Take a tasty journey through the new wave of barbecue taking North Carolina by storm

This is the second installment in our The State of Barbecue series.

The line at Jon G’s Barbecue forms at 6 in the morning, five hours before the first brisket is unwrapped from fat-soaked butcher paper and slapped on a cutting board.

In that time, groups will trickle in with chairs and coolers, playing cornhole and card games, cracking beers and seltzers and tailgating their lunch like it’s a college football game. According to Jon G’s greeter and barbecue guide Tom Harrington, father of co-owner Kelly Kirkman, a group once showed up at dawn, set up a propane flattop and made breakfast in the restaurant’s parking lot.

In just about every way, Jon G’s — in the town of Peachland, east of Charlotte — isn’t like other North Carolina barbecue spots. The sign out front reads “Texas-inspired,” which means the lines are there for brisket and beef ribs.

And it’s the kind of barbecue experience North Carolinians typically reserve for backyards. Jon G’s is among a new group of Tar Heel barbecuers turning barbecue into a party.

Forever, barbecue in North Carolina meant pork — period. But now, all of a sudden, it means that and everything else.

Though it’s too early to rank this new class of North Carolina pitmasters, Jon G’s Barbecue has the longest line. Maybe it’s the one-day-a-week model, slicing and serving only on Saturdays. Maybe it’s the cooler of free beer and festival vibes as diners wait for hours to walk through the door. Or maybe it’s the most talked-about brisket in North Carolina, served alongside bright red Cheerwine sausage, spare ribs and other smoked surprises.

Getting to Jon G’s before 9 a.m. stands the best chance of taking on the full menu, as sellouts are a certainty. On a recent Saturday, groans traveled through the line as beef ribs and bacon burnt ends were crossed off the menu.

“Every Saturday we’re shocked. Friday night we’re not sleeping, wondering if people will show up,” Kelly Kirman said. “It’s enough to make you tear up. We’re so busy when I look outside.”

A smoker with a dream

This generation of pitmasters came to barbecue through passion and distraction, not bloodlines. Some are backyard hobbyists, whose smoked experiments escalated to birthday parties, the competition circuit and full-fledged restaurants.

“It literally started in the backyard,” said Garren Kirkman, the Jon G namesake and co-owner with his wife, Kelly. “I started with a cheap smoker and cheap brisket and smoked the bejesus out of it. Looking back, obviously it was terrible, but since my first bite of brisket in 2009, I thought, ‘Hey, there’s something here.’”

Jon G’s started as a brewery pop-up, selling barbecue out of a trailer in Charlotte while the Kirkmans worked full time. Then in 2020 the couple bought a closed roadside restaurant in Peachland, quitting their jobs and jumping into barbecue full time.

“When Garren gets his mind on something, it can be an obsession,” Kelly Kirkman said. “You can’t replicate how this business came together. People think we’re magic. We got really lucky and worked really hard.”

‘Texas-inspired’

The Kirkmans may run the most Texas-style operation this side of Plano, but they’re born and bred North Carolinians. Garren grew up knowing barbecue as fire department pig pickings and smoked half chickens. But since a bite of brisket more than a decade ago, he saw that barbecue extended beyond state lines. .

“We definitely promote that we’re Texas-inspired, but we’re proud to be North Carolinians,” Garren said. “We want to make the best food, we don’t want to be tied to a region. We cook smoked meats.”

The fiery regionality that once defined American barbecue has largely cooled off.

“We want to all play together,” Garren said. “That regionality thing stokes my nerves. I don’t want to do the same exact thing, just because of the place I live in. We can all do something different.”

Kelly Kirkman notes that there’s “room for everybody” in the barbecue world, whether you’re a whole hog traditionalist or a brisket enthusiast.

“If you’re crazy enough to be in this business, I’m on your side,” she said.

The brisket grail

If you’ve ever cooked a brisket then you already know. About starting a fire in the middle of the night and the coals burning orange. About the trimmed and seasoned brisket dusted thick in salt and pepper, then tucked away for hours as smoke wafts over it, slowly changing a chewy, fatty overworked muscle into a prized piece of succulence.

If you’ve done it you know it often doesn’t go that way, that the fire can sneak up and wring every juicy drop of moisture from the brisket, or maybe rain has choked the coals and two hours past dinner time the beef isn’t budging.

For barbecue in 2022, brisket is the grail. In regions without historic ties to barbecue, the beefy cut is celebrated from Portland, Maine, to San Francisco to Richmond, Virginia.

Part of the allure of brisket for chefs and barbecue chasers is it’s so damn hard to cook.

“People are taking barbecue and elevating it to not something everybody could do,” Lawrence Barbecue owner Jake Wood said. “With brisket, these amazing fatty slices that’s just salt and pepper, smoke and meat — no sauce needed. There’s a lot to be said for that. It’s a whole other ballgame.”

That ballgame pulled Wood out of the ranks of fine dining and into barbecue, finding his heart no longer wanted the top tier culinary pursuit. The smoke was in his eyes.

