261 miles of whole hog

in search of north carolinas best whole hog barbecue

As I stepped off the plane in Raleigh, North Carolina, I remember thinking, “I can’t wait to have my mind blown.”Every year we take a food trip to a somewhere we’ve never been before, not just to eat, but to challenge the way we think about food. This year brought us to Eastern North Carolina where BBQ means chopped whole hog instead of smoked briskets. 

Our first stop wasn’t a barbecue joint. It was a late-night staple of all white trash men my age, waffle house. It was also the first Waffle House I’d ever walked into that wasn’t full of drunks and crackheads. All three of the waitresses were over sixty and some of the nicest ladies I have ever met. 

Somewhere between my waffles and hashbrowns I told the waitress, whose name I never got, why we had flown to North Carolina. “Honey,” she laughed “don’t they have BBQ in Texas?” I laughed too, then explained our background and why we’d travelled halfway across the country to eat theirs. Before we left, I asked them where we should go. “Well Dale’s has the best chicken fried steak around.” she said, “unless you’re in the mood for actual fried chicken, then I’d go to the wagon wheel.” As a Texan these answers threw me. You see, back home when we say “barbecue” it means food cooked with smoke and fire. Asking for barbecue and being handed fried chicken felt like asking where the bathroom was and being pointed toward the kitchen sink. Close enough to understand the logic, but still wrong. When we pulled into the hotel, I wasn’t questioning whether North Carolina could cook barbecue. I was beginning to wonder if we if we had been talking about the same thing all along.              

The next morning, we climbed into the car with the kind of excitement you have as a kid headed to the waterpark for the first time. We didn’t know what to expect and we just couldn’t wait to get there. Being good Texans, our first stop wasn’t Eastern North Carolina barbecue at all. It was Dampf Good BBQ, one of the few places in the state serving up Texas barbecue.

Being 29 degrees outside we had to eat quickly before everything got cold. But everything was on par with every one of the top Texas joints. Great brisket with a nice peppery bark, savory spareribs, very tender turkey, and a burger that was so large we were able to split it into thirds and still get 4 bites each. We toured the pits, which was us being more nosey than curious, and talked with Nick (the owner) for a while to allow time for digestion before we hit the road back to Raleigh. 

              After that grand BBQ feast, we needed something to cleanse the pallet and I knew just the thing, hotdogs. The Roast Grill is run by a husband-and-wife duo, George and Kathy. We made the pilgrimage for one reason. HOT WIENERS. 

That’s what the sign above the front door says. 13-year-old me would’ve thought this was the funniest thing ever. Inside there are only about 10 bar seats and a menu that’s probably older than I am. It was a sheet of paper stained with years of grease and sunlight. The choices were simple, “Hot dogs- only” and “Hot dog + drink”. When our turn to order came George asked, “what do you want on your dog?” Not wanting to cause a fuss, “just give it to me the way you eat them.” Apparently, that means chili, mustard, and slaw. Jordan stepped up next, “What’re my options?” George just stared at him. It wasn’t an angry look. It was a look of a man who had answered that question ten thousand times. “Everything he got.” He finally said. “You can have it all or take something off.” As he turned around to the grill and I noticed the back of his shirt, “NO KETCHUP” in red lettering. I guess he got tired of answering another question too. After slurping down our dogs, we once again asked George where his favorite BBQ spot was in town. “Ole Time’s got the best fried chicken and pork” I laughed.  “Fried chicken at a BBQ joint?” He looked at me like I just insulted his grandmother and said, “look man, you asked the question”. Like at Dampf, we noticed the people behind us becoming impatient with us taking up valuable seats. Between the four pounds of BBQ and a chili dog sitting in my gut it was time to head back to the hotel.

