[bright music] - Next on "North Carolina Weekend" we celebrate North Carolina barbecue with visits to BBQ joints all around the state.

From Winterville to Asheville, and all points in between.

And you won't wanna miss our special guest coming up next.

- [Announcer] Funding for "North Carolina Weekend" is provided in part by Visit NC, dedicated to highlighting our state's natural scenic beauty, unique history, and diverse cultural attractions.

From the Blue Ridge and the Great Smoky Mountains across the Piedmont to 300 miles of Barrier Island beaches, you're invited to experience all the adventure and charm our state has to offer.

[upbeat music] ♪ [upbeat music continues] ♪ [upbeat music continues] ♪ - Welcome to "North Carolina Weekend" everyone.

I'm Deborah Holt Noel, and this week, we are celebrating our state's iconic food, barbecue.

Right now I'm at Sam Jones Barbecue in Winterville.

It is a super popular place to find some cue, but you know, sometimes it gets a little bit lonely eating all by yourself.

- Pardon me.

Is this seat taken?

- Oh my gosh!

Bob, I can't believe it's you.

What are you doing in this area?

- I live right down the road, so this is a frequent local stop for me.

I saw the vans and thought I'd pay a visit.

- I love it.

I love it.

And this is perfect.

So tell me, what do you like most about this barbecue?

- Well, you find everything here, or a little bit of everything.

You get the old fashioned wood-cooked barbecue over real wood, lots of smoke.

But they've also added some of the tastes and amenities that people expect nowadays.

People have moved here from all over the country and even all over the world really.

And they sort of expect a little different experience, some of them.

- So you're gonna get the real deal here at Sam Jones, and let me ask you this.

The classic, Eastern North Carolina barbecue or Western, what's the difference?

- Not to put too fine a point on it, but basically, the Eastern coastal plane was settled by the Scots, Irish.

They found the Native Americans already cooking pigs.

The Spanish had brought them in.

They tended to cook the whole pig.

And whereas in the Piedmont, German settlers came down the Great Wagon Road through the Shenandoah Valley and came in and they were already used to cooking pork and had a real taste for the pork shoulder.

So naturally, they decided to barbecue that and they used to do it for circuit court days.

And so you had farm workers and mill workers and people going to circuit court who all enjoy barbecue for various reasons.

- Well, they both sound great to me, Bob.

In fact, it reminds me of a visit I made to Lexington not long ago where I visited two really popular barbecue restaurants.

Here's a sample of what I tried.

- [Cook] We train our cooks about two years before we let them cook by themself.

And if you notice we have no thermostat or anything in the pits, we go by feel.

- [Deborah] And they're feeling it at Lexington Barbecue which started back in 1962 out on business I-85 and used to be called Honey Monks.

Today, almost 60 years later, Honey Monks or Monks or Lexington Barbecue still serves a lot of cue.

- We normally use about probably 500 to 600 shoulders a week.

Somewhere in the neighborhood we'll cook about 6,500, 7,500 pounds in a week.

We make 250 gallons a tea a day, 40 gallons of hush puppy mix a day.

So we use a big volume when it comes to it.

So it is kind of that word of mouth, like hey, this is pretty good, let's go try it.

- The next day, while visiting downtown Lexington, I followed the smoke to another great eatery, the Barbecue Center.

- We started in 1955 as kind of the outlet for our local dairy serving ice cream.

And then it just kind of progressed into serving barbecue out of the back.

And then we moved two blocks down the street, built indoor pits and became the Barbecue Center, and I guess kind of the rest is history.

My mom's still here, my brother's still here, so we're still doing this as a family operation.

- [Deborah] But the center is also beloved for its ice cream, and especially it's world famous banana split.

- [Cecil] The banana split goes back to our ice cream days and it's grown itself over the years.

So the last time I believe we weighed it on camera, they weighed between three and a half and four pounds.

Usually every month we do at least 1,000.

- [Deborah] Lexington Barbecue is at 100 Smokehouse Lane in Lexington and they're open Monday through Saturday from 10:00 AM to 9:00 PM.

For more information, give them a call at [336] 249-9814, or go to lexbbq.com.

The Barbecue Center is at 900 North Main Street in Lexington and they're open Monday through Saturday from 11:00 AM to 9:00 PM.

