NC

Kings Restaurant – Kinston, NC

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Name: Kings Restaurant
Date: 9/7/15
Address: 405 East New Bern Road, Kinston, NC 28504
Order: Pig-in-a-Puppy combo with fries, slaw, and a drink (link to menu)
Price: $8

As it turns out, the last barbecue I tried on Labor Day weekend ended up being the best of the bunch. To be honest, after a weekend of eating and drinking, barbecue was kind of the last thing I wanted to have on our 7 hour drive back home. Nevertheless, I try to be a team player when I can (many times much to my wife’s chagrin), so we stopped at King’s Restaurant in Kinston.

Outside of Wilber’s in Goldsboro, the other barbecue restaurant I’ve heard come up the most in the region was King’s. People tend to speak fondly of it with memories of how they would stop there on the way to and from the beach growing up. Plus, they have a barbecue sandwich in a giant hush puppy. I repeat: a barbecue sandwich in a giant hush puppy. This is not a drill, people.

Even without the novelty of the sandwich – the hushpuppy “bun” was kind of weird but I got over it pretty quickly – the pork was nicely smoked and more than held up on its own. After I finished my combo, I snuck some away from my daughter’s kid’s meal (not that she was eating much of it anyways) because I found it to be that good. Or maybe it was in comparison to the lackluster barbecue I had eaten earlier in the weekend. 

I wrote in an earlier review for McCall’s that next time I would rather just go to Wilber’s (particularly since they are 0.5 miles apart) and while Wilber’s does edge out King’s by a bit, they are separated by 22 miles on highway 70. Depending on which way I’m headed to or from the beach in this theoretical example, I could see myself going with either and being quite content.

–Monk

Ratings:
Atmosphere – N/A
Pork – 3 hogs
Sides – 3 hogs
Overall – 3 hogs
King's Restaurant Menu, Reviews, Photos, Location and Info - Zomato

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Photos: Southern Sauce BBQ Festival – Charlotte, NC

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Boone’s Bar-B-Que Kitchen

A few weeks back on the last weekend of Summer, Charlotte held the Southern Sauce BBQ Festival in the shadows of BB&T Ballpark. The festival was a first time event combining two previous events – Blues, Brews & BBQ and the Charlotte Beerfest. A small-ish affair, it was mostly confined to Romare Bearden Park (where a stage with blues bands competed for a spot in a Memphis blues competition) and the stretch of Mint Street between the park and the minor league ballpark. There were a couple of the old standby barbecue food trucks – Boone’s (with a cool sign giving us a shout out!), Moe’s, Sauceman’s, Smoke & Go – along with some newer trucks I hadn’t seen before. While it would be unfavorable to compare it to the Q City Charlotte Barbecue Championships (which was held roughly on the same weekend the past couple of years but was a much bigger affair), it definitely was a nice way to spend a few hours on a sunny Saturday afternoon.

–Monk

Linkdown: 9/30/15

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– This year’s 86th Annual Mallard Creek Barbecue will be on Thursday, October 22

– Queen City Q and the Hornets enter into a partnership for the upcoming NBA season

As part of the multi-year agreement, Queen City Q will operate a pair of branded concession stands at Time Warner Cable Arena, one on the lower level and one on the upper level, allowing fans to enjoy some of the area’s best and most popular barbecue while attending events in the building.  Queen City Q products will also be featured on the arena’s suite menus.

– Charlotte Agenda makes one of their bold and click-baity proclamations that “the best barbecue in Charlotte just might be sold by Boy Scouts”

-The second Charlotte-area location of Smoke opens in Stonecrest next week

– Steve Raichlen has some barbecue secrets from Ed Mitchell in the HuffPo

– Marie, Let’s Eat! visits the newer, larger Character’s Famouse BBQ in Adairsville, GA – you might recognize its pitmaster Michael Character from BBQ Pitmasters

– NOLA Smokehouse in New Orleans closes this Saturday

– Johnny Fugitt has 7 recipes he must try from the 12 Bones cookbook

– Robert Moss’ list of the south’s best barbecue beverages rightly includes Cheerwine

– Some details on a pre-Barbecue Festival shindig:

-Speaking of Lexington, Brad Livengood of The Lexington Dispatch has some barbecue history regarding pirates I previously had not come across

Pirates loved to party, and there was nothing like a good pig picking to make a party atmosphere. So they devised a process based upon an apparatus made of green wood. It was a rack of sorts, to hold the pig’s carcass as it was being smoked. The rack was placed over a pit filled with charred embers to slowly simmer the meat. They called the process, the boucan. Its practitioners were soon known as boucaneers. The often used synonym for pirate, buccaneer, comes from this method of cooking barbecue. I don’t know if there was hickory wood involved, but it surely was smoked and pit-cooked. So we lovers of barbecue in Davidson County have something in common with Blackbeard and his ilk, and it’s just a short walk down the pages of history from the tastebuds of some cutthroat pirate to our love of a chopped sandwich today.

– Lucky Peach says there are 14 (!?) styles of american barbecue

Big Oak Drive-In & Bar-B-Que – Salter Path, NC

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Name: Big Oak Drive-In and Bar-B-Q
Date: 9/5/15
Address: 1167 Salter Path Rd, Atlantic Beach, NC 28512
Order: Pork barbecue sandwich with slaw on top and hush puppies (link to menu) Price: $6

Big Oak Drive-In and Bar-B-Q is an institution for folks who visit the Atlantic Beach area and make the short drive to Salter Path. Its a bit of an unassuming building just off the main road dissecting Bogue Banks but routinely has long lines and a crowded parking lot. Even a downpour didn’t deter folks from queuing up to order from the takeout window. They simply started to bring umbrellas or rain jackets with them and braved the elements.

The shrimp burger is really the main attraction at Big Oak and while the barbecue isn’t an afterthought, it’s also not all that great. I’d call the sandwich a slightly below average one with not a lot of smoke and heavily reliant on cole slaw to give it moisture. The hush puppies are a bargain at $0.89 for a bag of six, but unfortunately they weren’t much better than the pork sammy.

I didn’t have high hopes for the barbecue from Big Oak Drive-In and Bar-B-Q and my expectations were more or less met. Next time I’ll definitely just go for the shrimp burger.

–Monk

Ratings:
Atmosphere – N/A
Pork – 2 hogs
Sides – 2 hogs
Overall – 2 hogs
Big Oak Drive In & Bar-B-Que Menu, Reviews, Photos, Location and Info - Zomato

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