RALEIGH, N.C. — It’s an impossible question but Wyatt Dickson has an answer.
The best bite of barbecue in his barbecue-filled life happened to be a pig he smoked himself. It was a heritage breed from down the road at Chapel Hill Creamery, its diet consisting of leftover whey from cheesemaking and served pig-picking style.
With his fingers Dickson grabbed a hunk from the side where it was browned and caramelized and tinged with smoke and dunked it in a pool of fat and juices that had pooled in the curvature of the ribs.
“That might be one of the best bites I’ve ever had,” Dickson said. “It just doesn’t get any better than that.”
It’s not controversial these days to count a bite of barbecue as among the most weak-kneed experiences in all of food.
In the past decade or so, barbecue has ascended from a humble roadside delicacy to the top tier of the nation’s food world. Pitmasters have won James Beard Awards, gleaming restaurants have been built, moving an ancient tradition seemingly far from the takeout box.
As one of the country’s historic barbecue regions, North Carolina is in the midst of its own revival of the state’s most famous food.
But while the traditional pork and chicken have spots carved out on the menu, many of the restaurants opening today don’t look like the pits of old. The menus have taken on a decidedly Texan tone, making room for brisket and beef ribs and sausage amid the chopped pork and occasional smoked chicken. The dining rooms are sometimes gleaming like a fine-dining restaurant, the pits and smokers are front and center instead of tucked out back. Barbecue has added a bit of spectacle to the smoke.
But as trend and Texification change some North Carolina barbecue, others are reverent about the state’s gloried past.
“I feel like now more than ever, it’s important to cling to and safeguard our own barbecue traditions,” Dickson said. “There’s an influx of people from afar with their own barbecue tradition and barbecue expectations. There’s pressure on restaurants to meet those expectations and cook brisket or do it Texas style. I’m glad you like brisket but the gospel I preach is North Carolina whole hog barbecue.”
Although Dickson’s Picnic restaurant in Durham does serve a brisket that he is proud of, he’d just as well take it off the menu.
“I wish it wasn’t as delicious as it is,” Dickson said. “It would be much easier to not cook it. There’s nothing wrong with serving it, but it’s also not our barbecue tradition.”
HONORING AFRICAN AMERICAN BEGINNINGS OF BARBECUE
In the 1990s, Ed Mitchell helped ignite the first national obsession with barbecue. He first turned his family’s Wilson grocery store into a barbecue takeout joint, then later opened Mitchell’s Ribs, Chicken & Barbecue. In 2002, the Southern Foodways Alliance named Mitchell’s the best barbecue in North Carolina.
As the prestige of barbecue grew, Mitchell said it was important for him to honor the African American beginnings of barbecue, where enslaved people were often the perfectors and experts of a craft now getting recognition.
“It meant a great deal to me to see the focus on the craft,” Mitchell said. “People didn’t realize what it took to produce it. And most ones doing it back in the day were picking cotton, were working on the farm doing most of the labor. There was an emphasis on the talent that had always been overlooked — people assumed there was nothing to it.”
Over the past three decades Mitchell has become and remained the state’s most famous pitmaster. He was recently named as one of this year’s inductees to the National Barbecue Hall of fame, honoring a career with countless TV appearances, national press and invitations to places like Australia, London and Brazil to show the craft and art of cooking a pig over coals.
About 20 years ago, his son, Ryan Mitchell, ignored four emails from the late Anthony Bourdain, looking to film for his first Food Network show, “A Cook’s Tour.” The Mitchells were up to their necks running their restaurant and thought nothing of someone wanting to put barbecue on television.
The father-and-son duo is planning to open a new restaurant, The Preserve, in Raleigh, which will feature whole hog. But, in a sign of the times, it will have brisket as well.
“We have to be aware of this generation and their eating habits and serve the barbecue they want,” Ryan Mitchell said.
A SHIFTING POPULATION — AND TASTES
On a weekday in Wayne County, the lunch rush at Grady’s BBQ will be largely neighbors and farmers, the same as it’s been for years. But on the weekends, North Carolina’s great barbecue cathedrals often rely on the road-tripping diner, one with the time and inclination to burn $50 in gas for a $5 sandwich.
The shifts in barbecue reflect the changes in diners as much as the whims of taste and trend. In the past two decades, cities and counties in North Carolina have seen a whole lot of new people, especially in the Triangle, many likely bringing a different definition of barbecue.
Sam Jones isn’t sure if the barbecue is shifting, or if it’s the people.
“The hard lines that used to exist, that barbecue was either this or it’s not barbecue — that’s over,” Jones said. “It used to be, for people in North Carolina, it was either whole hog, or it ain’t (expletive). For 10 million Texans, it’s brisket. As times go on and we’re so much more transient as a society, those lines are blurred.”
