The first time I heard, and I mean listened to, registered, and remembered the name Gifford’s Bacon was at the East Nashville Farmers Market on a sweltering day, the blacktop so hot the market had warned shoppers via Instagram to leave their dogs at home for fear of blistered paws.
I was in a shortish line waiting to buy two dozen eggs while sweating and silently cursing the man ahead of me who was deep in conversation with the vendor. He didn’t seem to be purchasing anything and wasn’t in a hurry. As he chatted, the now significant line of folks behind me roasted in direct sunlight. My lettuce was limp.
I hope I didn’t clear my throat or heave a dramatic sigh, but that’s likely what happened. Regardless, the man was finally moving along, and as I stepped up to the table to place my order, the vendor let me know that the man, pointing behind me, Nathan Gifford of Gifford’s Bacon, had paid for everyone behind him. He left the table empty-handed and waved, leaving a pile of cash on the table.
When I repeated this story to Gifford, he didn’t remember it. His reaction was “That’s cool” and “Aww,” as if he was hearing a sweet story about someone other than himself. The only thing I can take away from this interaction and memory blip is that Gifford lives life in such a way and, by proxy, conducts business where acts of uncommon kindness are common, unmemorable even.
Over the next hour, Gifford tells me he starts the day by asking, “What awesome thing can I do today?” Today’s awesome thing: he’s on Bacon Tour (which is precisely what it sounds like: Gifford takes his pork product on tour to meet with chefs in other cities for low-pressure sales meetings) in Atlanta’s Inman Park eating Lemon Pepper Wets (if you know you know, and Gifford knows). He says he might go for a swim after our interview.
Tomorrow’s awesome thing? He’ll cook breakfast for the Atlanta Braves. “Which is crazy,” he says. “I’m a Braves fan.”
Gifford connected to the Braves’ head chef on a previous Bacon Tour through his distributor. The chef liked the bacon, the players liked eating the bacon, and he was invited to cook breakfast — the dominoes falling just as they should when the product to which your last name is attached speaks for itself in quality.
This series of events with the Braves, the flow and the ease, is a mirror for much of Gifford’s life today. A good man with a good product, to whom good things gratefully flow.
He’s quick to credit his wife of 20 years, Nicole, for her hand in everything. “Without her, there is no Gifford’s bacon.” He’s also quick to acknowledge it hasn’t always been this way, hence the gratitude.
He’s 13 years sober this year — the same number of years Gifford’s Bacon has been open for business. “That is the crazy thing to me; my life was in such turmoil. It was chaotic. When I got the chance to be a functioning member of society, the bacon took off.”
Having grown up under the thumb of poverty in Guthrie, Oklahoma (“A crazy place, I grew up next to the Flaming Lips. It’s weird, a lot of tornados”), Gifford can point to the exact moment, at age 7, when his life’s course started to map itself. He walked into his school’s cafeteria for the complimentary breakfast program one cold winter morning and “saw all the sausage and ham and bacon and eggs, mountains of pancakes and syrup, and it was warm in there. And it just hit me: It was the first time I felt safe. I never
looked back.”
He tells this story in response to the question, “Why bacon?” In what could have been, and maybe should have been, a heavy moment in our conversation, he quips that he told this same story to a friend, the friend responding, “So you wanted to be a lunch lady.”
Still, the weight of what he shares isn’t lost: Gifford’s entire career, his bacon empire, exists to recreate for others the feeling of safety and warmth he first experienced at age 7. Or, as he says, “I’m sitting in the feeling of not being in that place anymore.”
“So I grew up in rural Oklahoma, and I was expected to go nowhere, and I was exceeding everyone’s expectations of that,” he shrugs of childhood. “When you grow up in that world and want to be in a restaurant, you’re gonna work at a barbeque restaurant whether you like it or not. Because that’s what they have there. So I was around smokers and pigs at an early age.”
A few years later, his family moved to Texas, a place he would return to later in life. “My mom had to sign a waiver for my first kitchen job when I was 14,” Gifford remembers. “I got to hang out with my friends and drink, and we got paid.”
He dropped out of high school at 16, bought a van, and lit out for San Francisco, finding work in the Tenderloin district, to which he adds, “I don’t recommend doing that; it was extraordinarily dangerous.”
More traveling and cooking ensued, and upon returning to Texas, the Hill Country outside of Austin, to be specific, he became friendly with some “real butchers who took pity on me; they showed me the ropes.” This under-the-wing instruction and Gifford’s practice of the craft naturally led to sausage making.
A few high-profile connections in Austin opened the door for him to make charcuterie for events at the Alumni Center at the University of Texas, which led to cooking at the History Museum, which then led to cooking for Senators and Governors, Lady Bird Johnson’s funeral reception, and a President’s wife. The yeses were compounding, and Gifford seized upon the opportunities to advance.
