Two Days Across Carolina - A Fool's Errand, Revisited

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.

Links:  The Bar B Que House - Best BBQ on the Beach

Bar-B-Que House - Oak Island | Urbanspoon


  

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.

Link:  Flip's Barbeque House - Wilmington | Urbanspoon

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. 

Link:  Casey's Buffett Barbecue & HM - Wilmington | Urbanspoon

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. 

Links:  Jackson's Big Oak Barbecue Home Page

Jackson's Big Oak Barbecue - Wilmington | Urbanspoon

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

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

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.

Links:  Nunnery-Freeman BBQ

Nunnery-Freeman Bar-B-Q - Henderson | Urbanspoon

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.

Link:  Skipper Forsyth's Bar-b-q - Henderson | Urbanspoon

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

Eating In Empty Lots - Part l - The Crab Shack

If farm-to-table is the Platonic ideal for the food production-to-consumption model, the whole pasture-to-pie hole routine, then surely ocean-to-foodtruck comes in a close second.  For what culinary encounter could be better than chancing upon a seafood purveyor beached in a gravel parking lot strangely redolent of Old Bay?  By what gastronomic kismet would have you able to simply (if randomly) roll up to this truly improbable foodtruck, only to drive off, minutes later, with a garbage bag full of steaming crustations and a quickening across your heart?  Because it’s written in the stars.  Because the sensei of gastronomic excellence have so ordained.  You will eat at The Crab Shack, grasshopper, and yes, you will like it.  Such is their decree.

I know of The Crab Shack only because it suddenly appeared in my neighborhood one morning in a weed-choked empty lot, between a rarely-driven schoolbus (shown beside; the owner operates a CDL class when the mood strikes) and a psychic/palm reader’s place of business, if that’s what they’re calling the business of reading palms, these days.  Why would a seafood truck be here, I wondered.  Stolen, I thought.  Left to rust, I speculated.  Tomfoolery, I decided.  Madness.  For what kind of lunatic would find an overgrown, abandoned lot in a mostly-residential (and highly unfashionable) neighborhood of Alexandria South suitable for peddling a highly-perishable food product from a trailer better suited to hauling ponies around the childrens' birthday circuit?

John would.  That’s who.  The sole proprietor of this unlikely enterprise.  And he's no madman.  Quite the opposite, in fact.  He’s comfortably into middle age and wears the hair, tattoos, and complexion of a Native American who has known hard work for most of his life.  An old soul.  Knowing and wise.  But also someone with whom you’d want to address in careful tones of deference and respect.  Someone who you’d want  to have your back in a barroom throwdown, someone who could likely drop his opponent like a bag of rocks.  And if that’s not reason enough to be nice when ordering, John’s elderly father hangs out inside the trailer as well.  Wears a Fedora.  Fingers a cane.  And never blinks through what can only be described as an ex-pugilist’s leer.  Imagine William S. Burroughs in the person of an elderly erstwhile crabber and you’ll have the idea, boy-o.

Seafood stands like this are commonplace across the American South.  Travel the two-lane black tops of the Virginia Tidewater, the Carolina Low Country, north to south, and you’ll encounter an almost-endless procession of shrimpers or crabbers peddling the day’s catch from the tarpaulin-covered backs of their bombed-out F-150s.  But here, in this part Northern Virginia, that never happens.  It simply isn’t done.  Fisherman do not sell their catch from pickups, let alone trailers retrofitted with refrigeration and the ability to steam and season one’s catch for roadside patrons.  The county does not let them.  To have John tell it, he wanted to locate on land he's owned for years.  But Fairfax County shook him down for thousands in licensing fees and permits (to protect, no doubt, the proprietary fiscal interests of such culinary brick-and-mortar fixtures as Hooterbees and T.G.I. McFucksters).

