Every serious eater I know has one: a culinary ground zero. Be they taquerias for some, or
Vietnamese noodle shops for others, these ground zeros are places of
gastronomic reckoning where everything these eaters might have known (or
thought they knew) about food is suddenly and irrevocably blown to smithereens,
destroyed by that otherwise innocuous morsel of street food at the end of their
plastic forks. They are places of
epiphany, agencies of awakening, these eateries, and they show the newly
hatched culinary enthusiast that food is not merely fodder for one’s own gob
hole whose sole purpose is to kill the biological imperative of appetite, or to
negate the physiological response of smoking a joint and jonesing for a jumbo cheese
pizza. No, these places are the
holy places of cuisine where the oracles of gastronomy labor in near-total
obscurity under mysterious shrouds of grill smoke and in whose cuisines are
secreted a thousand tales telling of who they are and from whence they came. In such places, an eater can learn
about the world in a single afternoon, and it often tastes of salvation.
For me, that place is Bob’s. Situated in north-central North Carolina just off I-85 at
the end of an otherwise unremarkable service road where weary travelers go to
gas up and buy smokes, and where culinary ambition would seemingly want to
crawl off and die, Bob’s Barbecue, with it’s naugahyde chairs and V.F.W.
karaoke-night vibe, was where I first became the eater I am today, where I was
first dimly able to decode the signs and signifiers on my plate, and where I
first realized I had my head so far up my own ass I was incapable of really and
truly understanding anything about American cuisine. You should forgive me that. I was then a young culinary turk from Missouri farm country newly
embarked on a career in the Washington food world, and like all recent converts
insecure in their convictions, I was comically overzealous in my adherence to
the orthodoxy of my new faith. If
the food wasn’t somehow a derivation of Franco gastronomy, I wasn’t fucking eating
it. No poulet basquaise on the menu?
No coq au vin? I’ll
go hungry thank you very much was the vibe I was throwing at restaurateurs
in those days. Quite a bold
culinary stance to take on a road trip from Washington to Atlanta, I know,
because Wendy’s, then as now, wasn’t exactly down with the whole sous vide
thing, and McDonalds didn’t offer cote de
boeuf on its 99 cent menu. But
it was lunchtime and I was hungry.
Really, really hungry. As
in: eat or black out at the wheel. So I pulled off the interstate at
Butner and navigated the blight—the McDonalds, the Sonic, the Hardee’s—that
American road food has become, determined, in my delirium, that I would rather capture
and consume a local house pet before capitulating to the culinary menace of those
evil golden arches. No cocker
spaniels died that day, I am pleased to report, because I happened to find Bob’s,
looking for all the world like a shopworn Veterans of Foreign Wars bingo
palace, but promising authentic North Carolina barbecue by the pig smoke adrift
on the mid-day air.
So I rolled into the gravel lot and entered Bob’s,
convinced, as any twenty-something culinary know-it-all would be, that the food
before me was going to be bad, hardly worth eating, food for rednecks, a
simpleton’s cuisine. But I was
hungry enough to eat my left hand, and no matter how bad Bob’s might be, it
would be infinitely better, I knew, than the shit purveyed by the evil laughing
clown down the street. So I
ordered. Grudgingly. Then I sat. And ate. And
when I emerged from Bob’s, thirty, maybe forty minutes later, I was different
somehow. Forever changed. For what I encountered inside Bob’s was
an American cuisine so pure, so elemental, so fucking good, that I realized
with the kind of clarity that comes only to fools and idiot savants, that I was
wrong about everything. My
fixation on haute cuisine, on so-called molecular gastronomy, on the cult of Escoffier,
all it had been misguided, a fool’s errand, all of it deeply and profoundly
wrong. I hail from Missouri, after
all. Both sets of grandparents
were farmers
for crying eye. I could ride a
horse and shoot a gun before I could write my own name. Bob’s food reminded me of this. It was a looking glass, of sorts, in
which I saw who I really was as an eater, and that this culinary identity of
mine was somehow eternally fixed by the topography of my birth. A new world of gastronomic possibility
opened up for me inside Bob’s, a decidedly working-class, farm-and-labor
culinary landscape decidedly devoid of the fussy, ephemeral, and sauce-heavy
cuisines so central to the largely unsuccessful apprenticeship of my own food self-education. Driving away from Bob’s after that
first visit, I resolved to toss my black turtlenecks, chuck my Gitanes, and
pawn my well-thumbed copy of La Technique
the moment I got home, and I felt suddenly unencumbered, light-headed, and free
at last.
