The Baker’s Corner Gluten-Free Cafe & Coffeehouse in Hernando, Mississippi, is a transformer. Not the humanoid robot type that changes into different objects, but a restaurant that changes its identity on weekend nights.
Beginning at 5 p.m. on Fridays and Saturdays, The Baker’s Corner at 39 West Commerce Street becomes “The Corner Smokehouse.” The breakfast and lunch menu converts to a dinner menu and owner Leslie King and her husband Charles begin serving gluten-free barbecue and all the fixings.
As the sign reads, “Real BBQ, Real Flavor — Bet Your Tootin’ There Ain’t No Gluten.”
“Well, earlier this year we had talked about trying to do something different at nighttime because people don’t necessarily want coffee late night or lunch or breakfast menus at night,” Charles says.
They tossed around ideas and came up with gluten-free barbecue. “We just figured barbecue was a good fit. There’s not another barbecue restaurant in Hernando.”
They already had most of the ingredients they needed on hand except the meat and proteins.
“We did have to spend some money on new equipment,” he says. “A commercial smoker to do the meats was one. And then we got a rapid-cook oven so we could heat up entrees and stuff like that. We prepare entrees to order instead of having them pre-made.”
“Meat is naturally gluten-free,” Leslie says. But she had to use gluten-free ingredients “to make the barbecue sauces, rubs, and marinades.
“I had to make sure the ingredients are gluten-free. A lot are made in factories where they come in contact with wheat or they use some kind of wheat starch.”
She modified her bun recipes to be gluten-free. “I already had a bun that we were using, but it was not soft like you would think of a hamburger bun. I had to modify my bun recipe to make it a softer bun, so it was more like a regular bun. It’s basically the same ingredients. Just the proportions of the five different flours that I use. Those had to be changed. And the baking time and temperature.”
Leslie can eat regular barbecue. “I can eat the meat,” she says. “But I don’t have celiac. I’m just intolerant. So I can eat a lot of things that a lot of my customers cannot.”
Coleman’s Bar-B-Que, Hernando’s longtime barbecue restaurant on Commerce Street, closed during the Covid pandemic, Charles says. And the building was demolished.
They began spreading the word about their upcoming gluten-free barbecue a few months ago. “We started telling some of our regulars,” Leslie says. “They were excited. Then we decided on an opening date. I think we put it out on Facebook last week. And it was overwhelming. People are really excited to have a barbecue restaurant back in town. Our gluten-free customers are really excited. They don’t really eat barbecue anywhere else.”
As far as they know and researched, they’re the “only dedicated gluten-free restaurant in the whole Mid-South.”
“One of the most surprising and great responses we had was the people who do not have to be gluten-free who bragged about how good the bun was. The most common word was ‘amazing.’”
The menu features pulled pork and chicken, barbecued bologna, and barbecued pork and chicken nachos and salads.
Ribs aren’t on the menu. “Not yet,” Charles says. “We just wanted to get the work flow down in the kitchen and get the servers well adjusted. Keep the menu simple.”
The Corner Smokehouse also includes sides and desserts that aren’t available at The Baker’s Corner.
Charles is in charge of barbecuing. “I had a great mentor teach me how to barbecue. He was probably one of the best known barbecuers in Memphis — John Willingham.”
The late restaurant owner was synonymous with barbecue. “At that time John had won probably every major barbecue championship in America. And, I mean, he was on national TV.”
Since they were friends, Charles kept after him to show him his barbecuing techniques.
This “went on for a year,” Charles says. Finally, one day he asked him and Willingham said, “Be at my house Saturday at 6 in the morning.”
Charles spent several weekends that summer at Willingham’s house learning to make different rubs and how to barbecue chicken, brisket, and “a lot odd things, too. We did shrimp, salmon. We made some bread on the grill one time. John was a very, very interesting character. He was always fun to be around.”
Willingham always had “some interesting and wild” stories. “He could tell a story without bragging.”
Charles also discovered Willingham owned a lot of patents on his inventions, including some type of part “used on a lot of planes.”
He was also the creator of the W’ham Turbo Cooker, “an offset smoker that would keep the heat evenly distributed.”
Charles was on a barbecue team, which participated in numerous regional competitions, including Memphis in May World Championship Barbecue Cooking Contest.
Charles’ team went by various names, including “Shakin’ and Bakin’” and “We Don’t Know What We’re Doing.” “We would just make up a name every time we entered the competition.”
He stopped competing around the late ’90s. “It just got too expensive. We were older.”
Charles plans to include more barbecue items at The Corner Smokehouse. “Ribs will probably get added to the menu. I’ve got a shrimp recipe.”
He’d also like to do a barbecued shrimp dish he loved at the old Gridley’s Bar-B-Q in Memphis. “I would like to figure out how to replicate that.”