So here he is, beached in a gravel parking lot between the psychic’s place and a big yellow school bus, a place almost existential in the loneliness it evokes.  But John’s loss is our gain.  Because his Crab Shack is exactly the kind of food purveyance my neighborhood (or any neighborhood, for that matter) needs.  Local.  Seasonal.  Fresh as it gets.  Because John sources his crabs and shrimp from Wanchese, North Carolina, a fishing collective on Roanoke Island, Dare County, in the Outer Banks of North Carolina, widely known for producing some of the finest crustations in the mid-Atlantic.

I stopped on a recent Saturday afternoon and approached this foodtruck misbegotten in the gastronomic wasteland that is this part of Fairfax County.  John greeted me.  He smiled.  Then he asked me what I’d like to eat.  I looked.  But my cursory glance at the menu was made superfluous by the sudden whiff of Old Bay adrift on the air.  Crabs.  A dozen, I said, followed by an emphatic and most polite please.  John left the trailer out the back door, threw a dozen of the little bastards in his steamer, and, moments later, walked out into the parking lot with a garbage bag full of the most glorious crabs I’ve yet encountered this season.  And as John tied off the bag and handed it to me, I understood by the glimmer in his eye that this was no mere food-for-money exchange.  This was more than that.  A proffering.  A gift.  A bequeathment.  Money had nothing to do with it.  For what John knew then, and what I was soon to learn as I ripped the bag open with my bare teeth, is that the act of sitting down at a wooden table in summer with a bag of perfectly steamed blue crabs and an ice-cold beer is one of the most transcendent culinary experiences a person can have.  Ever.  I experienced it.  And so should you.

The Crab Shack is located in the 5700 block of Telegraph Road in Alexandria, Virginia.  John is open for business (at the time of this writing) on weekends, midday to late afternoon.  Visit him.  Buy his food.  If you’re disinclined to eating in empty lots, I promise you a seat at my kitchen table.  And my beer is always cold.

Call John at 703.507.5607 for insight, wisdom, and directions.

Bob's Barbecue and the Ballad of Butner, North Carolina

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

Questing Carolina -- Searching For (and Finding) the Perfect Barbecue

Writing about barbecue is like writing about religion:  no matter how unitarian your embrace of all forms of smoked protein, no matter how pantheistic your remarks on the virtues of tomato and vinegar-based sauces, your views will deeply offend someone's barbecue orthodoxy.  You will be labeled a heretic.  Called out for apostasy.  Pelted with binary stones for culinary blasphemy.  Because barbecue is not merely some form of cuisine, nor is it simply some ancient cooking method perfectly suited for breaking down proteins, melting fat, and imparting the flavor of smoke.  No, barbecue is, for some, a way of life.  So let me say I adore all the high parishes and priests of the barbecue world.  Kansas City.  Memphis.  Texas.  Cows.  Pigs.  Yard birds.  Each and all have a special place in my heart.  But it's Carolina barbecue, specifically eastern Carolina pig, with its exquisite sauce of hot and tangy vinegar, that keeps this eater up nights, my dreams of pork shoulder borne up on imaginary whiffs of hickory smoke.

My mission was simple:  eat barbecue twice over two days in eastern North Carolina.  The only rule:  recommendations on where to eat cannot be culled from self-proclaimed "expert" internet sources, but must come from the mouths of locals in purely anecdotal form.  Sounds simple, right?  I knew from earlier trips through the Carolinas that the sheer ubiquity of barbecue is in no way a guarantee of quality pig.  Like all places hallowed for a specific culinary thing, the Carolinas have their share of culinary grifters and flim-flam men all too happy to peddle sub-par pig to any poor sucker with out-of-state plates.

