# How the Bay Area’s barbecue royalty celebrates a cookout > Source: > Published: 2026-06-21 11:45:42+00:00 **Getting your** [Trinity Audio](//trinityaudio.ai)player ready...Growing up in the barbecue business, Dorcia White was rarely invited to cookouts. Her friends figured she was tired of being around pitmasters cooking brisket and ribs as the daughter of the legendary barbecue family Everett and Jones. But at Roberts Park in the Oakland Hills, labor gave way to leisurely afternoons around the baseball diamond as the sprawling family let White enjoy the ultimate luxury: the freedom of being a kid without a job to do. Barbecue courses through veins of the Everett family in Oakland, emulsifying a history of joy and strife that walked to school on bare feet in Alabama to opening their first shop along what is now International Boulevard in East Oakland and through the election of Barack Obama, whereupon Everett & Jones Barbeque held a cookout to celebrate the America’s first Black president. For the purveyors of the Bay Area chain Everett & Jones Barbeque, a cookout isn’t just a celebration, it’s the mode of operation. White, owner of the restaurant’s downtown Oakland location, described how her grandmother, Dorothy Turner Everett, imprinted the values of “taking care of family, keeping tradition, and helping community” in each successive generation. It’s the reason why – as many of the region’s barbecue family businesses have shuttered or relocated – Everett & Jones has remained a cultural fixture. “I started working for my family at 14. I remember being at Skyline High School and I’m sitting in class, and someone said, ‘I smell barbecue,’” White said. “I knew it was me, but I wasn’t going to say. I knew I had barbecue in my pores.” Before Everett & Jones became the standard for Bay Area barbecue, they were just a family in Mississippi, near the Alabama border. Today, that region is known for its vinegar-based sauces, akin to styles in North Carolina and its tomato-based sauces influenced by the proximity to Tennessee, according to the [Encyclopedia of Alabama](https://encyclopediaofalabama.org/article/barbecue-alabama-style/). A family photo, circa 1948-1949, hangs in each Everett & Jones establishment, with the Everett family posing outside a school house in Westpoint, Alabama – the boys wearing overalls, the girls wearing white dresses and none wearing shoes. Everett, who would become the family’s matriarch, was about 16 years old at the time. “They moved their family here out West from the South because my grandfather was working on the railroad,” White said about her family’s migration in 1952. “They had nine children – eight girls and one boy at the time.” The plentiful jobs found at Oakland’s shipyards and maritime industries attracted tens of thousands of Black families from the South in the post-World War II boom years as part of the “[Great Migration](https://oaklandlibrary.org/content/black-migrations/)” of African Americans from the Jim Crow South. “Probably never before in the history of the United States has there been an internal population movement of such magnitude as in the past seven eventful years,” the U.S. Census Bureau wrote in 1948. When those families opened barbecue joints in the 1960s, their regional recipes stayed, whether it was Creole-spices of Jenkins’ Original BBQ or the brown sugar sweetness of Kansas City at KC BBQ. [Both have shuttered](https://www.sfchronicle.com/food/restaurants/article/kcs-bbq-berkeley-closed-17882282.php) since 2023. “It must have been very popular because Jenkins barbecue was an African-American barbecue as well as Flint’s Barbecue was an African-American barbecue,” White said. The ties between Oakland’s Southern transplants and barbecue was reinforced when White was cleaning the home of a great aunt who had just passed away. “Her and her sisters, a lot of them worked at other barbecues,” White said. “My grandmother (Dorothy) actually worked at Jenkins and she also worked at Flint’s Barbecue.” When Everett and her husband split, she was left to raise nine children. Using her knowledge from the local barbecue industry, she secured a [$700 loan from a friend](https://everettandjones.com/blogs/news/the-everett-and-jones-barbeque-story) and opened Everett & Jones Barbeque in 1973. “It was rooted in a woman just really wanting to take care of her children,” White said. “That’s how Everett & Jones started.” The main draw was Everett’s Special ‘Que Sauce, a tangy and savory tomato-based barbecue concoction influenced by Everett’s time working in barbecue joints in Oakland – a truly original Bay Area original sauce. However, it’s not just about the sauce. Everett & Jones’ brisket cooks for 15 to 17 hours, ribs for 5 to 7 hours, and chicken less than that, White said. Inside the cooker, meats rotate on an automated rotisserie grille smoked over oak wood – the same wood that Everett used when she opened her first shop on International Boulevard in Oakland, White said. By the time the brisket is served, the beef is held together by hopes, dreams and barbecue sauce. “It’s not a fast process,” White said. “Like a really good relationship takes time. And I think if you are going into it wanting anything fast, more than likely it’s not gonna be very good. Slow, steady, that makes good barbecue.” At the chain’s Broadway location, inside a room identified by the family as its “juke joint” which features recycled doors and window frames of Victorian homes from West Oakland estate sales, portraits appear along the wall like a who’s who of Bay Area celebrities – including Dorothy King, the family’s matriarch who passed away in 2021. Golden State Warriors Steph Curry and Kevin Durant sheepishly smile in an gray-tinted, early iPhone photo with King. Concert posters from the restaurant’s “Barbecue, Beer and Blues” festival tacked on the wall show artists like Little Milton in 1999 and Bobby Womack in 2002. Even the Raiders have a dedicated wall celebrating the franchise’s golden era helmed by Hall of Fame Coach John Madden and Super Bowl MVP Marcus Allen. “You could imagine how busy we were before any of those games,” White said. Everyone seems to know Everett & Jones. Their most memorable cookout was Nov. 4, 2008 – election night in America. Throughout the campaign season leading up to that night, White said, Everett & Jones had turned its restaurant into an organizing hub for the Obama campaign in the East Bay, hosting the local troupe of Young Democrats, phone banking operations, and debate watch parties to watch the junior senator from Chicago describe his vision for a multi-cultural nation. On the night of the election, festive Obama supporters were jam-packed into Everett & Jones’ “juke joint” and an adjoining room called Q’s Lounge. When networks announced Obama as the projected winner, the celebration spilled into the streets of Jack London Square and downtown Oakland, igniting a spontaneous block party celebrated under the presence of news and police helicopters flying overhead. White, herself, observed the scene from her home in West Oakland as she took care of her newborn son. Now in the fourth generation serving up ‘Que in the Bay Area, White’s son began working at Everett & Jones, too – a rarity in 2026 as many of the region’s historic barbecue joints have watched their family businesses close their doors. Chinise Braviel, the manager at the chain’s Laurel District location in Oakland, said there was no one cause to the demise of these families. The pandemic, in combination with soaring beef prices, had decimated barbecue joints that once peppered the East Bay. “I remember going to Flint’s, going to Kinder’s, going to KC BBQ,” Braviel said. “Now, we’re like the ‘Last of the Mohicans.’” While the Raiders and Athletics have taken their operations elsewhere and gentrifying neighborhoods usher in generational change, the soul of Oakland’s barbecue has been unwavering because it was never built on profit margins. But people keep coming back to Everett & Jones. “We’ve been here a long time, and we didn’t get here by imaginary things,” White said. “It’s real, built on love, soul, community, and that you can’t bottle that up and make that into a social media post.”