by Unknown
I was way ahead of schedule at this point, because eating in New York had made me forget how quick and efficient service can be everywhere else. Waitresses who work the barbecue circuit have a routine.
Once you’re seated, they take your order within thirty seconds. A minute later they’re back with tea, utensils wrapped in a paper napkin, and an apology for keeping you waiting for your meal. Two more minutes pass and your sandwich arrives. I had eaten three lunches in Goldsboro, and it wasn’t yet one p.m.
I had one more stop, a catering firm known as Alton’s, open to the public only three days a week. I figured any place that exclusive had to be worth finding, even if it was on the road leading to the Goldsboro-Wayne Municipal Airport, and nobody I asked had ever heard of the Goldsboro-Wayne Municipal Airport. It took me almost an hour of high-speed driving before I found what I believe is the world’s only unmarked municipal airport, and the more lost I got the more certain I was that I F O R K I T O V E R
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was in for the barbecue experience of my life. That’s the sort of optimism required when searching for a remote restaurant you’re sure you’ll never find. When I finally arrived, I saw that the barbecue was being prepared in some sort of pig cooker on wheels. I liked the idea that locals never go anywhere without dragging their barbecue behind them.
As I walked inside, I heard the sweetest of sounds, the thunk of a cleaver chopping away at pork. Alton’s resembled a Grange hall hired for a family reunion. There were long tables set with plastic tablecloths, and the chairs looked to be the kind that fold up for storing in a shed, although I tested mine and it refused to bend. Every table had four unmarked bottles of sauce on it, but I ignored them. I never add sauce to barbecue sandwiches, figuring it will be interpreted as an insult, the way shaking salt on a plat du jour angers fancy French chefs.
The sandwich at Alton’s was tasty enough, although it came on one of those horribly squished rolls and contained so little meat it was about as filling as an hors d’oeuvre. The iced tea was weak, like most iced tea in this part of the country, but I suppose I can understand the reluctance of proprietors to spend a lot of money on tea when what their customers want is plenty of sugar. On the way out, I picked up some oversize, homemade, brown-sugary chocolate-chip cookies, three for a dollar. I was planning to keep them in the car and eat them throughout the trip, but the chocolate started dissolving in the heat. That can’t be said of Moon Pies, which are covered with an unimaginably terrible chocolate product that refuses to melt.
The luncheon portion of my first day concluded, I headed north-east to Farmville, looking for Jack Cobb’s, which is open only three days a week. This was supposed to be one of them, but the lights were out.
I was sorry to see that, because I liked the ambiance: a rusty old jack cobb & son sign, a pig painted on the front window, and railroad tracks running alongside. I drove on in search of the well-regarded B’s, in Greenfield, and found it on the edge of town, on B’s Barbecue Road.
That’s about as fine a tribute as a barbecue spot can get, having the road it’s on named after it. B’s was closed, even though it wasn’t supposed to be, according to the hours posted outside. Somebody had 2 1 8
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scribbled a note on a white paper bag and left it between the front door and the screen. It read: “Sold out of food.” I pushed on, headed for Bunn’s, the place that bragged it would put its barbecue up against anybody’s.
Bunn’s is located in Windsor, which looks like the kind of town that had parades and ice cream socials until the four-lane bypass got built and sucked the life right out of it. Bunn’s is a pleasant place, in a hoary, country-store sort of way, although a refurbished seating area in a side room, apparently modeled after hospital cafeterias, couldn’t have been more depressing. The sandwiches cost $1.50, which is fifty cents less than anybody else’s, and came on a hamburger bun that was a whole lot worse than anybody else’s. The pork was respectable enough, although I didn’t detect any hints of wood smoke, and I couldn’t figure out where or how it had been prepared. The tiny charcoal grill out back was way too small to hold a hog.
I reached the town of Ayden about noon the next day and went looking for the Skylight Inn, which, I remembered from a previous visit, was on Route 11. I drove up and down the road for a couple miles each way and was frantic with worry when I couldn’t find it, because I remembered the sandwich there as one of the most memorable eating experiences of my life. It turned out that Route 11 had changed, and I was driving on the all-new, four-lane version. The Skylight Inn was where it always had been, but the road was no longer Route 11.