First stop was the truly marvelous Bar-B-Que House Restaurant in the coastal town of Oak Island, North Carolina.  Situated in the extreme south-eastern corner of the state and literally a stone's throw from the Oak Island barrier beach, Bar-B-Que House first appeared as one of those sand-front food establishments I'm so deeply leery of; the kind of place that could easily be ignored by the 6,500 Oak Island locals, but kept flush by the nearly 50,000 sun-loving tourists that flock to the island in the summer months.  The kind of place that could offer little more than deep-fried sewer rat and still keep its ownership in an unending succession of Cadillac SUVs.  And yet every local I spoke with in Oak Island and neighboring Southport insisted Bar-B-Que House was the real deal.  So on a bleak winter weekday afternoon (nothing quite kills a lunch rush like weather) I ventured in and was nothing short of astonished at what I found.

The place was packed.  And loud.  One might even say rowdy.  What had just happened, I wondered?  Was I suddenly no longer in the staid and sleepy South? Did I just unwittingly step through a magical door and somehow end up in South Boston following a Red Sox game?  No, the signs and signifiers of the old South were very much represented.  Cammo vests.  Clasp knives on belts.  Hats adorned with the Stars and Bars. These were all true Southern locals, my kind of culinary people, and they were all clearly juiced on the kind of high that only sweet tea and barbecued pig can produce.  So I sat in a booth and ordered from my delightful server the epic Grand Daddy Combo Platter (that's three meat choices for you keeping score at home) of chopped pork, pork ribs, and smoked chicken.  Accompanying this carnage were four sides:  red slaw, collard greens, hush puppies with honey butter, and what turned out to be the  piece de resistance, the deep fried corn on the cob.

No sooner had my food arrived that I beheld what for me was a truly astonishing sight.  At my table were all three varieties of Carolina barbecue sauce. I realize that most barbecue newbies will fail to recognize this as the kind of culinary apocalypse, the gastronomic big one, that, to barbecue aficionados this surely must represent.  To explain:  when one enters the Carolina barbecue world as an aspiring aficionado, a self-annointed expert, one is asked, implicitly, to pick a favorite, to choose sides, to swear unwavering allegiance to one of the three Carolina-style sauces pictured left:  Lexington (cider vinegar), Eastern (cider vinegar with more heat), or South Carolia-style (vinegar and mustard).  And once you pick a sauce style, you must defend it tooth-and-nail to the bitter, bitter end.  Think of barbecue culture like a bad prison movie:  chose your homeboys, chose your inside gang, or be left out in the prison yard like buzzard food.  Me, I'm devotedly an Eastern sauce kind of guy, but I was secretly delighted--even thrilled--to see all three styles represented.  It was an act of culinary daring, (imagine the fate of the jailbird foolish enough to ask the Nazi ganglord just why can't everyone just simply get along) and just when I was sure no one was looking, I sauced my food with all three.  The pork ribs were fantastic: pink with wood smoke and falling off the bone.  The chicken was good, a solid, solid offering.  But the chopped pork was truly magnificent.  Almost as good as Carolina pork gets.  And a true show stopper.  Or nearly.

Because once I had dispatched the meat, I moved on to the sides.  The red slaw was made of finely chopped cabbage and flavored with a perfect balance of vinegar and catsup.  The collards contained enough bacon to be considered a pork dish.  But the deep fried corn on the cob was transcendental--boiled, no doubt, before being deep fried.  What emerged from the fryer was corn no longer.  What had started out as corn had come out as caramelized golden goodness.  Something you offer to the spirits of the dead as the best of what we mere mortals can produce.

After a meal like this, dessert is a non starter.  A no go.  All of the available internal real estate has been used up.  As in:  no vacancies, dude.  But something told me to order the cobbler and the banana pudding.  While the cobbler was quite tasty, it was the pudding that blew me away.  It was nothing like anything I had ever tasted.  It resembled pudding in almost no way.  So I asked the manager for the recipe and was told it's a closely guarded secret.  If I had to guess, the pudding was a delightfully baffling mixture of sliced bananas, sour cream, Cool Whip, and powdered vanilla pudding.  But Whatever is in the stuff, the banana pudding was pure sugary magic and I ate every last bite.

