW’s Juke Joint opened in Crestline. He said he and Wilson connected over their affection for the same music and their love for Southern cooking.
“You could talk to him about anything,” Hicks said. “He was very welcoming as a person and a sweetheart of a guy.”
They would listen to live music together, and Wilson would go to Hicks’ live shows. Hicks said he has always been proud of Wilson’s product.
“I always have looked at SAW’s BBQ as a hit song,” Hicks said. “His sauce is like what the Heart of Dixie tastes like. It’s got all of the flavors of the South, and they come together right in the Heart of Dixie.”
Wilson had a calling, Hicks said. Together they shared an artistic common thread and were able to learn from each other.
“It’s really a blessing to learn from people who have callings,” Hicks said. “He taught me dedication and staying true to your craft. There are a lot of parallels between music and barbecue that I’ve been able to draw from being around his cooking.”
Cain said he will always remember Wilson as his buddy and he misses him every day. It has been difficult for him to talk about it, he said.
“I remember his smile,” Cain said. “I remember his jokes. He was like a brother. You have so many memories when you have a brother like that. He was a one-of-a-kind human being.”
SAW’s BBQ isn’t going anywhere, and the quality won’t change, Cain said. They have systems already in place to continue what they’re doing and keep getting better, he said.
“I know very well what Mike wanted us to be and continue to grow into, and I just hope that we’ll get bigger and better as we keep going and keep his legacy alive.”
Hicks agreed that Wilson’s legacy will live on in the barbecue, he said.
“Every time you bite into a rib, you feel like he’s standing behind you with a hand towel, waiting on you to smile, which you probably will do when you eat barbecue from him,” Hicks said. “His legacy is the recipes, the people who work for him, the people who are in the trenches with his recipes. And those are the people who carry the torch.”
