Throughout the South, up hill and down holler, in just about every town — and at some centrally situated interstate exits — there exists at least one semi-respectable barbecue restaurant. Barbecue is one of America’s oldest culinary customs, meat cooked low and slow over indirect heat, an unpretentious, adaptable form. When compared to other traditions, it’s most like the blues — elemental in its simplicity, born of scarcity and strife, a comfort to the body and soul. And like the blues, barbecue boasts myriad regional riffs on one simple theme.
Every region has its hallmarks, of course, but deep in the barbecue belt, a hungry carnivore can find a half-dozen variations, sometimes all in the same neighborhood.
Over the phone and over plates of pork and brisket served every which way, I asked five pitmasters to tell me what barbecue means to them. In Part One I focused on Tennessee and Texas. Here I visit barbecue joints in North Carolina. What emerged is a celebration both of differences and shared traditions. Buckle your belt.
Jesse Davis
Barbecue served with red slaw and bread on the side, Salisbury-style.
College Barbecue
117 Statesville Boulevard, Salisbury, North Carolina 28144 • 704-633-9953
College Barbecue, so called because of its proximity to Catawba College, has an old-school diner vibe, with a green-and-white checkered floor and booths, chairs, and swivel stools finished in matching green. Cheerwine, Salisbury’s contribution to the carbonated beverage field, is served in plastic pitchers. Repurposed ketchup bottles filled with red vinegar sauce sit atop the tables. The air rings with conversation and the sound of meat being chopped, Carolina-style, on wooden cutting boards.
Jesse Davis
Jay Owen, owner/operator of College Barbecue.
“The restaurant has been here since ’64. It’s been College Barbecue since ’65,” owner-operator Jay Owen tells me after the lunch rush. “There’s a little bit of a Memphis tie-in there. This building was built for a franchise called Little Pigs of America.” (The short-lived Little Pigs of America franchise started in Memphis in the ’60s.) That original restaurant lasted only a few months, the Salisbury-born Owen says. “So the guy who built the building was stuck with it. He asked the meat vendors, the guys who supply the meat in here, who could he get to run this.” The meat vendor recommended Owen’s uncle, David Koontz. “So my Uncle David came over, and they kind of drastically changed it. It used to be picnic tables, self-service drink machines. It was way ahead of its time, and they made it full-service.
“The rest is history, buddy. It’s been College Barbecue ever since.”
With 45 years of tradition to uphold, Owen has a lot on his plate. But he’s up to the task. He worked with his aunt for nine months before taking over the restaurant.
Jesse Davis
The meat is chopped on the same counter that was used in the 1960s.
“Most people in the North Carolina area do a vinegar base [but]barbecue means a lot to a lot of different people,” he says, making him the first pitmaster to share some variation of that sentiment. “Right here in Salisbury, there’s no two of us doin’ the same thing.” College Barbecue’s standard order comes chopped, but customers can order pork to their preference, Owen says. “Chopped, sliced, pulled pork. What do you mean by pulled pork? I’ll do it any way you want it, but I gotta know.”
“The main thing I would say about barbecue is, do what you do and do it better than anybody else, and you’ll be successful. Don’t try to dabble in this or dabble in that.” — Jay Owen
Barbecue lends itself to carry-out orders. It travels well, making it an ideal meal to pick up for a picnic or get-together. Even before the nation made the rapid, 2020 pivot away from dining in to curbside and carry-out, Owen says at least 35 percent of his business was done through the drive-thru window. “We do a lot of what I like to call ‘simple caterings,’” he says. “We’ll even do a whole pig on-site if you want us to. It all depends on if you got the money and want to spend it. But 99 percent of the caterings we do are, ‘Hey, look, I got family coming in. There’s gonna be ten of us. What do I need?’ ‘You need four pounds of barbecue, some baked beans,’ you know, and you put together a little meal like that.”
Jesse Davis
Owen says that amateur backyard barbecuers who get up in arms about using a specific kind of wood are misdirecting their energies. “I tell you right now you can’t tell the difference in taste in that stuff,” he says. “Hickory was never designed to be cooked with because of the way it tastes. Hickory — the way hickory burns, it holds its coals for a long time and it holds heat. So you can cook. Where you can use six or seven pieces of hickory wood, you might use an entire pine tree.” That, and pine burns hot. It wouldn’t do to burn the pit down.