As with any truly great restaurant experience, I was strangely sad when the meal was over and the check delivered.  I simply wanted to keep eating all afternoon long.  But we know that's not how it works, especially with barbecue.  One must quite while one's ahead and simply walk away.  But as I paid my bill and picked my teeth, I knew with absolute certainty that dish for dish, pig for chicken, sauce for sides, my meal at Bar-B-Que House was the best barbecue restaurant experience I've yet to have.  Bar-B-Que house has got it down.  And they reign supreme.  I'll be back to lovely Oak Island, my Bar-B-Que House friends, and I'll be ordering the Grand Daddy Platter.  Just please don't tell anyone about the sauce.  My Eastern-sauce homeboys will surely shank me.

Stop two on my Carolina quest took me to Wilber's Barbecue in Goldsboro, North Carolina, roughly two hours northwest of Oak Island and in the porcine heart of barbecue country.  Wilber's sits at the edge of Goldsboro and is far enough off the beaten culinary path that the curious stares I received upon entering reminded me, small-town Missouri boy I am, of how effectively a well-timed glower can make a well-meaning out-of-town visitor feel like an unwanted outsider.  Perhaps there would be little love for me here at Wilber's, I thought, but isn't that what questing is all about?  Surmounting the stones in one's pathway?  Keeping the hellhounds off one's own trail?  Every great ancient myth surely reminds us of one thing:  the greater the obstacle, the greater the reward.  So I sallied forth, humming a Robert Johnson tune the whole way.

Wilber's Barbecue is vast and very nearly the size of a German beer hall.  On the late-afternoon, post-lunch rush occasion of my visit, it was still crowded, in sections, with the kind of locals one finds only in North Carolina, the kind who don't smile, even when tickled.  Southern hospitality might very well have stopped outside Wilber's door, but I remained undaunted.  Until I met my waitress.

As luck would have it, I had for my waitress an elderly Asian woman from an indeterminate country of origin, who sat next to me at my table, leaned in close, shoulder to shoulder, with fish oil on her breath, and who seemed to be learning English from what she could glean from Wilber's luncheon menus.  Poor lady.  The menu itself was strangely limited.  In its English.  In its culinary destinations.  It did offer a few essential and expected proteins (pig, chicken livers and gizzards, oysters, Brunswick stew) and the usual sides of greens, potato salad, and cole slaw.  Everything about the menu seemed to point in one direction only: pig.  So I ordered just that, chopped pork paired with roast chicken.  My sides would be green beens, hushpuppies, and slaw.  My tea would be sweet enough to induce Type II diabetes (not to mention rendering my vinyl table cloth sticky as fly paper).   I had ordered unsweet tea, but hey, the devil is in the details, and may not always speak English.

My food arrived just in time.  My fellow luncheoneers kept shooting me the Carolina stink eye, and I wasn't exactly made to feel welcome there, though only now do I realize that a VW driving, yuppie uberdouche from D.C. intent on photographing everything he sees or eats with a white iPhone deserves every nasty look he takes on the chin.  I smiled at my food and tasted my sides first:  the slaw was made from finely chopped cabbage, mayo, vinegar, and something (likely food coloring) that had turned it an iridescent green, and the green beans were unevenly cut and full of vine stems--good things, really, that indicate someone actually cooked this food on site instead of simply warming a can of foodstuff from food-devil Cisco.  Next I tasted the chicken.  It was perfectly roasted and tender and topped with a yellowish-orange gravy that seemed to be made of poultry pan drippings and cider vinegar.  The gravy was strange and rich and good.  All of Wilber's food was good, actually.  Really good.  Especially the gravy.


