One of Chapel Hill’s top chefs is trading in barbecue for casual Italian
It’s not goodbye for Big Belly Que, but it is see you later.
Amid the barbecue boom taking place in the Triangle, one all-wood pitmaster is pressing pause, turning Chapel Hill’s Big Belly Que into Bombolo, a mostly Italian sandwich and pasta bar.
“We put it into hibernation,” Garret Fleming said of Big Belly Que, which he owns and runs in partnership with his sister Eleanor Lacy.
For more than two years, Big Belly Que was part of Chapel Hill’s Blue Dogwood Public Market, smoking pork shoulders, house-made sausages and specials like beef ribs and chickens on a portable, all-wood smoker.
Now Lacy and Fleming are looking to open Bombolo by late spring at 104 N. Graham St., just off of Franklin Street, behind Al’s Burger Shack.
Fleming said moving the smoker down the street became impossible due to permitting and insurance woes. The smoke will return one day, most likely in Chapel Hill.
“We always kind of viewed Big Belly as the start of something,” Fleming said. “We thought we would quickly parlay it into multiple concepts that could organically grow.
“Barbecue can be delightful to bang your head against a wall, but it lacks some of the creative push,” Fleming said.
Bombolo arrives
The name Bombolo is Italian, roughly meaning “short fat man,” Fleming said, in a little nod to Big Belly Que. Many of the dishes are Italian, from the sandwiches at lunch to the plates of fresh pasta in the evenings. But Fleming said Bombolo isn’t an Italian restaurant.
“We want to be able to have some fun with it,” Fleming said. “We didn’t want to call it an Italian restaurant and then just do whatever we wanted anyway.”
On the sandwich side, there will be porchetta with burnt radicchio jam, a Philly-style roasted pork roll with broccoli rabe and sharp provolone, fried oysters with grilled artichokes and an olive oil poached tuna with red wine vinegar, in a dressed up version of a tuna salad.
In the evenings, the menu will feature fresh pasta dishes, including many classic Italian noodles, Fleming said. But there will also be rice noodles with XO sauce made from charcuterie scraps and topped with an oyster.
“It’s closer to Chinese than Italian,” Fleming said of the dish. “We do want to be able to have some fun with it and be reflective of North Carolina, but also be reflective of what we want to do.”
Background in fine dining, ‘Top Chef’
Fleming’s background is in fine dining. His first venture in the Triangle was the downtown Durham restaurant Motto, which closed in 2017, but had earned a raving four star review from former News & Observer dining critic Greg Cox.
Before Motto, Fleming had appeared on a season of “Top Chef” and worked in fine dining restaurants in Washington, DC. Bombolo looks to meet somewhere in the middle of Fleming’s experience, the casual lunch service reminiscent of Big Belly Que, then turning into a more traditional service in the evening.
Bombolo joins a growing trend in the Triangle of casual food getting fine dining treatment. Fleming said it’s a trend tied to the pandemic.
“There was a little of this when the housing market crashed a few years ago,” Fleming said. “There was a huge swing of white tablecloths going out in Chicago and DC. People with backgrounds in fine dining doing food they wanted to eat, but for half of what it would cost to eat in a restaurant. ... You should be able to get edible, delicious, meticulously crafted food that doesn’t cost an arm and a leg.”
On the beverage side, Fleming and Lacy plan to stick to beer and wine, but didn’t rule out cocktails down the road. The theme of the wine and beer list will be flavorful affordability, Fleming said, where a lunchtime glass wouldn’t seem unreasonable.
“I want us to start affecting change for how wines are being priced,” Fleming said. “The rule is the glass buys the bottle, but I want us to get our pricing down. ... When you’re abroad, the cost of local beers and wine is extremely nice. A lot of that is lost here.”
The bar will have a charcuterie chamber on display, where various meats will cure for weeks or months or even over a year.
When Big Belly Que resurfaces, Fleming plans to keep it in Chapel Hill. He said the city has ceded some of its destination dining qualities to Durham and Raleigh in recent years, but hopes to build concepts like Bombolo and the eventual Big Belly Que that draw diners back.
“With our efforts to really try and create concepts in the community, I don’t think it’s far fetched for Chapel Hill to regularly be the destination,” Fleming said.
This story was originally published February 25, 2022 at 12:53 PM with the headline "One of Chapel Hill’s top chefs is trading in barbecue for casual Italian."
