Like many Southerners, Andy Marshall grew up eating his fair share of fried bologna sandwiches for lunch. “I remember my dad scoring the edges so the bologna wouldn’t buckle as it cooked. He liked his with Miracle Whip and a summer tomato, I liked mine with mustard and pickles. It was a simple sandwich for simple days.”
So simple, in fact, that when Marshall started Puckett’s Restaurant in 1998 at a small community market southwest of Nashville, bologna sandwiches were one of the few things he could make reliably on the twenty-inch griddle behind the counter. But even before Puckett’s grew into the success story it is today, with nine locations in Tennessee and Alabama, the tinkering began. Marshall kept a smoker outside, so in went a whole, five-pound log of bologna coated in barbecue rub. And when smoke didn’t permeate the meat enough to suit, he scored the logs with end-to-end cuts. The inspiration for hefty slices also came from childhood. “My dad always called fried bologna a poor man’s steak.” Marshall says. “That’s why we cut ours thicker, like a steak sandwich kind of deal.”
Though Puckett’s now serves all manner of Southern fare from breakfast through dinner, the smoked bologna sandwich has remained popular, as Marshall was reminded when it was briefly dropped from the menu in 2022. “There was a lot of ‘Where’s my fried bologna sandwich?’ and ‘When’s it coming back?’” he recalls. “There was one guy who always ordered it with a fried egg on top, and he was probably the most vocal.”
What makes the sandwich so craveable? “People love to eat what they remember,” Marshall says. “There’s nothing really that exciting about a bologna sandwich until you see it on a menu—and then you know you want it.”
