Carolina barbecue.
The preparation seems simple enough, right? Smoke a pig.
Chop it up. Season it with
vinegar. Scoop it onto a bun. Hit it with slaw. Serve. That’s it. No rocket science required. So why should something so simple
invite hyperbole with tired old tropes like food
of the gods, or penultimate last meal
to describe such proletarian fare? Why should a workaday cuisine so perfectly unfussy become a widely accepted fetish-like
lifestyle choice for food obsessives, gastronomic cultists, and competitive
amateur cooks, who might otherwise do something better with their time (like
find cure cancer, or pursue the last digit of Pi)? Why should something so central to America’s unabashedly egalitarian
culinary self-identity spawn such fiendishly sectarian conflict among barbecue
scholastics and devotees as to result in deeply undemocratic name calling, with
the nomenclature of slurs based on delineations drawn by seemingly blood-sworn
allegiances to tomatoes or vinegar, to animals that go oink and moo?
Because as anyone who has ever eaten a properly prepared
Carolina pig knows, barbecue is anything but a simple food. For some, barbecue is a deeply
elemental—even spiritual—ritual involving fire and smoke designed to coerce the
Gods-of-Flavor into rendering truly transcendent what had otherwise been a pedestrian
section of unremarkable shoat. For
others, barbecue is an infinitely complex exercise in food science, wherein
flavor concepts like the Maillard
reaction and the fabled smoke ring are pursued the way zealots
chase gods, the way mystics hunt ghosts through clouds and layers of
dimension. Even the spelling of
the word itself (barbecue v. barbeque v. bar-b-que) has been cause for broken
noses and fist-busted lips for decades.
Make no mistake about it: barbecue is ethereal.
It lives in the most esoteric nether regions of gastronomy, and it’s the
foodstuff of the true culinary aesthete.
If Morrissey ate meat, he’d do barbecue as a drug. And barbecue is why, with just two days
left to burn on my most recent Christmas vacation, I chose to visit eight
barbecue restaurants across three hundred miles of North Carolina backcountry,
searching for the ultimate in smoked pig.
A fool’s errand, I know, and as ill-advised as some Conradian quest
upriver to vanquish an ever-elusive culinary Kurtz. But barbecue will do that to an eater. It will impair his judgment. Upend reason. Imbue one with truly Falstaffian appetites. And it will incite impulses and
behaviors routinely indulged only by junkies and crack heads, whose compulsions
are never, ever checked at the door.
Eight restaurants located in five different cities across three
altogether distinct barbecue regions of North Carolina. So off I went, as with everything I do, hoping
for the best.
DAY ONE - OAK
ISLAND/WILMINGTON
Bar-B-Q-House
I started my journey here for several reasons: because it’s about five minutes from my
mother’s house; because I’ve been here before; because I’ve always found it a
place where I could comfortably reorient myself with the rigors of stuffing my
gobhole with barbecue without attracting too much undue attention; and, well, because,
I really like the place. Bar-B-Que
House of Oak Island is always good, and ever reliable. It’s already been subject to one of my
pork-fat-smeared reviews, so I’ll not belabor its virtues too emphatically yet again. Let’s just say I found it as charming as
ever for all the ways any always-busy-in-the summer restaurant so sullenly wears
its mid-winter, always-slow-in-the-off-season ennui. I also found it delicious. Located in sight of the Atlantic Ocean, this restaurant can’t
get any more geographically eastern. But style-wise, Bar-B-Que House
defies barbecue orthodoxy by offering ALL the sauces in the Carolina
canon. Lexington. Eastern. South Carolina-style.
They’re all here. And
they’re offered with the palpably giddy irreverence that attends all heretics in
their happy little hearts. I
ordered pork, ribs, and Brunswick stew.
My chopped pork was a thing of quiet beauty, almost demure in the
triumph of being delicious, while the pork ribs—like any better-looking understudy forever trying to steal the
spotlight—rang against my teeth like castanets. New to me was the Bar-B-Q House’s Brunswick stew. And while thin enough in broth to pass
for soup, it came off surprisingly complex for a dish whose sole purpose on a
menu is to act as culinary clearinghouse for restaurant leftovers. Bar-B-Que House is one of the reasons
I’m glad where my mother lives where she does. I get to visit again and again.
