The Pig
Chapel Hill, N.C.
2/17/24
Before me sat a plate of pork, hush puppies, coleslaw, and pickles. Behind that, because I’d insisted on trying more sides, a bowl of fried okra and another bowl of collard greens. Behind that, a huge glass of sweet tea.
I was at the Pig in Chapel Hill, N.C. to try, for the first time, Eastern North Carolina barbecue — a regional variant on the cooking style known the country over that almost every Eastern North Carolina expat I’d met in the past 25 years had told me was the best.
Was it just hometown pride and nostalgia talking? Or was it really the best, or enough to stand toe to toe was Kansas City, Memphis, and Texas to stake its part of the spotlight on the barbecue stage?
I’m not a barbecue expert. But I am an enthusiast — always have, ever since I could get my hands on it. I consider myself blessed to live in New Haven, where I can scratch the itch for barbecue at Ricky D’s, Sandra’s, Bear Smokehouse, or Ma’s House as I see fit.
Like many Northeasterners, however, I’d grown up under a huge misconception, that barbecue was about the sauce. Good barbecue is really about the meat.
My eyes were opened to this essential fact on a trip to Kansas City about two decades ago. There, on the advice of a friend who’d grown up there, I went to Gates BBQ. The sauce was tasty, but the meat was a revelation, smoky and sweet in equal measure. I understood that before that moment, I had never really had proper barbecue. After that, I learned to be more discerning.
Since then, I’ve had several memorable barbecue experiences, from Central BBQ in Memphis to a few places the names of which I cannot remember in Texas and Virginia. Some of the best barbecue I’ve had has been at private gatherings, where I watched the meat get smoked overnight and through the next day. Perhaps most memorable, on a solo road trip I stopped in Chandler’s in Knoxville for lunch and ate pork, chicken, and sides literally until I was so stuffed I was nauseated; I didn’t eat again until lunch the next day.
Luckily, those of us in the Northeast don’t have to travel nearly as far as we used to in order to get the real deal. In the past 20 years, even the transplanted Southerners I know will say that barbecue in the Northeast has improved overall. But they will also point out that not all styles have migrated equally. Tomato-based sauces, such as those out of Kansas City or Memphis, prevail over vinegar-based, mustard-based, or other barbecue sauces. And most barbecue places don’t smoke a whole hog; they smoke pork shoulder or other cuts separately. Hence a particular keening from friends from Eastern North Carolina, describing a tender, vinegar-based experience I’d never had, and never had the opportunity to have.
So when I found myself heading down to the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill area, I decided to correct that problem. I started texting friends both from and in the area: if they could pick one spot for me to try Eastern North Carolina barbecue, where would they pick?
It seemed at first that I asked five years too late.
“Used to be Allen and Son,” said one friend, Charlie, who has lived in the Northeast for a couple decades, mourning a place that had closed its doors in 2018 because, as Charlie put it, “Son retired, and couldn’t find anyone he trusted to take over.”
I asked Joe, who currently lives in Durham where he would go.
“It used to be Allen and Son,” he said. But he said he’d pass me along to his friend Chris, a “barbecue connoissuer” and “wealth of knowledge.”
“Call him tonight,” Joe added. “He’s champing at the bit to share his knowledge with a Yankee journalist.”
A conversation was Chris was a tour through the history and geography of Eastern North Carolina barbecue and its place in the firmament of American barbecue overall. “It’s complicated and fascinating,” he said.
The bare bones of it: According to Jim Early in The Best Tar Heel Barbecue, “the custom of slowly roasting meat on a grid of wooden sticks at low heat over live coals was developed by Native Americans and passed on to our forefathers.” Eastern North Carolina-style barbecue is itself a couple centuries old, and is distinguished from surrounding barbecue styles by a few key features.
First, the meat comes from smoking a whole hog, not just parts of it (as other barbecue styles sometimes lean into).
Second, the sauce to flavor the meat is vinegar based, with no tomatoes, and thus is tangy and thin rather than sweeter (or hotter) and thicker. When served, the meat is also finely chopped.
Chris offered two reasons why these conditions prevailed. First, people in eastern North Carolina first believed tomatoes were poisonous (they belong to the nightshade family; also, tomatoes actually were poisonous when served on pewter plates, as the tomatoes leached lead from the plates and delivered a high enough dose to kill diners). He also suggested the possibility that the the meat was finely chopped because people had “shitty teeth.” (I checked this teeth comment with Charlie. “Um, probably true,” he said.)