“I spent years chasing something I thought I wanted to be,” Wood said. “But there wasn’t the passion I felt needed to be there.”

Beach vibes in barbecue

Lawrence Barbecue is perhaps the most devil-may-care of the new barbecue bunch. Situated in the new Boxyard RTP development in Research Triangle Park, it’s really a beach bar in an office park, fueled by offset smokers pushing out brisket and sticky Cheerwine spare ribs, pulled pork shoulders, raw and roasted oysters and specials like thick-cut smoked bologna on a bun and seasonal sandwiches like softshell crab.

There are frozen drinks upstairs at the Lagoon bar and at one time weekly griddled birria tacos that were so popular the Lawrence flattop was tied up for hours.

“We’re not doing what we’re doing to say this is what North Carolina barbecue should be or that it’s better than what you’re used to,” Wood said. “It’s just different. We respect barbecue tradition, but it shouldn’t hold us back from staking our own claim to the barbecue scene.”

Wood grew up with whole hog and shoulders smoked by uncles and grandfathers and dads in his family and serves a menu largely devoted to North Carolina, down to a potluck-worthy deviled egg potato salad. He said North Carolina’s new wave of barbecue isn’t always embraced by those in the old guard, though he declined to share the names of naysayers.

“You look up to these folks, you eat there and have respect for what they’re doing, but there’s no respect back your way,” Wood said. “I call BS on that.”

Stale smoke?

Wood said North Carolina barbecue has perhaps been too low and too slow for too long. Some of the smoke has gone stale in the state’s proud tradition, he said, letting an evolving barbecue scene in Texas steal the show. He sees Lawrence and the new generation of North Carolina pitmasters reclaiming some of the spotlight.

“In Texas, it’s religion, it is life, they take it so seriously,” Wood said. “North Carolina barbecue has not been around (that conversation). It’s not been a prominent thing in 25 years. … I think it’s time for a change in North Carolina barbecue. ... It hasn’t made much progress over the years. But there’s a lot of room and a lot of talented folks working to elevate it.”

Veteran barbecuers can feel the heat of the pit or smoker or hear the rhythm of the fat dripping on coals and know whether the temperature’s right.

The class of pitmasters doesn’t have time for that. Smokers are tricked out with thermometers and dampers to dial in the heat for hours.

Prime Barbecue owner Christopher Prieto calls himself a “barbecue nerd” and sees science in the smoke, teaching classes on techniques and cooking as if a perfect brisket is an equation to crack. He’s only 38, but he believes the next generation of Texas-based pitmasters will get to barbecue perfection even faster.

“We’re in a landscape where I can become a barbecue expert in five years,” Prieto said. “In my generation, I started where you had to work at places and learn on the pits. (This generation) studies barbecue, gathering the most advanced knowledge with the purpose of eliminating all flaws in the barbecue.”

Originally from Texas, Prieto has been in barbecue for decades, teaching classes, cooking in and judging competitions and appearing on television nearly as often as legendary North Carolina pitmaster Ed Mitchell.

When Prieto opened his first restaurant in Knightdale, he built a barbecue palace, with walls of white subway tiles, an orange tiled walkway leading to the cutting line and towering ceilings with circle chandeliers. The pitroom is on display behind glass on a long outdoor patio. There’s a sign that says to ask for a tour. Prime packages one of the oldest styles of cooking in something shiny and new, which Prieto says is the point.

“It’s not a new style, it’s just been modernized,” Prieto said. “It’s modernizing something that’s traditionally very old.”

On Saturdays, Prime sees its longest lines of the week, slicing through sometimes 70 briskets before an afternoon sellout. And on that day, Prieto sneaks onto the menu perhaps his most personal dish — whole hog lechon, which pays homage to his Puerto Rican heritage and his North Carolina home.

Adobo sauce is subbed in for the traditional salt-only seasoning and citrusy mojo sauce stands in for peppered vinegar. The pig is cooked Ed Mitchell style, Prieto said — hot and fast, the skin crisped and chopped up separately then mixed into the meat as it’s ordered. It’s a dish that stands on tradition and the promise of North Carolina’s evolving barbecue scene.

BBQ adds pastrami, meatloaf to the menu

The rules of what is and isn’t barbecue have largely been tossed aside. Situated near Interstates 95 and 40 in Johnston County, Redneck BBQ Lab owner Jerry Stephenson said he’d frequently get requests for pastrami to be added to the menu. So He shipped pastrami down from New York’s famed Katz’s Deli and tried to replicate it.

Prime BBQ also serves pastrami as a weekly special. Shepard Barbecue on Emerald Isle makes a smoked meatloaf sandwich, Sweet Lew’s in Charlotte runs smoked racks of lamb ribs. And don’t be surprised to see smoked duck on the soon-to-open Longleaf Swine menu in Raleigh.

“I like doing things my way, I think we’re more than just a brisket,” Stephenson said. “That’s why I’m hesitant to say what we’re seeing is Texas barbecue invading North Carolina. That’s a gimmick. We’re seeing evolution to our barbecue.”