You can give them a call at [336] 248-4633 or go online to barbecuecenter.net.

Well Bob, I know that you've visited dozens and dozens of barbecue restaurants.

What do you look for in a place that's really great?

- Two key ingredients, authenticity, absolutely essential, and a sense of community.

And if you have those, boy, it's gonna work.

- That's really important.

And you know what?

We went into the vault, found some of your popular stories, and right now we're gonna share a few clips.

Take a look.

- Oh, oh, I love that.

That's delicately flavored.

It's not sauced too heavily.

It's a good quintessential Eastern North Carolina sauce, but it's got a little hint of sweetness in it.

Michael, well done, man alive.

Hand-chopped pork shoulder right in the mainstream of the Piedmont tradition.

Now I'll tell you what, this barbecue has never been cooked over wood smoke here.

I've been eating it though for 20 years.

And even though I'm kind of a wood smoke live coals kind of a guy, I've never tasted any eastern North Carolina whole hog barbecue that was any better than this.

Go figure, it is delicious.

We roped in a panel of experts.

Margaret Garner tried a barbecued chicken sandwich with South Carolina style mustard sauce.

- It's really smoky and it tastes like it's been roasted in a fire with wood.

Not a grill, but like a fire.

It's really tender and I like the bun.

It's kind of soft and squishy.

- [Bob] Sally Garner had a chopped beef brisket sandwich and really liked the smokey sauce.

- And I really like how it has other things in it to make it more flavorful.

And I also like the bread, how it's, I like the toasted bread.

- The whole hog barbecue cooked over oak coals is just as it always has been.

Wow.

It's back.

Smoked tomato barbecue sauce.

Look at that.

[Bob laughing] Look at my shirt.

All right now, this is a first, the barbecue sauce just kind of exploded all over my shirt.

Somebody off camera said it just explodes with flavor.

I'll tell you what, that's terrific.

We're here with Sam Jones, one of the great guys of barbecue in my opinion.

And Sam, I know you have this place here in Winterville, you've got the place in Raleigh, but your heritage really started long before you came along at Skylight Inn.

- My earliest recollections of the restaurant, I think I was about nine or 10 years old wiping off tables and filling up bottled drink boxes.

- I remembered the bottled drinks.

That was a real trademark of the Skylight Inn and still is.

- That we were probably the only barbecue joint in North Carolina that didn't have sweet tea for all those years.

- So let's take a look at what's going on in here.

- So what we got in here is actually a hog and a half.

And that was where the bottom hog, we can actually cook two hogs in this apparatus here.

And so the top hog was moved off onto here because we stage the hogs throughout the day.

So the person that eats at lunch and the person that eats at four or five in the evening is getting the same quality product.

- Right, right.

It's coming right off the pit.

It doesn't sit there all day.

That is magic.

Sam, A few years ago, Heather Burgess of PBS North Carolina did a wonderful feature on you and we wanna share that with our viewers now.

[gentle music] - Fire.

That's something that I think mesmerizes every child on some level.

That same fire that's such a terrible thing creates such a beautiful thing here.

What we are doing is preserving a tradition.

There's a lot of barbecue places that there's no fire burning.

So this smokehouse I feel like is one of my children.

[upbeat music] I'm Sam Jones.

My home is Ayden, North Carolina.

[upbeat music continues] Ayden, North Carolina, which is a town of about 5,500, and we are coming in from my home, which is on the east side out in the country.

I just noticed that welcome home sign.

Barbecue has completely gone through a renaissance.

It's become trendy, as the old country song says, I was country when country wasn't cool.

That's our family in barbecue.

But whole hog is one, what Eastern North Carolina I think historically is known for as it pertains to barbecue.

To me, I grew up in it.

My grandfather, Pete Jones, used to pound the drums.

If it's not cooked with wood, it's not barbecue.

And he opened in the summer of 47.

Here at Skylight, me and my dad and my uncle operate it.

- My name is Bruce Jones.

I'm Pete Jones' son and I'm Sam's dad.

I never have had a chance to be myself.

I don't usually get here about lunch time.

I pastor a church in Farmville.

Well, I've been working here 56 years.

I took what my dad gave me and went with it and Samuel carried it to a much higher level.

- Another title I hold is the Chief of the Fire Department.