              After a nap and 45 minutes in the restroom, we finally regained consciousness. It was time to eat like locals. Based on George’s recommendation, we headed to Ole Time BBQ. When we pulled up the place was a ghost town, bad sign. Inside were six barstools and a half dozen booths. We did what we were told and ordered the fried chicken along with some pork, cole slaw, and hush puppies. Right after we ordered, the place filled up. You would’ve thought someone rang a dinner bell. Within a few minutes nearly thirty people piled in the front door to order the exact same dinner we just ordered. When we got the food, it looked dismal. Then we took our first bite, and the heavens opened. This was without a doubt the best fried chicken I had ever had. Crispy skin, juicy meat, and seasoned with whatever magic they keep in the back of the kitchen. Then I tried the pork. That first bite of Eastern North Carolina barbecue stopped me in my tracks. The sharp vinegar sauce cut through the rich pork in a way I had never tasted before.  It was tangy, savory, and just a little spicy. After our meal we sat there dumbfounded, did we just go to a BBQ joint to eat fried chicken? Not only that, did we just eat the best bite of pork we would ever eat in our lives? After dinner, we went around the side of the building hoping to shake the pitmasters hand. But we couldn’t find the pit room. Then we noticed something else, there was no smell of smoke in the air. We stood there for a second before someone said, “Did we just get served BBQ that wasn’t cooked on wood” the answer might’ve ruined the magic. So, we never went back inside for fear of revealing the truth. We climbed into the rental, drove away, and chose blissful ignorance instead. 

              We called our final day in Eastern North Carolina “Road Trip Day”. Before it was over we would drive 261 miles and eat at five restaurants that serve whole-hog barbecue. The map took us to a small red brick house with a long driveway that wrapped around the back. We would’ve passed it up if it weren’t for the small, corrugated plastic sign by the driveway that said, “BBQ Open Saturday 8-until”. Past the house sat a small carport with a couple of empty tables and chairs in front of building with a sheet metal roof and a cedar plank façade. We were stopped at a toll booth out in front of the carport where we made our order, two small BBQ plates with slaw and hush puppies. The man radioed the order to the kitchen and a woman almost immediately came out with two Styrofoam to-go boxes. Now, there is only 3 “parking spots” at this BBQ joint and it was 8:30 am in January, so we were in a conundrum, where do we eat? We asked the woman, she looked at us dumbfounded and said, “well its 17 degrees outside. So, I would recommend not eating outdoors.” So, we pulled our rental car into one of the 3 spots and dug in. 

Inside the box sat around a pound of pork studded with red pepper flakes from the style of vinegar sauce we came to love the night before. On-top of that pork sat a shard of perfectly cooked crispy hog skin. We dug into the pork and let out an audible moan, this bite was 10x better than what we had the night before. I grabbed the three-inch shard of crispy skin and stepped outside to see it in the sun, and it looked like a piece of glass glistening in the light. We cracked it into three and shared it, crunching down on what was most definitely the best version of pork I’ve had and possibly will ever have. The first crack felt like I had bit down on a glass shard which immediately began to melt down in my mouth leaving a salty/ porky taste behind. After demolishing all the pork, we set in on the hush puppies. They were somewhere between cornbread and funnel cake with a crispy outside, soft inside, and a sweeter than any hush puppy I’d ever eaten. We finished both plates entirely while watching 3 dozen cars drive through and pick up their food. Besides us, who would come out here and grab bbq at 8am?  We realized they aren’t open in the morning because people around here want to eat bbq for breakfast.  By the time we were leaving the line of cars had turned over three or four times. We weren’t watching people buy their breakfast, we were watching the entire town prepare for lunch. 

After 57 miles and a coffee stop, turning down “B’s Barbecue Road” felt like a good omen. We pulled into their gravel parking lot behind the pit house in a plume of smoke. Stepping out we got baptized by the smell of what can only be described as familiar yet unique. The main restaurant was a worn and tattered white brick fronted building with baby blue wood siding that was faded by years of sun. the sign on the front of the building reads, “B’s Barbecue, Born in Eastern NC” with a happy little pig and a “Pepsi-Cola” logo. The window is around the side of the building and there was no indoor seating that day, much like Sid’s. 

At the window we ordered the same thing we had eaten earlier, two BBQ plates. The plates came out within 3 minutes of ordering, and we were pleasantly surprised, as it turns out a BBQ plate here comes with a chicken quarter! The pork was chopped finer than Sid’s and needed another splash of sauce, but the flavor stopped me in my tracks. It reminded me of my granddaddy’s brisket when I was a kid and I couldn’t figure out why and the chicken carried a similar flavor. 

