A homecoming for Rodman’s Bar-B-Que: The 92-year-old restaurant will get a new lease on life

This summer, a very old name will hang in a very new location: Rodman’s Bar-B-Que has found a new home.

For as long as anyone alive can remember, the Rodman name has been synonymous with barbecue in Hampton Roads, ever since Howard Rodman and then his son Roy started selling their vinegar-tanged pork to Portsmouth churches around 1929.

From its original Portsmouth location to where it stood for 50 years — a voluminous and bare-bones Suffolk barn on the Rodman family plot along Shoulders Hill Road — the pulled pork and fried chicken at Rodman’s Bar-B-Que have been woven into the fabric of Tidewater living.

The Jaycees ate that pork in the ’40s. The Lee Ward Civic League met there in the ’50s. For decades, Roy’s son, Juddy, served a free barbecue luncheon to sports clubs in Norfolk.

The Christian Broadcasting Network once treated its TV audiences to a meal of Rodman’s oak-and-hickory-smoked pork every single day, said co-owner Barry Saunders. Saunders started his first part-time job there when he was 15 and has been working full time for 35 years.

“Everybody worked at Rodman’s,” he said. “You know, you went to school and then you got a degree at Rodman’s before you did anything. We had a blast. It was fun. It’s as hard as work can be, but we had fun doing it.”

For generations, it has endured. And for decades, Saunders said Juddy turned down offers to buy the family’s building and land. For those same decades, they heard rumors the city of Suffolk wanted to widen the road the old barn sat on.

This year, those rumors came true. Saunders saw it coming when he sat in on a city meeting a couple of years back and saw the plot where the barn stood marked with little red dots: “To be demolished.”

The city let them hang on for some extra time during the pandemic, he said. But this spring, the iconic red and white barn of Rodman’s Bar-B-Que finally had to be demolished, a victim of progress and a new glut of cars.

“That was a sad sight,” Saunders said. “I didn’t like to be around there when they tore that thing down. … I have fed my family out there for Thanksgiving in that room for probably the last 10 to 12 years.”

Saunders closed down the 92-year-old barbecue spot in February. But he vowed to find a new home for the simple “Suffolk-style” family barbecue recipes of the Rodman family — along with long-brined and always fresh-made fried chicken and a recipe for chicken and dumplings that came from Saunders’ mother.

He spent months searching for a place. And finally, at the end of May, he signed a lease. The new Rodman’s will be at the edge of Churchland in Chesapeake, at 3124 Western Branch Blvd. in Poplar Hill Plaza. Rodman’s will be in a space once home to Fortune House Chinese Restaurant.

“I could throw a baseball and hit the Portsmouth line, and that’s where it all started,” Saunders said. “I’ve got a lot of people that live in Portsmouth. I didn’t want to leave Suffolk, but this is kind of in the middle.”

But even in Chesapeake, it’ll be a homecoming: It’s the neighborhood where Saunders grew up. In fact, it’s the same parking lot where he and the other Churchland High School students used to hang out.

“I could show you a picture if I could find it,” Saunders said, laughing. “We were the old guys of our senior class, and back then you could buy beer at 18. We’re standing in front of the ‘No Loitering’ sign with a Budweiser. They took that picture and put it in the yearbook. I thought my mom and dad were gonna kill me.”

The history is important to Saunders, and so is the legacy; Juddy Rodman died in 2012, at nearly 90 years old.

“Juddy Rodman is kind of a second dad to me,” Saunders said. “You say the name of Roy Rodman or Juddy Rodman in these parts, I don’t know if you could ever find someone with a bad word to say about them. Maybe they gave away too much food over the years, which is its own problem.”

Even as he moves into a new space and a new chapter, Saunders plans to keep the spirit of the old place alive with rustic and red-painted decor, and a lot of the same stuff hung up on the old walls — including pictures of the barbecue spot’s various incarnations.

Saunders still remembers his first real day of work — when Juddy called him to come back full time, years after he’d worked catering events in high school. His very first pig cook would be two whole hogs for an LPGA tournament at the Greenbrier Country Club.

”We had a cooker where you had to feed the fire all night long,” he said. “We put two pigs on at 6 o’clock at night and then you spent the night out there.”

At that tournament, Saunders says he was approached by a TV personality who’s since become another of Hampton Roads’ most familiar fixtures — WAVY sports broadcaster Bruce Rader.

“Bruce Rader came up to me and said, ‘Well, how are things?’” Saunders said. “And I didn’t really know him. I said, ‘You know Bruce, I hate to admit it — and I hope this doesn’t get out too far — but I slept with two pigs last night.’ And he ran with it.”

In some ways, the Chesapeake restaurant will be a return to form for Rodman’s. In the middle of the last century, Rodman’s used to be a proper “barbecue café,” the sort of place where people could meet for a communal meal.

But for most of the past 50 years, they’d largely just been doing catering — while selling some meat by the pound here and there out of that hulking barn on Shoulders Hill Road.

“For 35 years, you wouldn’t have two people come in during the day,” Saunders said. “But as time went on and Juddy got in bad health, it was sort of thrown in my lap. And I said, ‘Let’s heat up some barbecue and see if we could sell a sandwich.’ ”

Slowly, people started figuring out they could stop in at the barn for some freshly fried chicken, made with a simple salt-and-pepper recipe. They came in for barbecue sandwiches, and beans, maybe some chicken and dumplings to heat up at home.

“And thank God we did that, because then when the virus came, we could survive,” Saunders said. Event catering ground to a halt and Rodman’s was able to keep the lights on by sending family meals out the door.

In the Chesapeake location, they don’t plan to do table service or anything fancy. But they’ll have a counter, and tables where you can sit, and a more consistent menu of sides. They’ll bring back Rodman’s redskin peanuts. And maybe someday they’ll sell the Budweiser that Saunders used to drink in that parking lot — though he isn’t quite sure he wants people to park for hours at his tables with drinks.

“I don’t know if I want people in here watching the ballgame and sitting all day long,” he said.

After all, he’ll have plenty of customers and he needs to make room for them. When he announced on social media that Rodman’s planned to reopen, Saunders said, the Facebook post was seen by 47,000 people and shared hundreds of times. The messages poured in from all over.

“I get calls and texts every day. ‘How close are you? What are we going to do? Where am I gonna get my peanuts?’ ” he said. “We’ve got a very big name for a very small business because we’ve been around so long.”

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In part, this may come from a longing for a past that’s suddenly disappearing. The past two years have seen some of the oldest restaurants in the area close for good, so fast you could be forgiven for thinking homestyle had gone out of style.

Moseberth’s Fried Chicken and Jones’ Restaurant in Portsmouth, and Bunny’s in Suffolk — each one many decades old — have all tumbled into history over the past two years.

“We don’t have Jones’ Barbecue anymore. We don’t have Bunny’s,” Saunders said. “There’s not a down-home, what-we-do kind of thing around anymore. And even the young people kind of want that again.”

Saunders said he’ll do everything he can to make sure he’s ready for his customers, once they get themselves back open.

“One guy said, ‘I hope your staff is ready for one hell of a grand opening!’” Saunders said. “So we might just have to ease into this.”

Rodman’s Bar-B-Que plans to reopen in late summer at 3124 Western Branch Blvd., Chesapeake. Follow their progress at bit.ly/Rodmansbbq.

Matthew Korfhage, 757-446-2318, matthew.korfhage@pilotonline.com