The Big Apple Inn

On Farish Street in Jackson, Mississippi, in a small building that has been a grocery, a barber shop and a gathering place, the same family has been selling the same three sandwiches since 1939. The Big Apple Inn is one of the oldest continuously Black-owned businesses in the state, and its history runs straight through the civil rights movement: Medgar Evers ate here, movement organisers met here, and the building is a landmark of the Farish Street district that was once the heart of Black Jackson. Anthony Bourdain came for Parts Unknown because he understood that a sandwich can carry a hundred years of a city inside it.

The sandwiches are the point, and the first one is the pig ear. Slow-cooked until soft, chopped and piled into a soft roll with a fiery house sauce and a spoonful of slaw, it is a poor man's classic turned into something you will think about for years — chewy, rich, and far better than its reputation suggests. The second is the smoked sausage, split and griddled, dressed the same way. The third, and the one to order if you are unsure, is the tamale, a Mississippi Delta tradition adopted from the Mexican workers who came through the region, wrapped in paper and eaten with the sauce.

Come for lunch, order all three on one visit, and eat at the counter. Nothing here is expensive and nothing here is fancy, and that is precisely the inheritance: a working family, a working street, and food that has not changed because it did not need to.

Bourdain's Mississippi hour was one of the show's most serious, and the Big Apple Inn is why: a place where the food is inseparable from the people who have eaten it, and where a pig ear sandwich can tell you more about American history than most books.