Flip's Bar-B-Que
Flip’s Bar-B-Que is the kind of establishment the more
nostalgic element of the barbecue contingent dreams of. It’s that now-down-at-the-heels relic
of bygone era of home-style hospitality where rough-handed roofers and
roughnecks still congregate along the naugahyde swivel stools of the lunch
counter to spill town gossip. It’s
also where the silver-haired proprietor, Bob Church, plies his well-honed
talents as the lone cook, lone waiter, and lone all-around-nice-guy. At its present location for 62 years
now, Flip’s has been owned and operated by Mr. Church for the last 26. And while the glory of Flip’s seems—on
first glance—a bit faded (along with
its nautical décor) the place should be met on its own terms. Flip’s advertises itself as home cooking, and that’s the very
experience its food imparts.
Eating at Flip’s is like dining at the table of your favorite
uncle. Flavor profiles might not
pop as they should—just as your uncle never learned to deploy MSG to wake even
the most somnambulant of ingredients—but the food at Flip’s tastes truly homemade. Everything here is made in-house. Everything. The two undisputed heavyweight champions of Flip’s menu are
its deep fried mac-n-cheese (a Velveeta-like cheese product likely more addictive
than Lou Reed’s personal stash of heroin) and what turned out to be the best barbecue sauce of the entire trip.
The sauce (made on site, bottled by hand) is a wickedly accomplished
East Carolina reinterpretation of that uniquely South Carolinian riff on mustard
sauce. Think Jimi Hendrix playing
the Star Spangled Banner at
Woodstock, and you’ll have some idea as to how deeply Mr. Church has fucked
with tradition. Mr. Church sells
the sauce by the gallon to places as far removed from the Carolina coast as Bakersfield,
California, and it alone is reason enough to visit Flip’s. A jar of Mr. Church’s sauce would do
you good. Get some.
Casey's Buffet
If you turn left to leave Flip’s, you will, before you can
count to ten-Mississippi, have arrived at the stupefyingly bountiful Casey’s
Buffet. Self-described as
“Barbecue & Home Cookin’,” Casey’s is more soul food emporium than a traditional
barbecue joint. Consider what must
surely be one of the most calorically-dense (and delicious) menus of all-time: chopped pork, fried chicken, fried gizzards,
catfish, whiting, deviled crab, fat back, chitlins [sic], field peas, turnips,
collards, okra, hushpuppies. It’s
all here. And pig’s feet. Always pig’s feet. Owned and operated by Gena and Larry
Casey since 2005 (Larry being a dead-ringer for famed Mississippi novelist and
namesake, Larry Brown) Casey’s is a veritable Mardi Gras of soul food good
vibrations. Patrons are loud, even
boisterous (for the normally staid Wilmington eating crowd) and every employee
here—on my visit—was clearly dedicated to her mission that no buffet item should
be anything less than fresh and piping hot, and that no glass of sweet tea should fail
to brim with the sugary good stuff (thanks to the delightful Renee,
Jedi-warrior of the tea pitcher). And
while there were minor inconsistencies in the excellence of some savory offerings
(expected at buffets so varied and large) all of it was good; some of it flirted
with the truly great. So even for
the buffet-averse among you, even for the trotter-phobic, comes an entreaty,
from me, to go to Casey’s if you’re ever in Wilmington, and sit elbow-to-elbow with
the most spirited group of hungry strangers you’re ever likely to meet. It’s a dining experience almost without
parallel the world over, and it’s little found anywhere outside the deep
American South. And in case you
were wondering, the pig’s feet are to die for.
Jackson's Big Oak Barbecue
But if it’s the gold standard of Wilmington, North Carolina,
barbecue you seek, if it’s the reigning champion of chopped pork in New Hanover
Country, look no further than Jackson’s Big Oak BBQ. These guys aren’t messing around. Named for the unbelievably large live oak tree towering behind
the restaurant, Jackson’s simultaneously evokes both the down-home charm of a
mom-and-pop food stand, and the hurry-up-idiot-the-food-is-getting-cold
efficiency of a well-run culinary machine. As my meal at Jackson’s represented my fourth in as many
hours, I kept it simple. I ordered
the pork barbecue sandwich (topped with coleslaw) and a side of their magnificent
sauce. One bite of the pork, and I
knew all roads for barbecue enthusiasts in the lower Cape Fear region lead here,
to Jackson’s. Fresh, vibrant, with
all the requisite tanginess required of east Carolina barbecue, the pork at
Jackson’s was head and shoulders above anything I’d tasted that day. Credit the freshness of my freshly-chopped
sandwich, or credit the steady hand behind Jackson’s perfectly ebullient bright-red
vinegar sauce, but what I tasted in Jackson’s pork were barbecue masters at
their delicious best. My only
regret was that I lacked any of the requisite internal real estate to pursue
their side dishes—the fried okra, the mysteriously-named corn sticks—but now I have
an excuse to return to Jackson’s, and return I most certainly shall.