Back home we can typically walk around back and start chatting it up with almost any pitmaster and quickly build a repertoire through anecdotes and mutual friends. But this time, I fumbled the ball. Walking into the pit room I shook the cook’s hand and immediately asked him, “so, how do y’all make any money at this?” After his smile turned to a scowl, I realized what I had said could be misconstrued as me not enjoying my meal. I began crawfishing and explained to him that in Texas every time I have cooked a hog, I spend hundreds of dollars on a cord of wood and buy heritage breed hogs just to scrape a couple of pennies together of profit. He took a long drag of his Marlboro light, “well son…” then took another drag. “Quit doing it that way”, I just stared. “Go buy yourself some Kingsford blue and use that instead of wasting all your money burning good wood.” Then it clicked, the nostalgic taste I loved so much was charcoal smoke. I poked around checking out the set up for another couple minutes picking his brain about all the nuances of hog cooking began saying goodbye when he stopped me. “Son, you seem to think about BBQ a lot. Stop thinking. Cook the hog until it is done without burning it, that’s all this is. Nothing more.” I shook his hand and left feeling like I had learned 30 years of knowledge in 30 minutes. I thanked him, climbed back in the rental and he shouted one last thing, “oh! Quit buying them fancy pigs. A hog is a hog, buy the cheapest one you can find.”

You may be thinking, “so you’re telling me that you ate at 2 joints before noon, and you still have more places to go? Your gut must’ve been in shambles.” To that I say, you’re right. We were stuffed but a good soldier puts his head down and carries on. Stop 3 brought us to Ayden, NC to a brick building with a large capital rotunda on top sitting in a white gravel parking lot. Skylight Inn is well known in the BBQ world as an integral piece of BBQ history.

 Since 1947, they have been known worldwide for their whole hog BBQ cooked over wood. As you walk inside you are immediately greeted by a line of locals waiting to get Saturday lunch with their families. You order at one of two registers at a wooden counter covered in bottled sauces and merch. Behind the counter you see a man with two cleavers chopping hog on a large wooden chopping block. The block, concave in the middle from all the chopping that has occurred over time and the hog piled 12-inches high studded with little bits of crispy skin mixed in. We ordered 1lb of BBQ, chicken, corn bread, and slaw all of which was being prepared behind the counter while we ordered. As we went into the dining room it was filled with locals talking across the room at each other asking, “how’s your mom” and “you see Troy’s new truck?” The food was similar to what we had now grown accustomed to. The pork was chopped with crispy skin mixed in that was a nice mix of the first two stops we went to, silky smooth with a nice finish from the sauce. The chicken, however, was…. different. I can best describe it as a half chicken cut into quarters and dunked in an orange-colored BBQ sauce. We picked at it and must’ve had a look on our face because a local looked over and said, “yeah, that chicken is different. You either love it or hate it. It’s a lot like the cornbread” When we ate the cornbread it was like chewing on corn flavored cardboard, it’s a half inch thick and very dense. 

We walked around back and stuck our heads into the smokehouse where we ran into one of the pit hands. He opened the door, and a wall of heat hit us in the face. Along the wall sat brick pits glowing with cherry red coals. Across from them, another fire burned nothing but wood. It wasn’t cooking anything. It’s only job was to make more coals. That’s when I realized how much labor goes into this style of barbecue. Someone’s entire day is spent tending to one fire just to feed another.  When I asked him how much wood they go through a month he responded, “a lot” and took us out back to their wood yard where they had a mountain of wood piled up. It must have come in by the truck load because there were about 25 different piles scattered around all about 6-foot tall by 12-foot wide.