I visited Bob’s Barbecue last week on a road trip to
Asheville. It was as I had
remembered it: a squat and Post
Office-like building marooned at the barren end of a Carolina service road. And if the women behind the counter
were not the same woman in person,
they were the same in type: sweet little old ladies in aprons and
hair nets and rose water perfume whom you might imagine having just arrived
from a Southern Baptist bake sale and who call you darlin’ as they serve you the kind of barbecue that changes
lives. For Bob’s service methods
employ a relic of the old South; Bob’s serves cafeteria style. You take a tray (by the glass pie case
loaded with sweet goodness) and order your protein (presumably pork, though
fried catfish and chicken livers are available) from a lady whose job it is to
scoop an enormous dollop of chopped pork (with creamy cole slaw) onto a
Frisbee-sized bun. She plates your
pork sandwich on Styrofoam, then passes it to the hushpuppy lady. The hushpuppy lady deposits a gloved
handful of hushpuppies into a paper basket, then pushes your tray to the green
bean lady. The green bean lady
scoops an enormous portion of bacon-infused beans onto your plate, then hands
you the tray and sends you down the line to the cashier. The little old cashier smiles and asks
you if you’d like tea. You
do. She hands you a Styrofoam cup
filled with shaved ice, takes your money, and sends you off with yet another
smile and the promise of bottomless hushpuppies. Oh, yes. That’s right.
Unlimited fried corn meal.
So you fill your cup with (very) sweet tea, take a seat at a simulated
wood grain table, and tuck into some of the best barbecue you’re likely to ever
encounter.
Barbecue aficionados will be quick to point out that Bob’s,
by decree of its location, is necessarily of the Lexington school of barbecue,
which emphasizes pork shoulder (Eastern Carolina utilizes all parts of the pig
except the squeal) and whose approach to sauce is milder and relatively more
laid back on the topic of catsup (it usually contains but a dram) than Eastern
Carolina orthodoxy allows. I
strongly favor Bob’s pumped up, eastern-styled counterpart (see my earlier blog
entry on Wilber’s Barbecue of Goldsboro for that) and yeah, Bob’s pig could certainly
benefit from a much bigger dose of hickory smoke, but I dare you to find a
barbecue joint anywhere in the state that serves up a superior or more highly
distilled essence of rural North Carolina itself. I can find really good barbecue almost anywhere in that
great state, sure. But nowhere
else in my extensive Carolina adventures have I ever found a truer, purer, more
crystalline specimen of what it means to eat smoked, chopped pig, shoulder to
shoulder with farmers, with mechanics, with sweet little old ladies from the
local Southern Baptist Church.
It’s why we eat.
Nourishment. Reprieve from
toil. Communion with the people at
the true still point of this turning world. And for this eater, Bob’s is my church; it’s patrons, my
Carolina congregation.
For the record:
Bob’s serves the best hushpuppies I’ve ever eaten. And when you visit Bob’s, as I know you
will, please wear rose water as your perfume, ladies, and gents, make sure
that’s pomade billowing your lovely locks, and for the love of Pete, one and
all, enjoy the aroma. It gets no
finer anywhere else in Carolina.
They have no website, praise Jesus, so there is no link to offer.
But there is this. An address.
Bob's Barbecue
1589 Lake Road
Creedmoor, North Carolina 27522
919.528.2081