INTERMEZZO - WARSAW
Smithfield's Chicken 'N Bar-B-Q
So why fried chicken?
Why now, in the middle of all this barbecue madness, with my brain at
its most addled with food obsession and porcine fever (and with the prospect of
having to eat four more sandwiches that day), would I stop at Smithfield’s Chicken
‘N Bar-B-Q in tiny Warsaw, North Carolina, and order a four-piece box? Because I would have been a fool not
to. Because on a balmy Saturday in
the South, when Smithfield’s (and other local chain restaurants kindred in
culinary spirit) are at their busiest, they are most certainly at their very,
very best. To have a piece of perfectly
golden, perfectly crusted, peppery yardbird lifted from the fry grease, then
moved—within nanoseconds and with ninja-like skill—from a fry basket, to a paper
box, to the loving lip-lock of your own waiting mouth, is one of life’s keenest gastronomic
joys. And on days like the day I
visited, no one in North Carolina, and I mean no one, is doing fried chicken better than Smithfield’s. Not the eighty-five-year-old church lady,
who fries in cast iron at every Sunday social. Not the rice-necked, cotton-haired Southern belle, with a grease-stained recipe
passed down through every generation of family cooks since Reconstruction. So look for a crowded parking lot when
passing by. Look for old men in dirty
denim shirts, disembarking from pick up trucks, with snake blood on their hands.
That’s when you go to Smithfield’s. So do. For the
love of Pete.
Links: Smithfield's Chicken 'N BAR-B-Q®: Eastern North Carolina Bar-B-Q and Chicken Family Restaurants | BBQ Chicken, Barbecue Chicken, Carolina Barbeque, BBQ North Carolina, North Carolina Barbeque, BBQ Online, Barbecue, Barbeque Restaurants, Best Barbeque, BBQ, Barbeque, Carolina Barbeque, BBQ North Carolina, North Carolina Barbeque
Smithfield's Chicken 'N Bar-B-Q - Leland | Urbanspoon
Smithfield's Chicken 'N Bar-B-Q - Leland | Urbanspoon
DAY TWO
Raleigh
The Pit
The Pit. I
wanted to hate this place. Really
I did. For I imagined—on first
entering—that I had finally discovered a Carolina barbecue purveyor who was the
very anathema of how a barbecue restaurant should look. How it should feel. How it should smell. The problem: it wasn’t dirty.
It wasn’t dangerous. And it
most certainly didn’t make me regret I wasn’t packing large-caliber heat. The Pit evoked precisely the opposite. It achieved that sense of casual luxury
that so many restaurants strive for, and few actually attain: it was nice. Located in a
hipster-dense Raleigh neighborhood of erstwhile warehouses now converted into
trendy eateries, The Pit is a lovely destination, offering everything you’d
ever want from a restaurant for a Saturday meal. It’s
bright. It’s clean. It’s still got that “new car smell.” And the décor successfully flirts with kinda swank. They have a highly-competent staff (smartly clad in black,
no less), who serve in teams of three to attend your every gastronomic
want. And if that weren’t
anti-barbecue-establishment enough, The Pit even has a fucking wine cellar. You read that right:
it has a wine cellar. In
lesser hands, these culinary heresies would be an affront to barbecue
traditionalists. They would be food crimes. Injustices. And they would have purists crying for the pitmaster's head so it could be dragged through the streets. More often than not, I would agree with that angry mob. Usually the zealots--and it pains me to admit this--are right. But in this case, no. Not here. Not now. Because
The Pit produces seriously delicious, entirely legit, barbecued pork with Carolina-certified
street cred. I ordered and tucked
into a plate of the stuff, buttressed with two sides—collards and black eyed
peas—and was deeply impressed (even shocked) that a restaurant so well run, so
pleasant to eat in, could produce barbecue this “authentic” for little more than
what amounted to a pittance to pay.