As the years have gone by, barbecue styles have proliferated. Farther west in North Carolina, “you get more of a brown sauce that has tomatoes,” and the meat is sliced, Chris said. “They realized tomatoes weren’t poisonous and they had slightly better teeth.” And “there’s a separate barbecue in South Carolina that‘s sort of a mustard base,” Chris said.
But meanwhile, Eastern North Carolina barbecue persists. They smoke a whole hog over wood — “if you use an heirloom pig that‘s tremendously fatty, it’s gonna be more flavorful,” Chris said — and they use a vinegar-based sauce.
Despite its population, the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill triangle isn’t the epicenter the style; that’s farther east, toward the coast, where spots abound in smaller towns (such as B’s Barbecue, in Greenville). But Chris figured that might be too far a drive for me.
He considered that maybe I should go to a place in downtown Raleigh that he declared “a pretty good plate,” and that it was “done in a modern, hip place.” He declared the meat to be excellent. But “the vibe is not the same” as a more traditional place, “nor is the pricing,” he said. So he demurred.
“I’m all about paying twice as much for the best barbecue, but I think it removes it from what it is,” he said.
We also took a detour into barbecue places of years past. As his fellow barbecue enthusiasts did, mourned the demise of Allen and Son in Chapel Hill. “It was the best in the area,” he said. Another barbecue place got shut down after the owner’s tax avoidance caught up with him.
He mentioned Picnic on Durham, “off the road where rich people golf.” (Joe had also mentioned Picnic, a place that was “always full.”) Then, Chris suddenly settled on The Pig, in Chapel Hill. Chef and owner Sam Suchoff, he said, is “making the absolutely best Eastern North Carolina barbecue style there is.… In terms of the smokiness and flavor, the sheer quality, I think it’s the best.”
He then added: “I don’t believe that Allen and Son’s best was as good as The Pig is now.” He kept going. “I would be shocked if there was anything, including in the temples of barbecue, that are as good as The Pig. There’s some very, very famous chefs who can’t cook as well.”
I was sold.
Saturday morning I skipped breakfast and went for a long hike in the woods near Chapel Hill, along the banks of the meandering, nearly spiritual, and swimming-hole-laden Eno River. I was getting hungrier and hungrier, which was just right: Charlie had leaned on me, as a scout, to try the collards and the okra, and I didn’t want to let him down.
I arrived at the Pig shortly after 2 p.m. It was half-full and lively. Exhausted and a little bleary from low blood sugar, I ordered the pork platter and my two sides. With an undertone of warning in his voice, that I was perhaps ordering too much food, the young man behind the counter said I could swap out some of the sides of the platter I was ordering with the additional sides I had ordered. I insisted that I wanted it all.
He then asked me if I wanted anything to drink. Forgetting where I was, I asked, lamely, “do you have sweet tea?”
He locked eyes with me. “We’re a barbecue place,” he said.
He was sure right about that. Everything I ordered was top notch. The pickles and coleslaw were light and tangy, with just enough sweetness to round out the flavor. The hush puppies were crispy and hearty without being too oily. The fried okra was lightly breaded and nicely spiced, the okra inside fresh and nourishing. The collard greens were hearty and cooked just right, flavored perfectly by the meat they’d been cooked with.
But as Chris predicted, the pork itself was the star. As I learned years ago in Kansas City, with good barbecue it’s about the meat, not the sauce. At the Pig I understood that Eastern North Carolina was upping the ante. After all, a rich, complicated barbecue sauce could theoretically distract from a few sins by covering up the flavor of the meat. With only a light vinegar sauce to add acidity, pepperiness, and a little moisture, Eastern North Carolina was going all in on the quality of the pig, both how it was sourced and how it was prepared. There was no place to hide.
At the Pig, no hiding was necessary. The pork’s flavor was robust and complex, sweet and smoky, hearty without being too fatty. The amount of sauce was just right, bringing out the meat’s savoriness and adding a zippy tang as another dimension of an already deep flavor. There were two sauces on the table I could have tried. I didn’t want to add a drop of either of them. Why unbalance a flavor like that? It was perfect the way it was.
The man behind the counter had been right: I had ordered too much food for one person, even one who had skipped breakfast. As I approached being perhaps too satiated, I had to start making decisions about what to finish and what to leave behind. I started making laps around the sides in equal measure. With the meat itself, however, I didn’t leave a scrap behind.
It was a meal to remember, though it was also all too clear that the journey into Eastern North Carolina barbecue was just beginning. As I took my last bites, I was haunted by something else Chris had told me:
“The secret of barbecue restaurants is that the barbecue is not remotely as good as the fried chicken,” he said. He mentioned the Chicken Hut, in Durham, about 20 minutes away from where I was.
“They’re to die for,” he said.