Lastly, I tasted the chopped pork.  I don't know what made me eat it last, or why the culinary cosmos would speak to me in such strange and unexpected ways.  But Wilber's chopped pork was, without question, the best chopped pork I've ever put in my mouth.  THE.  BEST.  EVER.  This is not hyperbole, folks.  This is not some jerk-off food blogger correcting an otherwise questionable food experience by writing false epiphany into an untrue happy ending.  No, this was it.  This was the best barbecue of my life.  The best and most perfectly seasoned pork dish I've ever eaten.  The most perfectly smoked piece of meat I'd ever put my mouth.  More telling perhaps:  Wilber's was the only chopped pork I've ever come across that made me know that saucing the meat would be an act of self-sabatage and a crime against all that was holy and good in the world.  How could this be possible, I wondered?  How could such an idiosyncratic place like Wilber's produce something so delicious, so truly amazing, that it would make me want to sing its praises from high atop the binary mountaintop to whomever could be troubled to listen?

I waved my elderly Asian waitress over and asked her the same question.  She smiled with perfect understanding.

"More sweet tea," she said.  "Coming right up."

I paid my bill, bought some of Wilber's bottled sauce, and rushed outside to follow a sudden impulse.  This impulse took me all the way behind Wilber's Barbecue and to a gravel lot between the restaurant and an adjacent cornfield.  There it was, dear readers.  There was my answer.  And in a great halo of hickory smoke.  There was the great barbecue oracle foretelling all things truly great about Wilber's pork had I only the insight to investigate its tellings before sitting down to eat.

It was Wilber's smokehouse.  It's where the magic happened.  The Mount Olympus where the barbecue gods lurked.  And I was awestruck.  I was truly amazed.  I had found the holy barbecue grail. At Wilber's no less.

Your link to Bar-B-Que House:
The Bar B Que House - Best BBQ on the Beach

Your link to Wilber's Barbecue:

Barbecue, Wilber's Barbecue Home

And love them both for what they truly are: culinary treasures.

I Heart New York Pizza, If Only Elsewhere, And In the Deep American South

Heartbreak in life is inevitable.  As is the fact that everything you ever believed in or thought was true will eventually be debunked, shat on, and revealed as the sham it always was.  Evidence Santa Claus.  The Easter bunny.  The sparkling promise of the Obama presidency.  Lies, all of it.  And all of it, the opposite of true.  So how did I ever make it this far in life with the silly belief that Italians made the best pizza?  I've lived in Chicago.  I've stalked New York like a jealous ex-boyfriend.  I've eaten hundreds, nay thousands, of slices of the greasy stuff in that dark and often drunken and inevitable 3AM of the soul, and believed with soul-shuddering conviction that all the truly great pizza I had put in my mouth was made by some fresh-off-the-boat paisan who wore a gold St. Christopher medallion around his neck and loved his elderly Turino-born mother just a little too much.  So imagine my astonishment when I discovered what was some of the best pizza of my life in a Wilmington, North Carolina, pizzeria named I Heart New York Pizza (owned by a Greek named Yani, no less) and made by a Salvadoran cook named Herbert.  Yes, Herbert.  You would have likely had a better chance at reviving my belief in the Tooth Fairy than convince me guys with names like Yani and Herbert could be producing some of the best pizza in North America.  And yet, that's precisely what they are doing at I Heart New York Pizza, and doing it daily, and oh-so very, very well.

The sad truth is that before my recent encounter with I Heart New York Pizza, I did not heart pizza at all.  In fact, I kind of hated the stuff.  Not because pizza ever failed to be delicious, or even, if more rarely, something that approximated culinary salvation for an intemperate soul.  It was that pizza seemed a simpleton's food.  The proverbial white flag of culinary surrender.  What is pizza, after all?  Red sauce.  Dough.  Cheese.  Some combination of vegetable or protein topping.  And something you ate when too drunk or tired to seek the truly transcendental.  It was kid food.  It was food for the despondent.  The bored.  The cerebrally impaired.  Or so I thought until a winter's late-afternoon need for a snack brought me off Wilmington's Front Street and into the culinary wheelhouse of Herbert and Yani, and their magic dough.