People in Eastern North Carolina still call Skylight Inn in Ayden “Pete Jones Barbecue,” or just Pete Jones’ place, despite his death in 2006. Sam Jones’ grandfather added a silver dome to the one-story brick building after it was once described as the Barbecue Capital of the World in a National Geographic story.
Sam Jones still smarts over the weeks after he first opened Sam Jones BBQ in Greenville and neighbors and friends chastised him in the “Bless Your Heart” section of the Daily Reflector newspaper for putting beer on the menu. His own father, a Baptist preacher, didn’t step foot in the restaurant for weeks.
Despite their blood connection, Skylight and Sam Jones exist in different worlds, maybe different times. There’s a mountain of oak logs piled as high as the restaurant behind Skylight, and things haven’t changed for generations. Even for Jones, Skylight is a time machine.
Jones travels in a circle of some of the country’s most famous pitmasters and counts Aaron Franklin and Wayne Mueller as friends, each Texas barbecue legends.
Perhaps it’s that company or maybe it’s because he’s a Jones, but brisket isn’t on the menu at Sam Jones BBQ for a fairly simple reason.
“We ain’t good at it, we ain’t got good at it,” Jones said. “I can’t be Aaron Franklin. But Aaron Franklin can’t be Sam Jones. The food has its own identity and the people to bring it to the table have their own as well.”
But Sam Jones, heir to a barbecue birthright, says he’s energized by the evolving landscape within a centuries-old tradition.
“I’m never going to be a person who hates on new barbecue,” he said. “Just don’t half-ass it. You don’t need to be a 17th generation cook to make good barbecue.”
WHOLE HOG AND PIEDMONT IN THE ERA OF BRISKET
On the phone, John Shelton Reed made coleslaw as he talked barbecue, mixing up the cabbage for a dinner party he planned for the next day, with a Piedmont-style butt as the centerpiece.
Reed, a former UNC-Chapel Hill sociology professor, is one of the nation’s foremost barbecue historians, authoring numerous books, including “Holy Smoke: The Big Book of North Carolina Barbecue.”
The fierce regionality of North Carolina barbecue seems to be waning among newer restaurants, Reed notes. The lines of Eastern North Carolina and the Western North Carolina or Piedmont style are no longer stark and absolute, if they ever were.
The Eastern-style evangelists will tell you the flavor is distinct in the whole roasted pig — that the dark and white meat with the rich and fatty belly and prized rib meat all mixed together becomes something greater than all the parts smoked alone.
But the Western-style, Lexington loyalists might say that all it takes to tap into North Carolina flavor is a 20-pound shoulder, not a 200-pound pig. The other main difference is a bit of ketchup added to the vinegary sauce and slaw in Lexington.
“The two are much more like each other than they are anything outside the state,” Reed said. “It’s a slight difference people make a big deal of, like rooting for Duke or UNC, or being a Baptist or a Methodist.”
Reed once attended a brisket course in Austin, Texas and said anyone who’s ever cooked a brisket knows to respect it, if not fear it. It’s not brisket that bothers Reed as he considers the evolution of barbecue, it’s places that try to cater to all tastes and perhaps lose their own point of view.
“The real threat to local styles and places is what I call the IHOP model — cooking ribs, brisket and pork shoulder and chicken, with a choice of sauces,” Reed said. “They’re starting to pop up in places without barbecue traditions, or even in places that do have traditions, like Raleigh, filling up with people from other places.”
North Carolina barbecue stands out from Texas, some note, with direct heat up under the meat. Coals sit under the whole hog or shoulder and eventually build to a steady sizzle of fat dripping down and puffing into smoke.
“North Carolina is not just the vinegary based sauce, it’s also the fat dripping on the coals,” said Bob Garner, the former UNC-TV host and author of “Bob Garner’s Book of Barbecue.” “You get that bewitching grill taste, you get the smoke, that’s what makes it unique.”
Today, accolades and acclaim has meant barbecue is more respected and admired than ever before. That’s all well and good, said Robert Moss, barbecue editor at Southern Living magazine. But he thinks sometimes it can be a bit much.
“The Texas mania distorted what barbecue is supposed to be,” Moss said. “Barbecue wasn’t a bucket list item. You never had to wait three hours to eat, it wasn’t an over-the-top experience with these luxurious slices of beef rib. It was a place to get a bite to eat and hang out.”
Moss builds one of the most influential lists in barbecue, forcing him to regularly compare decades-old pits to the latest barbecue hot spot.
“It’s a modest meal, but there’s beauty in the simplicity that you don’t get when you pile on Flaming Hot Cheetos or a stuffed jalapeno,” he said.
A FAMILY TRADITION IN GREENVILLE
B’s Barbecue sits on the Raleigh side of Greenville on a road named after itself.
In the pitch-black Pitt County darkness, the coals glow orange and hot as Ronald House shovels them beneath the pigs in a pit made out of a converted carport. Sparks spit and die on the floor as the coals are disturbed and then laid to rest, building to a temperature House says he feels with his body and knows as just right.