Almost nothing had changed. In back was an alpine pile of split wood, so huge it reminded me of those mountains of used tires scattered throughout the Northeast. A sign read upholding a family tradition of wood cooked bar-b-que since 1830.
The funny little dome atop the one-story brick building was still in place, denoting the Skylight Inn’s claim to being the barbecue capital of the world, which it might well be. Inside I noticed a self-service soda dispenser that wasn’t there in the eighties and more gumball machines than ever—four in all. Barbecue places have a lot of gumball machines because local booster clubs are always asking if they can put one in to raise money to send kids to summer camp, and barbecue owners don’t F O R K I T O V E R
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have the heart to refuse. Behind the counter, a man with a cleaver was chopping pork, although he wasn’t the same fellow from fifteen years back.
I gradually made my way to the front of the line, where Pete Jones, the owner, was assembling sandwiches and trays. The $2.50 tray gets you coleslaw, cornbread, and more pork than can fit in a sandwich. I was tempted but ordered the usual. Working quickly, Jones scooped up a mound of chopped pork from a huge pile on the counter behind him, added a smaller serving of coleslaw, and put both on a Sunbeam hamburger bun. He wrapped the sandwich in waxed paper and handed it over. My first impression was of heft. As I started into one of the side rooms to find an empty table, I noticed a fellow with a NRA belt buckle and a Pepsi-Cola cap tidying up. I asked him how much meat went into each sandwich, and he replied, “All we can cram in.” The dining area I selected didn’t have a lot going for it, as far as customer satisfaction was concerned. Every place I’d been before here had invested seriously in air-conditioning, upgraded the comfort level from sweatbox to meat locker. The air-conditioning in the Skylight Inn’s side room was barely perceptible. Wisps of a pork-scented breeze drifted about. The tables had brown Formica tops, the chairs had brown vinyl seats, and the floor had brown-speckled tile. A couple of Rubbermaid Brute garbage cans stood in one corner. All these ambiance issues became immaterial the moment I bit into the sandwich. I couldn’t stop myself. I ate it so fast I had to go back and get another one right away.
The pork was creamy and soft. The crunchy bits of skin were done just right, which meant they encompassed the yin and yang of barbecue, the crackle of carmelization and the ooze of fat. The vinegar was barely noticeable, and the presence of hot sauce was undetectable until it touched the back of my throat, leaving a tiny burn like the finish of a Napoleon Cognac. The coleslaw was fresh, elegant, and fine, containing a hint of mustard, so little that it seemed to influence the color more than the taste. I tried to eat my second sandwich slowly, but I gulped it, too, and I was too full to have a third.
I walked over to the counter to pay my respects to Jones and was 2 2 0
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told he had gone home for lunch, a shocking admission. If a man can eat this food every day, why would he choose to eat anywhere else? The fellow taking over for him said I should go to the house across the street and knock on the kitchen door. I walked across South Lee, which had hardly any traffic as a result of its no longer being Route 11, and through a yard, passing some pens containing turkeys and others with dogs. I knocked hard so Jones could hear me over all the gobbling and bark-ing that started up when I went by.
He was in the kitchen, having fish for lunch. His doctor had told him he had to stop eating barbecue six days a week, which he’d been doing for fifty years. Jones said he’d been diagnosed with a cholesterol count of about 800, which is a pretty effective warning sign for a seventy-two-year-old man. “Actually, I’m just guessing the number,” he said, “but I went to the doctor, and he took all these tests, and when he got the results he called me and said, ‘Come into my office as quick as you can.
You’re supposed to be dead.’ He wouldn’t tell me what it was, but a little while later he said I’d gotten it down to 375, which was about half.” His daughter had fried the fish in olive oil, and he was washing it down with cranberry juice, a meal he didn’t seem to be enjoying all that much.
He just ate steadily and slowly, and then he smoked a cigarette.