And yes. You also read that
right: The Pit is relatively
cheap, all things considered (demographics, location). Yet another reason for barbecue purists
to hate The Pit, I know, but the restaurant's approach to fair pricing is one of several
reasons I’ll be visiting The Pit the next time I blow through Raleigh. And who knows? I just might toss back a bottle of red. Maybe two. Just as long as you’re driving. The Pit rubs elbows with the county jail.
Links: The Pit Authentic Barbecue - Raleigh, North Carolina - Whole Hog Pit Cooked
The Pit - Inside the Beltline - Raleigh | Urbanspoon
The Pit - Inside the Beltline - Raleigh | Urbanspoon
Henderson
Nunnery-Freeman Barbecue
What Brownsville, Texas, is to the criminal narco element of
Mexican drug cartels, Henderson is to the world of Carolina barbecue. It’s the gateway. It’s the where-you-are-going away from
the where-you’ve-too-long-been. In
Henderson, lives are changed. Habits are formed.
Vistas of a lifetime of great eating begin to appear. And Henderson is where a great many
Northerners—Yankees, if we must—leave
southbound I-85 with the innocent-enough intention of grabbing a quick bite,
only to reenter traffic an hour later, already
way, way deep into the barbecue addiction of always wanting more, more,
more. Yep. That’s Henderson. It appears, innocuously enough, as any
other Southern town will: happy enough
to sleep it off, whatever that “it” might be. But look more closely, and Henderson reveals itself for what
it truly is: a gastronomic
powerhouse. A culinary
capitol. A place the food gods have
too greatly favored with too much really good barbecue. Case in point: the institution that is Nunnery-Freeman. Forget the strange name (the latter
being my own). Forget the fact
that it’s housed in a restaurant space so egalitarian, so pared-down, so
purely functional as to seem proto-Soviet in design. There’s nothing inside Nunnery-Freeman that doesn’t belong there. Why so? To make more room for the flavor of their barbecue, I
say. The chopped-pork sandwich is
workman-like in its ability to deliver the deliciousness of hickory-smoked pig
and the sweetness of its pickle-heavy topping of slaw. The day of my visit saw two delightful
ladies at the helm of Nunnery-Freeman, attending the other only patron, a black
man in his late-sixties, a retired big-rig truck driver as it turns out, who,
seeing the Virginia plates on my car, asked me to name the best barbecue in the
Old Dominion. I was stumped. So I asked him to name the best
barbecue in Henderson. He simply
raised the pork sandwich and smiled.
Evidently, I had found what I was so desperately questing for. The best.
Skipper's Forsyth's Bar-B-Q
Or not. Because
not a half-mile up Garnett Street from Nunnery-Freeman, is the equally remarkable
Skipper’s Forsyth’s Bar-B-Q.
Aesthetically, Skipper’s is the Yin to Nunnery-Freeman’s Yang. It’s a veritable barbecue restaurant time
machine where the cinderblock walls are painted the hue of Jell-O green, and
where ghostly harmonies of the Carter Family wouldn’t be out of place, were
that a wheezy old jukebox where the television now resides. And while Skipper’s could hardly be
more aesthetically different from its neighbor down the street, the food
couldn’t be any more similar.
Nearly identical, in fact. I
don’t mean that in a bad way, of course. They've achieved the same perfect level of smoke on the meat. The same chop. The same
bun. And like twins separated at
birth, I wouldn’t have been able to tell the sandwiches apart were it not for
the fact that Nunnery-Freeman uses white paper bags, while Skipper’s bags
theirs in plain brown. I know what
you’re thinking. To have your
life’s work declared a “tie” in both deliciousness and savor with the food of
your nearest competitor by a Missouri farm-boy turned Yankee-food-bitch from
Washington, D.C., must be grounds for stringing me up from the low branch of a
sycamore tree by my big toe. But wait. Here, in this bizzaro world of barbecue
doppelgangery, the pronouncement of a “tie” is good for everybody involved,
purveyors and consumers alike. Both
Nunnery-Freeman and Skipper’s Forsyth’s Bar-B-Q are both producing remarkably
good food; each is truly a jewel in the crown of Carolina’s barbecue
supremacy. Don’t just take my word
for it. As I was leaving
Skipper’s, I passed two Vance County Sherrif’s deputies seated at a table by
the door. I asked them who—between
Nunnery-Freeman and Skipper’s—had the best barbecue in Henderson. Neither missed a beat: both,
they said. The very definition of
a tie, if I ever did hear one.