Teaming up with his sister Roxanne Manley, Stephenson is one of North Carolina’s most accomplished competition barbecuers, lining the walls of the Redneck BBQ Lab with trophies won under their name “Redneck Scientific.”

With competition barbecue, Stephenson cooked in national events crossing all regions. He’s seen brisket — once as far away from North Carolina as a Parisian croissant — capture a sudden following.

Stephenson points to Instagram.

“It’s definitely social media,” he said. “Brisket is something that wasn’t around in North Carolina 10 years ago. We’d travel and find new things to try. Now we know all about it before we ever get there.”

Universal barbecue

The owners of Edenton’s Old Colony Smokehouse, Adam and Elizabeth Hughes, still go beyond the scratch and sniff version of barbecue found on social media. On a recent trip to Texas, a mix of research and vacation, they ate at 21 different barbecue restaurants in 10 days.

There, they saw staples of North Carolina showing up on menus, like whole hog and barbecue hash, a mix of pig’s head and chicken liver that’s rare to see on menus even in the Carolinas. The Texas invasion, it seemed, went both ways.

“The boundaries and lines are being blurred for sure,” Adam Hughes said. “It’s causing regional items to become more universal.”

Hughes is a self-taught pitmaster who brushed with stardom in 2018 by winning a special North Carolina barbecue episode of Food Network’s “Chopped.” That win led to opening Old Colony Smokehouse, a three-day-a-week barbecue joint built in an old bait and tackle shop on the edge of Pembroke Creek. Old Colony serves its barbecue market style, plus top-selling brisket, chopped pork, pork ribs, half chickens and so on.

“Any new barbecue restaurant is going to be expected to have pork and brisket and sausage, ribs on the menu,” Hughes said. “I think I would have a hard time being open if I did not have those items.”

Old Colony cures and smokes its own pork belly, aging it for a month simply to season the green beans or collards. Hughes said that’s one point where new ways trump the old ones.

“The newer places are putting an emphasis on sides. You don’t see that in older places where slaw, hush puppies and maybe french fries were it,” Hughes said. “You go into some great places, the baked beans are just beans reheated out of a can. If you look at the effort we put in, we’re making five different pickles. Cooking nine sides every single day.”

From poke bowls to brisket

Shepard Barbecue owners Brandon Shepard and his wife, Elizabeth, tried everything not to open a barbecue restaurant. They started with a food truck serving global street food, then opened a juice bar and poke stand on Emerald Isle. Then in 2020 the pandemic cleared out beach goers and the Shepards had to pivot.

“We got to thinking, what could we do that’s actually going to feed everyone,” Shepard said. “I went back to what I knew.”

Shepard learned whole hog barbecue from his grandfather, building a connection through smoked pork.

“My grandfather was real old school, he went to work and worked hard,” Shepard said. “I was trying to find ways to connect and one day I followed him to the backyard where he was cooking collards in a large pot and smoking a pig. I was just a kid so I was asking a bunch of questions. That became our bond. Barbecue was part of our life, but I never thought I would be doing it as a career.”

But in building Shepard Barbecue, the Shepards didn’t tap into tradition. They went looking for other inspirations.

“I’ve never been one for tradition,” Shepard said. “I love tradition, I understand it and respect it, but in the South there’s a phrase for that, ‘That’s not barbecue.’ Being a chef before a pitmaster, I looked to Mexican barbacoa and Asian satay and all these different forms of barbecue. We wanted to have fun with it and keep traditional techniques.”

That fun has included smoked meatloaf sandwiches, poutine and brisket gyros, alongside blackened and peppery sliced brisket.

Space for all styles

As Shepard sees North Carolina’s barbecue culture balance the old and the new, he thinks about historic restaurants like Grady’s Barbecue, the only Black-owned whole hog restaurant currently open in the state.

“For a guy like me, a Black pitmaster, African-Americans contributed to the culinary history of America in barbecue,” Shepard said. “As things went on, these little places fell to the wayside and didn’t get that recognition. A culture that had so much, for it to be lost would be kind of sad to see. A giant like Grady’s, they are the people who opened the gates for me.”

Shepard has come full circle in his barbecue ambition. On Emerald Isle, the summer beach crowd often has little connection to North Carolina barbecue, happy to order Shepard’s succulent slabs of brisket. But just as brisket is the newcomer to North Carolina, Shepard hopes that barbecue keeps space for all styles.

“The only way I hope to evolve (North Carolina barbecue) is to open people’s minds to other things,” Shepard said. “I don’t think you’re going to create a better thing than whole hog. I want to see North Carolina getting involved and celebrating it the way it should be.

“We’re letting it fall away and guys in Texas are picking it up. We’re about to lose our own thing chasing brisket.”

This story was originally published August 3, 2022 at 6:00 AM with the headline "Take a tasty journey through the new wave of barbecue taking North Carolina by storm."

Drew Jackson

The News & Observer

919-829-4707

Drew Jackson writes about restaurants and dining for The News & Observer and The Herald-Sun, covering the food scene in the Triangle and North Carolina.