He said nothing had changed at the Skylight Inn since last I’d come around, other than himself, and that was due to age. He was still cooking barbecue the same way, on charcoal made from 85 percent oak and 15 percent hickory, more oak than hickory because he likes a less smoky taste. I asked him a lot of questions about the coleslaw, which was even better than I recalled. He said he’d been offered ten thousand dollars for the recipe but that there was no recipe because every batch had to be made differently. “No two bags of cabbage are the same, and I go by smell,” he said. He agreed to reveal one secret. The mayonnaise he uses is Kraft.
I asked him if there was any barbecue he liked as much as his own, because I hadn’t found any, and he said that a second cousin of his by the name of Bum Dennis had a restaurant in the center of town I should try. “His granddaddy and my granddaddy were brothers,” he said. I drove F O R K I T O V E R
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over to Bum’s Restaurant, which is across from the police station and one store over from a shop called Guns Unlimited.
Bum had admirable air-conditioning, a relief after the Skylight Inn’s.
I can’t praise much more than that. The sandwich was so poorly put together almost all the meat fell out when I picked it up. That made me all the more appreciative of the assemblage at the Skylight Inn. Jones is like one of those artisans who can build a stone wall without mortar that lasts for centuries.
The next morning, I headed for the southeast corner of the state, passing Lane’s Barbecue House. It was closed, but with good reason. It had burned down, which is one of the potential drawbacks to cooking with wood. Just south of Camp Lejeune, I came to Betty’s Smoke House Restaurant. I walked around the building and didn’t see anything resembling smoke. Nor did I see wood. I felt it was a little too early for lunch, so I decided to poke around the gift shop, which made the hostess anxious. She yelled across the room, “Can I help you, sir?” I got the message: Get out of there and get to your assigned seat. I did so, immediately.
I ordered quickly, then asked permission to keep the menu at my table, just to look it over. In less than two minutes, the hostess returned and snatched it away. Dillydallying isn’t encouraged at Betty’s, which moves at such high speed the dining-room chairs are on rollers, like office furniture. The sandwich cost $3.50, which was too much, and it came with french fries, which it shouldn’t have. The pork tasted fine, but the fries were the mundane kind served at coffee shops.
Just before the South Carolina border I came to Big Nell’s Pit Stop, which backs up to a trailer park. I opened the door and walked into a fawning tribute to NASCAR. The walls were covered with stock car–
racing posters, and all available shelf space was filled with racing-related bric-a-brac, like a Kellogg’s Corn Flakes box with a picture of Richard Petty. Augmenting the decor was a handwritten sign taped to the men’s room door that read, if you make a mess, clean it up! I guess that was Big Nell’s way of saying bon appetit. The sandwich was remarkable in one respect: it was inedible. The pork was so watery and tasteless it could well have been made from reconstituted meat, the stuff 2 2 2
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of Camp Lejeune training missions. It was the only sandwich I didn’t finish, the only eastern North Carolina chopped pork sandwich I’ve ever disliked.
The proprietor might have mistaken me for Jeff Gordon, so quickly did I accelerate out of Big Nell’s parking lot. I started back north on Route 17, then performed another feat of daredevil driving when I noticed a Cheerwine soda dispenser on the far side of the four-lane, gleaming like a Cape Hatteras lighthouse, just outside a tire store. Cheerwine is pretty much the sweetest soft drink ever made, and in my opinion the greatest accompaniment to barbecue ever produced, although nowhere I ate on this trip offered it. I ripped the car into a U-turn, tore into the parking area, and had an ice-cold, twelve-ounce can that tasted just right, a little like Dr Pepper with cherry syrup stirred in. Except for a Moon Pie, I can’t think of another food that provides so much pleasure for forty cents.
I had three stops scheduled for my final day. The first place let me down, considering how perfect it looked. Smoke was pouring from an open pit when I arrived at Murray’s, a white-pained cinder-block building in a rapidly gentrifying suburb of Raleigh. Yet the pork was oddly bland, tasting of little except vinegar.
