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Key Takeaways
- Spending years on the road between Birmingham, Tuscaloosa and Memphis gave Newman a broad view of barbecue before he ever opened a restaurant.
- Having tasted enough barbecue across regions, he decided to act.
- As his business scaled, Newman learned that growth only means something if each new location can live up to the name on the door.
Will Newman did not dream of opening a barbecue restaurant.
When the idea first crossed his mind, he was in law school, following a path that felt practical and well-defined. His academic track pointed somewhere very different. “I have a history degree from the University of Tennessee, and then I have a law degree from Alabama,” Newman explains, a trajectory that leaned toward stability, not smokers and brisket.
During law school, Newman lived in Birmingham, Alabama, while commuting to the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa. It was a practical decision that kept him on the road and eating barbecue in different places.
Over time, that exposure added up. “I was surrounded by great barbecue,” Newman says. Tuscaloosa was home to the original Dreamland Bar-B-Que. Birmingham was where he lived. Memphis, where he was born, remained a reference point.
The moment that shifted everything came while Newman was doing exactly what he was supposed to be doing.
“I was studying on a Sunday for a big exam,” he recalls, taking a break in the law library to follow the Tennessee Titans game. When halftime hit, he happened to see who had won best BBQ in Nashville that year. The recognition stopped him cold. “It was just a brand that really wouldn’t hold a candle anywhere,” he says.
His reaction was not admiration; it was comparison. “I’m sitting here going, Golly, this place has won consecutive years,” he says. Then the thought landed with clarity. “If that is the bar to pass, I can do this.”
Looking back, Newman is quick to acknowledge how little he understood at the time. “I was incredibly naive,” he says. Nashville did not yet have a strong barbecue identity, and that gap felt like an opportunity. He was not trying to challenge Memphis or rewrite tradition. He was responding to what he saw as an opening.
That moment did not stay theoretical. Newman returned to Nashville and acted on it, opening what would become Edley’s Bar-B-Que.
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Legacy meets scale
Newman named the restaurant before he fully understood what that commitment would demand. Edley’s was not a marketing exercise. It was personal.
The name came from his grandfather, Edley Newman, a person he never really knew but grew up hearing about. “I didn’t know him personally because he died when I was an infant,” Newman says.
What he did know came from stories. “These old timers would stop me, and they’d say, ‘You must be Edley Newman’s grandson,’” Newman says. The stories were consistent. His grandfather organized youth baseball leagues, helped bring electricity to rural farms through the local co-op and showed up for his neighbors. “He made a really big impact on his community.”
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Naming the restaurant after his grandfather set a standard before the first plate was served. That standard mattered more as the business grew.
Expansion came faster than Newman expected, and he is candid about how unprepared he was. Opening the first restaurant felt manageable. The second exposed everything that was missing. “The second store taught us more about running restaurants than the first store did,” Newman says.
What broke was not effort, but structure. “We didn’t have any real operations,” Newman says. “Everything was institutional knowledge.” As he opened more locations, that approach stopped working. Expectations rose. Mistakes became more expensive. Newman found himself pulled back into the business, realizing that growth was fragile without a proper foundation.
That experience reshaped how he thought about expansion. “Almost anyone can open a restaurant,” he says. “It’s keeping it open 12 months that most people can’t do.”
Today, Edley’s Bar-B-Que operates multiple locations across Tennessee. For Newman, that growth only matters if the standard behind the name still holds. The name came first. Expansion had to follow it, not outrun it.
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Key Takeaways
- Spending years on the road between Birmingham, Tuscaloosa and Memphis gave Newman a broad view of barbecue before he ever opened a restaurant.
- Having tasted enough barbecue across regions, he decided to act.
- As his business scaled, Newman learned that growth only means something if each new location can live up to the name on the door.
Will Newman did not dream of opening a barbecue restaurant.
When the idea first crossed his mind, he was in law school, following a path that felt practical and well-defined. His academic track pointed somewhere very different. “I have a history degree from the University of Tennessee, and then I have a law degree from Alabama,” Newman explains, a trajectory that leaned toward stability, not smokers and brisket.