It was not love at first sight.  I Heart New York Pizza requires the eater to choose from an ever-changing variety of pizzas cooked at some point in the recent (or not so) past, left to sit at room temperature and under glass for god-knows-how-long, then returned to a thousand-degree pizza oven for a reheat just prior to eating.  In New York, this is the gig, par for the course, but in the American South it was strangely vexing.  And then there's the matter of Yani himself.  He's clearly calling the shots here, the swinging dick, and he will finish whatever task he's set out to dispatch before acknowledging your presence in any way, let alone taking your order.  I stood in front of the pizza case a good two-to-three minutes, feeling stupid every second of it, before Yani could be bothered to take my order.  But when he did turn and face me, when he did look into my eyes and favor me with that fleeting, Greek smile, it was if the sun had suddenly appeared from behind a cloud and the world was golden again and a place where possibilities did indeed abound.

I ordered three slices.  The Rio Rancho.  The Lasagna.  The Sausage and Pepperoni.  Each slice was somehow better than the last.  The Rio Rancho was a strange fusion of ricotta, bacon, and ranch dressing.  The lasagna also boasted ricotta, but with the welcome addition of meatballs and mozzarella.  As for the sausage and pepperoni, it was a straight-forward, no frills, in-your-face amalgam of mozzarella and pepperoni, but the sausage was akin to gyro meat and delightfully strange when paired with the pepperoni.  Nothing in these ingredients suggests anything approaching culinary greatness, I know, but somehow each slice was far, far greater than the sum of its parts.  So I finished all three enormous slices and returned to the counter to order two slices more.  Yani had evidently just left for the day, so I ordered from the delightful Herbert, who informed me my Buffalo Chicken pizza was good to go, but that he had no White pizza at present and would make me one on the spot.

So I watched Herbert roll out the dough, then toss it into the air with all the breezy, if masterful, nonchalance you'd expect from some expert pizza maker from Naples, not El Salvador.  Herbert told me he had been making pizza, professionally, since arriving from Salvador, several years before, and that he now believed he had finally discovered what people wanted in pizza, the acidity of the red sauce, the bite of the cheese, and which combination of ingredients made his pizza truly delicious, even surprising, and always popular with the Wilmington locals.

I told Herbert the fact I was about to consume five colossal slices of some food I previously hated might very well suggest that his pizza was more than simply delicious; it was remarkable, even special.  A gift from the culinary gods.  Herbert accepted the compliment with laughter and a smile.  But he grew serious, downright contemplative, when asked what, in his opinion, made his pizza so goddamned good.  Herbert raised his chin.  He narrowed his eyes.  He put his forefinger on his lips and nodded.

"It's the water," he said, finally.  "The water in the dough.  It comes from the river.  The river is magic."

An hour before, I had seen two alligators swimming in the same river of which Herbert now spoke.  So magic the river must be.  I returned to my booth, already full from my previous slices, and managed to take down my pizza with the finger-licking ferocity of a man who hadn't eaten in a week.  And yes, I even ate the crust.  But as I was leaving, a panhandler came into the store.  He was the same dread-wearing, hippy-love-shit kind of a guy, whom I had seen earlier begging for spare change on his all-too-dubious mastery of the African finger-piano.  He came into I Heart New York Pizza and laid down three dollars worth of small change for a single slice of Herbert's amazing pizza.  And as I watched him spill his dirty money across Yani's counter, asked myself this:  would I lay down my last three dollars on a single slice of Herbert's cheesy deliciousness?  That's a no-brainer.  The answer arrived in a nano-second:  Yes, emphatically, yes.

Yani and Herbert can likely be found most days at 28 North Front Street in Wilmington, North Carolina.  I will likely be found there most Federal holidays when I've ventured to visit the bizzaro Carolina low-country and my not-Italian mother.  You should know me on sight.  I'll be the guy hating myself for loving this pizza so much.  And I'll be sitting in the back booth with pizza grease on my chin, licking my fingers, yearning for more.