Stephenson’s, which lists its address as Willow Springs but isn’t even in the same county as Willow Springs, wasn’t promising at all. It was way too fancified. The tables were varnished pine, and mine was situated next to a glass wall overlooking a little garden of flowering trees and bushes. I couldn’t figure out why I felt so uneasy, until I realized I had never been in a barbecue place with landscaping before. The shrub-bery was excellent, and much to my surprise, so was the sandwich. The coleslaw was magnificently ingenious, a challenge to the slaw made by Pete Jones. Some wild-eyed innovator in the kitchen had added a few bits of finely chopped pickle, just enough to give the slaw extra piquancy and a pleasing crunch.
Grady’s was even harder to find than Stephenson’s. Allegedly in Dud-ley, it was five miles from the town center at the intersection of two F O R K I T O V E R
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roads not found on any map I had in my car, and I had three of them.
There was nothing near it but open fields and a tractor. Grady’s had seating for about twenty-five, a cooler filled with soft drinks, some frilly curtains, and a gum machine. The pork was so delicious I found myself contemplating the possibility that it was even better than the Skylight Inn’s, although the coleslaw wasn’t in the same league. I wanted to ask the woman stirring a pot how she made such a wonderful sandwich, but she let me know she was too busy to talk and I should find her husband, who had all the time I needed.
Stephen Grady told me he had opened in 1986, back when he was employed at a sawmill and could get all the wood he needed for free.
At the time, his wife, Gerri, had been laid off and needed work. “I bought it to make her a job,” he said, smiling, “and does she ever have a job.” He’s sixty-five now, and he and Gerri expect to work for five more years.
That will be the end, he said, because nobody will want to undertake the costly upgrades the state demands of a new proprietor. A long-term owner is allowed to ignore many newfangled regulations, and so can a relative who takes over a family business, but none of Grady’s eight children from a first marriage had shown interest in barbecue, and his wife’s children weren’t lining up, either. “You got to work hard at this,” he said. “This is not one of those easy livings.” Worried that the end was near for wood-cooked North Carolina barbecue, I reached a supervisor in the state’s environmental-health services.
Bart Campbell, one of those much-feared regulators I’d heard about, insisted the state wasn’t trying to put anybody out of business. It just didn’t want walls covered with soot, cinder blocks soaked with grease, and flies coming through unscreened windows. He didn’t sound unreasonable. “We don’t want people cooking on bedsprings they put across the top of their pit,” he said. “We’re trying to keep people away from things they can’t clean.”
He assured m
e that the state of North Carolina still stood behind wood-cooked barbecue, which was the right thing to say. Without barbecue there would be no reason for citizens to attend church suppers 2 2 4
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or gather at political rallies, both fundamental to the well-being of any southern state. “Life without good barbecue would be bad,” Campbell said.
I returned home to the land of toll roads, satisfied. I had eaten too much of the best barbecue I’d ever tasted, and I felt reasonably confident that wood cooking would endure, provided future generations of barbecue owners didn’t resent having to run hot-water pipes out to their pits.
I had eaten a dozen or so sandwiches during my four days on the road. While some people might think that was too many, all I know is that the morning after my return, I woke up realizing I had a long day ahead of me and not a single sandwich to help me get through it.
GQ, november 2000
A L I C E D O E S N ’ T C O O K
H E R E A N Y M O R E
This is a story about the celebrity chefs you adore: Wolfgang, Emeril, Rocco, Alice, Todd, and Mario.
It has a flaw, however, and I wish to acknowledge the fact immediately, lest you think I’m trying to get away with something. This is not the equivalent of one of those sneaky magazine profiles where the movie star refuses to give an interview and the writer hides the truth as long as he can.
Here is my confession: Although I am writing about celebrity chefs, the ones beloved by TV audiences and foodies nationwide, no actual celebrity chefs will make an appearance. I suppose it is the journalistic equivalent of mock turtle soup.
I tried to find them. I looked everywhere. I did what every glued-to-the-tube food fanatic wishes he could do. I traveled around the country visiting their signature restaurants. I made my way to Beverly Hills (Wolfgang Puck’s Spago), Berkeley (Alice Waters’ Chez Panisse), Boston (Todd English’s Olives, in Charlestown), and New Orleans (Emeril Lagasse’s Emeril’s). I also ate near home, in New York City (Rocco DiSpirito’s Rocco’s on 22nd and Mario Batali’s Babbo). I went 0-for-America.