Durham
Backyard BBQ Pit
False epiphany is poison to food writing—to all writing, for that matter. Food writers, more than any other, I suppose,
are tempted to manufacture and graft a narrative arc (rising action, denouement) onto stories about their
food quest and consumption—stories that are otherwise as flat as the Kansas
prairie—or falsely set the fairy-fire of sudden culinary wisdom dancing above
their own heads. Food writers buy. We sit. We eat. We
leave. That’s pretty much it. So that’s why I hesitate to describe
what was easily the single greatest barbecue sandwich of my most recent two-day
quest. Because were I inventing my
own food epiphany, this is precisely
how I would write it: intenerate
food professional (me), driving a late-model VW station wagon with a little
girl’s pink bicycle lashed to the roof (long story), approaches a roadside
barbecue stand in a highly distressed
part of a well-known Southern town. Our good food professional (still me) then
enters what is easily the dirtiest, strangest smelling restaurant he’s ever
been in, only to witness a fight between two combatants in the restaurant’s
tiny kitchen—the very same fight that sends the elderly dishwasher scampering
out into the dining room with but a single proclamation for the world: they
have knives! Naturally, our
tale must take a turn toward the surreal as the breathtakingly beautiful girl
behind the counter pretends that nothing out of the ordinary is taking place. She smiles a radiant, perfectly
coquettish smile, and asks our brave food professional (yep, still me) if she
might take his order.
The story has it all.
Conflict. Interracial
sexual tension. Barbecue. Knife play! And it would nicely lay the framework for the “big reveal,”
wherein I tell you that this place, this ramshackle, graffiti-covered,
violence-filled place, was where I discovered what was far and away the best barbecue of my entire trip.
Only now I wouldn’t be making it up.
Because that is how it all went down. That is how it actually happened.
I don’t know why we journeyman eaters always find the best
food in the worst of places. It’s
happened countless times to me, where the best this-or-that I’ve eaten comes at
great personal risk, be it as bad as a stabbing, or something as relatively
minor as freckling the bowl for a few colon-cleansing hours. I’ve polled friends on the subject and their
answers invariably follow three explanations: that the threat of poisoning by food greatly heightens
awareness of what one is actually eating, and because of that, flavors are more
pronounced; that our already-hard-wired sexual response to eating (swelling
lips, quickening breath, increasing salivation) is further stimulated by the
taboo of putting ourselves—our bodies—at risk; or that some of the most
interesting flavors often come from the dirtiest of places and the most
unlikeliest of flavoring agents like, well, dirt.
This, of course, in no way suggests the magnificent Backyard
BBQ Pit—scene of my most recent “greatest meal”—is out of compliance with the
sanitation codes and safe food-handling practices of its governing
jurisdiction. It is to suggest, however, that the Backyard
BBQ Pit is the kind of restaurant that barbecue enthusiasts spend days and
nights dreaming about: ramshackle,
bombed out, devoid of white people, a still-obscure source of truly amazing,
somehow indigenous-tasting chopped
pork. I ordered just the sandwich, and I opted to forego saucing it to better pursue
a purist’s joy of naked pork. How
was it? Pork this good should be criminal. Because I wasn’t half way through my
sandwich before I was inventing ways to quit my job, ditch my family, pull up
stakes, and move close enough to Backyard BBQ Pit to eat it every single day. My only condition: that the lads in the kitchen work out their
differences. Hug it out, maybe. And no more knives.
So what kind of epiphany did two days of eating at eight
restaurants across three hundred miles of Carolina backcountry produce? A real one, I fear, delivered in three equally
damning parts: that I had not the time
(nor the stamina) to eat in the very important barbecue epicenters of
Lexington and Greensboro, and had, insodoing, missed additional chances at porcine glory; that culinary
greatness—or the pursuit of—often produces gastronomic homogeneity; and that I now
know enough about Carolina barbecue to realize I actually know nothing about it at all.
Links: Backyard BBQ Pit #1 - Backyard BBQ Pit Restaurant and Catering - RTP, NC
Backyard Barbeque Pit - RTP - Durham | Urbanspoon
Backyard Barbeque Pit - RTP - Durham | Urbanspoon