 The tour concluded in the kitchen where we got a behind the scenes look at how they chop the hog. First it comes in as a quarter of the pig, then it’s deboned and the skin pulled off, after that all the meat is dumped on the board to be chopped. In a smooth motion the man chopping is slamming his cleavers through the pork, flipping un-chopped pork into the pile, and adding in crispy skin. It was very similar to watching drum line of snares. You watch and see them do it but you know there is no way you could do it that fast. Then he weighs out his meat and based on a table chart on the wall figures out how much vinegar sauce to add into his pork. This man does this whole process on repeat all day until there are no more customers left to feed or the hog runs out. 

Our fourth stop landed us at a restaurant that I had never heard of, and after a full day of chopped pork it was a welcome change of pace. We pulled up to a beautiful building with large glass windows in front. After a day of pulling into gravel parking lots and weathered buildings, Prime BBQ looked like it had been dropped in from Austin. 

 You walk into a big open room where the line wraps around the entire perimeter. You get to drool over everyone else’s plates piled high with brisket, sausage, and turkey. As we drew closer to the counter, we noticed something on the wall, a Texas Monthly article. Daniel Vaughn had ranked Prime the second-best Texas-style barbecue joint outside of Texas. Suddenly our expectations got a little higher. We ordered a smaller spread than normal because, as you can figure, we weren’t hungry. Brisket, pulled pork, ribs, and sausage with 3 sides and two deserts. As I ate, if I closed my eyes, I could see myself sitting in a BBQ joint anywhere in Texas. I was surprised that someone in a sea of chopped pork could nail a better smoked brisket than a lot of my friends on the “Top 50” list. 

We noticed a sign on the wall that said, “want a pit room tour? Ask an employee!”. What the hell, might as well right? We entered the massive pit room with tall ceilings and windows that allow patrons from the restaurant to view inside. Set in the wall were J&R rotisserie pits, the same brand that has been used in Texas for years. The pit room was abnormally clean compared to some of the rooms I had been inside back home, almost sterile. On the wall we noticed a familiar set of rules on a piece of butcher paper. These rules were the bible according to Bill “Sausage Sensei” Dumas, a true Texas sausage legend and the man who taught us how to make sausage. Those rules are drilled into everyone who walks through his shop and are never to be forgotten. We ended up sitting and talking BBQ with the GM and one of the pitmasters for about an hour. Before long we were swapping names of mutual friends back in Texas, it was strange. We’d flown across the country looking for something completely different, only to realize the barbecue world is a whole lot smaller than we thought.

Our final stop of the day brought us to Sam Jones BBQ, a restaurant run by the same family behind Skylight. More than one person told us that it’s a very similar menu and to check it out because they have the capacity to pump out volume. We pulled up close to closing time and the place was a ghost town. It made us think, do they really push a lot of food out of this place? We ordered some pork, pork ribs, chicken, and corn bread. If I’m being truthful, it wasn’t anything to write home about. We may have caught them on an off day, but our meal never reached the level of the other places we’d visited. The pork was dry, the ribs were tough, and the cornbread was identical to Skylight’s. But their pit room was sweet. Inside, they had the capability to cook 24 hogs and 150 racks of ribs at once. We noticed a giant pile charcoal bags outside the pit room and mentioned it to the manager. He chuckled and said, “well it’s a whole lot cheaper to run charcoal than to burn down wood.” It made us laugh, I guess that’s the common sentiment across the Eastern North Carolina region. 

As we got back in the car to go home and sleep. The drive to the hotel gave us some time to compare what we’d seen to what we knew back home. In Texas, a “BBQ plate” starts with another question, “what meat do you want?” In North Carolina, there isn’t a question. They mean a plate with pork, slaw, and corn bread. The prices surprised us too. The most expensive plate was $17.  Hell, in Texas that barely gets you a chopped beef sandwich at some places. The biggest difference is the culture surrounding the barbecue.  In Texas, it feels like barbecue joints are in competition to be “the next big thing”. Every year there’s another list, another viral video, another place “you have to try”. In North Carolina, I hadn’t got that feeling. These places weren’t trying to become famous. They became famous because they’d spent decades feeding their communities exceptionally well.  I began thinking about the waitress we encountered at the Waffle House asking us, “Don’t y’all have BBQ in Texas?” I now know what my response should have been. I would tell her, “We do, it’s just different.”