From cooking and barbequing to butchering to sausage making to salami to bacon, it’s easy to see Gifford’s natural curiosity bloom when he recounts for me his journey from then to now, the now of course being Gifford’s Bacon, the capitalization of the B proof of his success.
“I started in Oklahoma, left, and traveled around the country learning the craft of cooking. I wound up in Austin and got better at everything,” he says.
Gifford’s ever-expanding talents landed him a job working for superstar chef Sean Brock at his then-new Nashville location of Husk. He and Nicole toyed with the idea of moving to Nashville to be closer to his grandmother in Kentucky, and the Husk job offer put a plan in motion. “And when working at Husk, you either get really good really quick, or you exit.” Spoiler: He got really good.
While working as a butcher at Husk, Kristin Beringson, a chef friend, asked for a pound of bacon for a pop-up. “She said, ‘This is pretty good; you should keep making it.’ At this point, I was 27 years into a career — not 27 years old, but 27 years into cooking — and had a great job. I thought I’d finish my career with Sean, but I made one pound of bacon, and my whole life changed,” Gifford says of the experience.
At the advice of another chef friend, he bought a little smoker. It held four bellies, which is about ten pounds of pork.
“I gave bacon to friends and started getting excellent feedback,” he says. “We started in our garage in Madison, slicing each piece of bacon by hand, wrapping it in butcher paper, and driving around alleys, knocking on restaurant back doors begging them to buy our bacon because I believed in what we were doing.”
The considerable praise from a small pool of customers and respected colleagues was the little push he needed to keep going. By 2010, it was all hands on deck in the Gifford garage.
“Nicole had a 40-hour-per-week job, and I had an 80-per-week job with Sundays off,” he reflects. A tag team dance of sorts was implemented on a 14-day cycle in which she would cure the bellies on Friday, he would wash the meat and smoke it on Sunday, and she would make deliveries the following week.
As the volume of pork increased, so did the smoke. When the neighbors started complaining and Nicole tasted smoke in her ice cubes, Gifford moved the still-small operation to a lucky-find USDA-certified rental facility in Bordeaux. “People don’t know that there were so many of these moments where if I can’t figure out a solution to this problem, that’s the end of the story,” he says.
Fast forward to late 2018, when Gifford’s steady growth led him to another just-short-of-miraculous lease secured in East Nashville. A great location but with minimal perks. It had no electricity or running water. It needed a roof.
“It took a year to build out, and I was working out of coolers,” he remembers. “We got our USDA certification in February of 2020; it was our best month yet.”
Of course, the month following was the one-two punch of an EF3-rated tornado ripping apart East Nashville and a global pandemic. Business and life screeched to a halt.
Then, in May of 2020, executives from Kroger came knocking. “It was straight out of a movie — two office people with briefcases were at my door,” he says of the scene.
Like all retailers, Kroger struggled to keep up with supply, and Gifford, being a small operation, could produce small amounts of bacon safely. He ramped back up. East Nashville Kroger shoppers, especially, rallied around the brand, and the bacon sold out instantly, sometimes being restocked as often as three times per day.
Gifford’s Bacon weathered the pandemic. When case counts started declining and life teased ‘normal’ again, he fully reopened the East Nashville Bacon Compound. Today, it’s a multi-hyphenate smokehouse storefront hosting visiting chefs, maker’s markets, punk rock shows (ask him about the time Mudhoney played in the parking lot for 1,300 people), and whatever else his community needs.
The original team of two has expanded to 60, and Gifford’s Bacon can be found at Butcher & Bee, Redheaded Stranger, Cafe Roze and Roze Pony, The Four Seasons, Catbird Seat, Hathorne, and seemingly every other restaurant in Nashville helmed by a chef who cares about quality.
When Sean Brock selected Gifford’s Bacon for Joyland, a meaningful circle in Gifford’s life was made whole.
You’re probably wondering why very little has been mentioned about the product after all the to-do about the man behind Gifford’s Bacon. That’s because it’s bacon. It’s good by default. And as Gifford himself says, “The worst bacon in the world is still pretty good. I mean, I could eat mediocre bacon, and it’s still pretty good.”
Of course, many people feel Gifford’s Bacon is a superior product. Specifically, it’s a nice thickness with a pleasing amount of fat (but not too much fat!) and an earthy, smoky flavor that doesn’t overpower or get lost when in the company of other ingredients.
A skill honed out of necessity but also passion, a couple of clutch leases secured, words of encouragement in what is typically a non-praise giving industry, a large grocery chain buying product when no one else could — it all could have just as quickly gone wrong instead of right.
So now, with the ground solidly under foot and his product in hot demand across the country, what’s next for Gifford? “I’m going to send a pound and a half of bacon into outer space,” he says with an easy smile.
After coming out on top through a lifetime of high stakes, make-or-break moments, what’s to stop him from having a little fun? And on launch day, he’ll already know the answer: What’s an awesome thing I can do today?
