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Living Famously
Drop the name Bonnie Mack on any self-respecting barbecue lover and chances are they’ll know who you’re talking about. This award-winning chef at the famed Blues City Cafe in Memphis, Tenn., has been cooking up some of the best barbecued ribs in Memphis for more than 16 years. “I got real good ribs,” Bonnie says. “People come from all over to eat them.”
And when Bonnie says everywhere, he means it. Some of the regulars at the Blues City Cafe have included actor Robert Duvall and former President Bill Clinton, a close friend and fellow Arkansas native.
Learning to Cope
Bonnie was 59 when he was diagnosed with kidney disease and began dialysis at the Whitehaven facility. He says the long hours of dialysis treatment were tough at first, but now he doesn’t let the disease get in the way of his life. “I struggled with it for a year and a half,” Bonnie says. “But I figured it out after that. This is the only life I have to live. If you do what you gotta do, and follow the instructions, then it’s not too hard.”
While he cut his workload to accommodate dialysis treatments, Bonnie is still the main man at the Blues City Cafe, working on the days he doesn’t have dialysis. He no longer can eat some of the foods that made him famous, but as a chef, he occasionally gets to taste his own cooking. “I had to cut down on certain things,” he says.
At home, Bonnie’s wife does the cooking. “We have a schedule,” he says. “She does a good job of keeping things tasty.”
When he’s not pleasing palates in the restaurant, he stays busy with appearances on the Food Network and bottling his own barbecue sauce, available in Memphis grocery stores and by mail order. “When Bill Clinton was president, I shipped him cases of it,” Bonnie says.
Never Slowing Down
When he does have free time, Bonnie likes to spend it fishing. “If I feel all right after dialysis, I’ll go fishing on Saturdays and Sundays,” he says. His other passion is football.
Despite his busy life, Bonnie says he still needs support and gets it from his family. His wife and two children help him cope with his disease on a daily basis. “They’ve been pretty good to me,” he says. “It’s good to have them around.”
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