12 Bones Smokehouse

Linkdown: 5/7/14

/ Barbecue Bros / Leave a comment

– It’s spelled “barbecue”

– The “BeerBQ” hotdog from Triple C made with pulled pork and a sauce made with their smoked amber beer was JJ’s Red Hots best selling hot dog in its “brewdogs” series

– No NC festival made this list of barbecue festivals from USA Today (h/t bbqboard)

– This list of five meals you can’t miss in NC includes Luella’s Bar-B-Que in Asheville; more coverage from the Asheville Citizen-Times

At Luella’s, you can get an order of ribs (excellent), beef brisket (also excellent), chopped pork (some of the best I’ve had, and I’m a certified barbecue judge), and tempeh. The tempeh, a locally made soy-based product, is the veggie surprise. The menu says it’s “almost blasphemous, but so good we’ll forgive you.” And whether you’re a vegetarian or not, it’s worth a taste. Served glazed with a sweet-hot sauce and impregnated with hickory smoke, you’ll hardly notice you’re not eating meat. The chef/owner told me that two of his frequent customers are both vegetarians, and they rave about this dish.

– More lists: 12 Bones in Asheville and Hubba Hubba Smokehouse in Flat Rock (30 miles southeast of Asheville) make this list of America’s 35 best ribs

– The Jiggy with the Piggy BBQ Challenge at the Research Center in Kannapolis is this weekend

– The 10th edition of the Texas Pete Twin City RibFest will take place June 5-8 in Winston-Salem and according to the producer of the festival Allen McDavid it distinguishes from other “cook-offs” by the following:

Barbecue festivals like the Texas Pete Twin City RibFest have the requisite competition but that takes a back seat to satisfying the appetites of thousands of festival attendees who appreciate the choice of barbecue from several nationally renowned pitmasters with the necessary equipment necessary to feed thousands of hungry attendees. According to McDavid, “Our BBQ teams generally go through a tractor trailer load of meat every RibFest. If we don’t have rain, it’s more.”

– The Dallas Observer was not thrilled with Texas Ranger pitcher Matt Harrison (originally from Durham) and his preference for NC barbecue

It’s worse because this means that the Texas Rangers let someone from North Carolina answer a barbecue question on their account. Without censoring it. And let me remind you, the tweet is still there. Nobody immediately deleted it. No interns were fired over this.

Linkdown: 3/19/14

/ Barbecue Bros / Leave a comment

– USA Today did a short profile on Bill Spoon’s in Charlotte with some interesting insight on Charlotte from a local historian

“The east/west split dates back to when there were very few people in the mountains, so east really means east of Raleigh where the coastal plains start and west the Piedmont foothills,” said Tom Hanchett, a historian at the city’s Levine Museum of the New South and expert on Southern food, who joined me for lunch. “Charlotte is not really in either part, it’s a city of newcomers and we have other people’s barbecue. One of our most popular restaurants is Georgia-style and we have a lot of Latino and even Vietnamese barbecue, so having Bill Spoon’s here is very special. It’s eastern, whole hog with some hot pepper in the vinegar.”

– The Great North Alabama BBQ Quest (via rlreevesjr)

– South Carolina’s BBQ cook-off season starts this weekend (via bbqboard)

– If you happened to be at 12 Bones in Asheville yesterday, you may have seen a Travel Channel crew filming at the restaurant to cover the “Hogzilla” sandwich, “a bacon, bratwurst and pulled pork sandwich which Garden and Gun magazine named one of the top in the country,” for an upcoming show “Sandwich Paradise”

– Q 4 Fun has a review of Sauceman’s BBQ

– This month’s Carolina ‘Cue in Our State Magazine is Little Pigs in Asheville

Hence, Little Pigs BBQ was actually just one of more than a hundred Little Pigs Barbecue of America franchises. “Those guys were good business guys but they didn’t know food,” Joe says. Back in the ’60s, the concept of fast food was just coming into its own. McDonald’s got its start in the ’40s as a barbecue restaurant, but switched over to burgers because the slow process of making barbecue was hard to replicate on a national scale. Little Pigs Barbecue of America only turned a profit for one year, 1963, and by 1967, the franchise was bankrupt. Barbecue was too hard to homogenize.

But Joe kept his restaurant open. He started doing things his own way. He’d already been offering barbecue sandwiches at a buy-one-get-one-free deal, and the line was out the door on the first day. If customers couldn’t make it to Little Pigs, Joe would bring his food to them.

– Want this so hard

Asheville’s 12 Bones ownership changing hands

/ Barbecue Bros / Leave a comment

As of today, actually. Speedy and I will be visiting one of their locations in late September and will report back.

Update: More info here

Future plans include the installation of an outside patio at the Riverside store, equipped with heaters. Even when the cold months hit, it’s hard to handle the crowds, and the extra seating is needed.

-Monk

Asheville’s 12 Bones ownership changing hands