“I stay away from barbecue cook-offs, competitions, stuff like that,” Owen continues, but it’s not that he thinks College can’t cut it. That’s just not what barbecue’s about to him. “As far as taste goes, what I like and what you like are two different things.
“The main thing I would say about barbecue is — I’ll tell you what my Uncle David told me a long time ago — do what you do and do it better than anybody else, and you’ll be successful. Don’t try to dabble in this or dabble in that.” That, Owen says, is the key to College’s success.
“It’s been here since the ’60s, baby,” Owen says. “The guys still hand-chop it right there on the counter in front of you.”
Jesse Davis
Red Bridges Barbecue Lodge
2000 E. Dixon Boulevard, Shelby, North Carolina 28150 • 704-482-8567
I arrive at Red Bridges Barbecue Lodge moments after it officially opens for business that day, and the parking lot is already bustling. Inside, family wedding photos, portraits of past employees, and framed magazine covers adorn the walls. Natalie Ramsey, co-owner with her brother, Chase Webb, flashes a thousand-watt smile before taking me on a tour. She’s a third-generation barbecuer, and she’s worked at Red Bridges since she was 16 years old.
“My grandparents opened it in 1946, and then my mom took over,” Ramsey tells me. “And then that’s me and my brother,” she says, gesturing to photos on the wall. I ask her if the restaurant has changed much in three generations. “Recipes? No, absolutely not,” she says before dropping a pearl of wisdom I heard at College Barbecue too. “My grandmother’s motto was always, ‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.’”
Jesse Davis
The coarse-chopped barbecue is closer to what you'll find in Memphis.
“Okay, all we’ve ever done is we’ve pit-cooked shoulders. We have no rub, we have no nothin’, it’s just smoke. And you don’t find that anymore. Honey, we call this Shelby Style,” she says. “We do our own little thing. We pit-cook our barbecue, and our sauce is a ketchup-vinegar sauce. And our slaw is a ‘ketchup slaw.’” That “ketchup slaw” is a red slaw with a tomato base instead of mayonnaise. It’s a relic of a time before refrigeration, when hot summer temperatures and spoiled mayonnaise could put a damper on church picnics.
Jesse Davis
Pork shoulders are flavored by smoke alone.
And the meat? “Honey, we can do it any way we want to — chopped, sliced, minced, coarse-chopped, browned. One of the best cuts is a coarse-chopped/browned because it’s just a bunch of meat with the skin on the side, and that’s where the flavor’s at.” Sides? As is the custom in North Carolina, barbecue is served with hushpuppies: “Ours are made fresh every day from scratch, and they are phenomenal.”
If Ramsey sounds like an expert, it’s because she has done it all at Red Bridges. “I’ve cooked the meat, I’ve cut the meat. I’ve done all those things,” she says. It just comes from growing up with the restaurant — and her second family who works there. “These people have been here my whole life, most of ’em. It’s like my family,” Ramsey says.
She tells me about workers past and present, such as John Henry Williams, whose portrait hangs on the wall. “He worked here from the day we opened until the day he died.” Country star Patty Loveless used to work at Bridges — she’s one of the few who left. “She would go down to the woodpile on her lunch break and play her guitar,” Ramsey remembers. “Rhonda’s been here my whole life. Laura’s been here my whole life. We’re just a big family.”
Jesse Davis
Natalie Ramsey, co-owner of Red Bridges Barbecue Lodge.
Red Bridges has seen its share of strife, of course. “It burned down twice,” Ramsey tells me and then checks herself. “Excuse me, it’s been three times. I was pregnant with my second child when I come out here and see flames.”
Back on the tour Ramsey shows me the prep stations. “Our sauce is one of a kind. We ship it to Hawaii, Alaska,” she tells me as she leads me past the sauce room. “If you walk back there, it’ll knock you down.”
In the kitchen, Jerry chops the meat. “Been there and done that plenty of times,” Jerry tells me when I say I’m from Memphis. “Steppin’ out on Beale Street.” The chok-chok of blade on board is becoming a familiar sound on this trip.
“He cuts the meat and makes the sauce,” Ramsey says when she introduces me to John, a personal chef who works at Bridges in addition to running his own catering business. We talk music, food trucks, and, of course, barbecue as he shows me around the now-dormant original smokers. John says he got the job at Bridges when the worker who cut meat was out for surgery and recovery. “They happened to see me in my chef whites one day. I just happened to be picking up a sandwich for my mom,” he remembers. The owners asked him if he wanted to fill in for six to eight weeks while the other guy recovered. That was seven years ago.
