Ayden

Linkdown: 8/2/17

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– One man’s quest to ruin it for everyone else; complaints of air pollution from Little Richard’s BBQ in Winston-Salem:

Someone has been emailing for months officials with the N.C. Department of Environmental Quality, the Forsyth County Department of Environmental Assistance and Protection, me, state legislators, Ask SAM and anyone else within electronic earshot about “the plume from the 3 unregulated point source smoke stacks” that sends a “cloud of unmitigated (carbon monoxide) and particulate matter” into the atmosphere.

– Congrats to Rodney Scott’s BBQ, named one of 50 finalists for Bon Apetit’s Best New Restaurants in America 2017

– As expected, the Southeast Tourism Society has named The Barbecue Festival one of the top 20 events in the Southeast for October 2017

– Coverage of Skylight Inn turning 70 last weekend from the News & Observer and WNCT

– The 4th Annual Pigs & Pedals BBQ cooking competition is in Asheboro this weekend, with a new People’s Choice Competition

– Barbecue the documentary comes to Netflix in August in glorious 4k

– An “American Regional Barbecue Cheat Sheet from Tasting Table” though they don’t quite get the North Carolina section right

– This week’s latest Cheerwine story

Barbecue Bros Book Club: The One True Barbecue by Rien Fertel

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Not that we’re anywhere close to being qualified enough to evaluate books but more so as a public service announcement we will periodically discuss barbecue and barbecue-related books.

IMG_8196A collection of profiles on whole hog pitmasters throughout the southeast, “The One True Barbecue” by Rien Fertel is an enjoyable if not somewhat controversial read. In particular, Fertel ruffled feathers with his chapters on Wilber Shirley and Ed Mitchell. He portrayed the former’s restaurant as a joint with a racial division of labor between the front of the house and the back and the latter as a marketing gimmick in overalls that cooks hogs in a non-traditional manner (hot and fast rather than the traditional low and slow). However fair Fertel’s representation may or may not be (and he is but one man with his opinion), the fact that he spoke with neither for the purposes of this book only added more embers to the burn barrel.

Fertel ties the profiles together through narrative, following his path from New Orleans to the Carolinas and back, with even a stop in Bushwick to visit Arrogant Swine. Each chapter not only explores the pitmaster(s) themselves but in some cases the history of an entire town with Ayden, NC and its two joints Skylight Inn and Bum’s. He particularly favors Scott’s-Parker’s Barbecue in Lexington, TN, visiting with pitmaster Ricky Parker in the first chapter and then his sons after his death in the last chapter. In between, Fertel visits 12 other whole hog joints in Tennessee, North Carolina, South Carolina, Mississippi, and the aforementioned Arrogant Swine in NY.

I enjoyed Fertel’s writing and found this to be a quick read that I devoured over just a few sittings. Fertel cut his teeth writing oral histories for The Southern Foodways Alliance, and his experience writing on southern food showed. A small complaint would be that the only color photographs are confined to a section at the center of the book – I would have loved to see them throughout as opposed to the smaller black and white ones within the chapters. In any case, I can’t recommend “The One True Barbecue” enough.

–Monk

Linkdown: 2/15/17

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– TMBBQ on the italian influences of Texas BBQ in Waco

– An inside look at day one at Rodney Scott’s BBQ last week

– It opened without a hitch after a day or two of soft opening

– If you missed last week’s Bizarre Foods with Andrew Zimmern as they traveled to Buxton Hall and Fox Bros among others on the “Southern BBQ Trail”, you have a couple more chances to check it out

– Speaking of which, Zimmern has some goodies from his stops available at his website

– Marie, Let’s Eat! visits the Athens, TN location of the Buddy’s Bar-B-Q chain and left unimpressed

– An oldie but goodie from Our State

Linkdown: 11/30/16

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– A few more stops in the Carolina’s for Grant: Stephenson’s Bar-B-Q in Willow Spring, Skylight Inn in Ayden, and Sweatman’s Bar-B-Que down in Holly Hill, SC

– Robert Moss has an introduction to Georgia BBQ to kickoff Georgia BBQ Week, which Grant will surely love

– Coming to West Nashville soon from Pitmaster Pat Martin

– Daniel Vaughn of TMBBQ muses on a couple of easy rules for barbecue line etiquette

– From last month, Destination BBQ has an interview with Daniel Doyle of Poogan’s Smokehouse in Charleston

– The highly-anticipated Scott’s BBQ has broken ground at its Charleston location

– John Shelton Reed has a pretty out there barbecue theory on why Donald Trump carried the state of NC and I’ll just let him have at it

The latest, he told me the other day, was Hillary Clinton’s choice of a barbecue stop in Charlotte at the end of the presidential campaign. She and President Obama ate at the Midwood Smokehouse. It has a varied and upscale menu, but it is not a traditional barbecue eatery. Meanwhile, Donald Trump was buying one of those $3.50 barbecue sandwiches at Stamey’s in Greensboro.

“Maybe Clinton’s choice sold in Charlotte,” Reed said, “but the rest of the state was thinking Drumpf was eating at a real North Carolina barbecue stop, a big reason he won and she lost.