“I’ve been doing it so long I never have to raise the lid,” House said. “I can walk right in the pit and know it’s right. There’s no thermometer.”
A few cars pass by B’s in the middle of the night, honking their horns without stopping. Maybe they know Ronald or the usual B’s pitmaster or maybe they smell the smoke and the fat and know someone’s tending the flame.
Ronald’s father, Arthur House, was the original pitmaster at B’s for years.
B’s Barbecue is named for its founder, William McLawhorn, who opened the whole hog joint after losing his farm to hard times. B, as McLawhorn was called, teamed up with his best friend and fellow farmer Arthur House and began selling barbecue, with House smoking the pigs and McLawhorn chopping and seasoning, said his daughter Tammy Godley, who runs B’s today with her sisters Donna and Judy.
B’s leaves out the crispy skin, with Godley saying her father and House preferred it “clean,” as they called it. They kept the B’s style intact.
“We still had to answer to him,” Godley said of her sisters’ gradual takeover of B’s. “We kind of got in the routine.”
The road-trip diners who have made their way to B’s from Boston or Philadelphia after finding it on a best barbecue list will sometimes ask for brisket — even though the word isn’t anywhere on the menu or even likely anywhere within 10 miles.
“It happens three or four times every week,” Godley said. “I say, ‘We just have the chopped.’ If they want ribs, the only sets we do have are gone before we open.”
On a Saturday, if you’re not in line in the first couple hours after it opens at 9 am., prepare for heartbreak. The pit-cooked chicken is the first item to sell out every day, Godley said. Smoked chicken is a common alternative to pork at Eastern North Carolina barbecue spots, but the one at B’s stands out, slightly charred on the side closest to the coals, its skin slowly crisped by the heat and sauced with vinegar before serving.
On a recent Saturday, B’s was out of barbecue by 12:30 and out of chicken an hour before that.
“A lot of people consider us the best,” Godley said. “We strive to make sure it is.”
B’s is in its second generation, but Godley doesn’t know what comes next.
“We’re not getting any younger,” she said. “My oldest sister, Donna, she’s 62, but said she can work another 10 years. ... I know, hopefully, another five years. I don’t know too much after that.”
CLOSING TIME FOR SOME OF THE CLASSICS
That’s the fear for any barbecue fan, that yet another wood-cooked North Carolina institution will close, bested not by brisket, but time.
Growing up, Matthew Register knew barbecue as Easter pig pickings, usually cooked on gas and sauced with vinegar.
He credits John Shelton Reed’s book “Holy Smoke” for pushing his view of barbecue back further in time, back to when wood-cooked was the only way. He started smoking pork shoulders in his backyard, chasing a taste and culture that snowballed into Southern Smoke in Garland.
“What I was doing in my backyard was to pass on to my children,” Register said. “This is what barbecue is. This is part of our heritage. This is something that’s culturally identifiable to Eastern North Carolina.”
Among the closings in recent years, there’s Allen & Son in Chapel Hill, Jack Cobb & Son in Farmville and Smiley’s in Lexington.
Register is afraid of losing another.
“If people don’t take that 10-minute detour, these places aren’t going to be here,” Register said. “I know gas is expensive, but make a trip to Grady’s, pull into Skylight. If we don’t we lose a piece of our history and identity.”
REVIVAL OF A PIT IN GOLDSBORO
That’s what makes Wilber’s a rarity in North Carolina barbecue. As pits and restaurants closed across the state, Wilber’s is open today as one of the very few pulled back from the brink.
Popularized by its namesake, the late Wilberdean Shirley, who passed away in 2021, Wilber’s appeared lost in 2019 amid a bankruptcy filing. Then a group of Goldsboro natives partnered to purchase the restaurant, keeping alive one of the state’s most legendary pits.
“Wilber’s is a historic place, it deserves to be here,” said Willis Underwood, who owns a Goldsboro insurance company. “There’s a lot of pride in this tradition and in preserving a part of history.”
It goes beyond pride. The purchase price was $350,000, but reopening Wilber’s also took hundreds of thousands in renovation costs, said Underwood, who declined to name a specific figure. It meant restoring and rebuilding the brick and cinderblock pit and updating the restaurant and dining room.
The changes were philosophical as well, with Wilber’s being perhaps the only historic North Carolina barbecue joint selling beer. And on Thursdays, it sells a brisket special that would shock a Texan, cooked over coals in the pit and chopped instead of sliced.
Redeeming Wilber’s was a labor of love, Underwood said, but seeing yet another wood-cooked restaurant vanish like a puff of smoke was too much to bear. He thought the modern barbecue fan could still find something profoundly delicious in Wilber’s.
“The methods and mythology, it deserves to be kept,” Underwood said. “Sometimes things get over-complicated. If you can get back to the basics, that’s where the true love is.”