Command, put it right in the Gabriel Inn, right in the Gabriel Inn, we'll Cool it down.

I'm also the co-owner.

I have a partner at Sam Jones Barbecue.

Everything we do, the heat source is fed from this chimney.

All your old school barbecue places, the one I came from, that smokehouse was treated like it was the inner sanctum.

[gentle music] Because they're almost a thing of the past now.

That they're going away.

But we're going go see the old family pit which we recently resurrected.

So my grandfather's buried essentially right across the street from this house.

That's where the family cemetery is.

And I never knew or realized that this old pit was still in existence.

So my grandfather's mother, her side of the family, this was their place.

And so when I stepped in it the first time, it was almost like a religious experience.

There's a photo that hangs in both restaurants of a gentleman in overalls and he's standing beside this pit.

And it was about 1930.

Got my phone out and I went trying to find that photo.

I said "Man, I think this is that pit."

Sure enough, that was it.

So you take that gentleman that hangs on the wall in our restaurant that taught my granddaddy how to cook hogs.

- Oh my goodness.

- Written in pencil.

- Those are the weights.

- This is where that shot was taken.

This was the orientation of him in that photo.

Just candid.

In his mind, he was not doing anything special, I can promise you, nothing at all.

- Finding this for you really kind of felt like you were coming full circle.

- Being able to not only preserve it's one thing, but then to fire it up.

And now I've got a photo of the first shovel of coals that's been in that pit in over 60 years.

Nobody alive knows when the last time that pit was fired up.

[gentle music] A legacy is not an impact if it's unrealized.

I can't describe how special it is to be standing here where so many people in my family, one, built this building, and did something that was just a normal way of life to them.

So to have some of my friends both near and far to sit on this property and eat from this pit, in my opinion, the most fun thing that I get to do is take what started in this pit to crowds all over America at food festivals and things.

And people are wowed by whole hog because it's almost a thing of the past.

But if you think about old church revival meetings, revival was intended to make you leave a little different than you came.

And that's the way I approach whole hog.

That's the way I approach our food is you have a chance to interact with somebody on the table whether you're standing there or not.

- [Deborah] Sam Jones Barbecue has two locations.

715 West Fire Tower Road in Winterville and 502 West Lenoir Street in Raleigh.

Both restaurants are open for lunch and dinner seven days a week.

For more information, go to samjonesbbq.com.

- Barbecue is popular from the coast to the mountains for sure, and a lot of very talented people are putting their own individual unique touch on it.

Let's go up to Asheville where a James Beard award-winning chef named Meherwan Irani is doing his thing at a place called Buxton Hall Barbecue.

[upbeat music] - Buxton Hall Barbecue is a love story.

It's a love story to the way food used to be made.

It's a love story to the origin story of barbecue.

It's a love story to the community and to the South Slope and the history of this building.

The building has been around since the 20s.

The South Slope where we are was where the black community of Asheville had deep roots and a huge community.

By the 50s and 60s, that community was completely wiped out.

And the only thing that's left is a few remnants of that community, including this building that used to be a skating rink.

And if you look at the floors and look at the space, you start recognizing a lot of those signs of what this used to be.

So we tried to reclaim as much of the building as possible because we just felt like no part of this building should be wasted.

[upbeat music] When I first met with my then chef partner, Elliot Moss, we had a shared vision of wanting to bring whole hog barbecues done the way it was when this style of barbecue was first bought literally out of Africa when black slaves came to the south and started cooking this kind of food.

And we wanted to sort of bring it back to its origin story, but we hadn't seen that kind of barbecue this far west.

That was hugely important to both of us.

Making sure that we're sourcing from the community that's close by.

- All of our hogs come from Vandele Farms.

She's about 45 minutes away in Lake Lure.

So we'll butcher the hogs down, get them into the smoker, and then cook them anywhere from 12 to 14 hours.

You never cook a whole hog for four or five people, for a small family.

It's really a community event where we're inviting people in.

And it's not about the barbecue, it's about the people, cooking with heart.

And barbecue has that soul food kind of feeling that allows you to really love what you're doing because of this, you get to bring all these people together and they get to enjoy what we're putting into this kind of art form.

The agricultural community that's here in this area is what drives the food scene.

And it gives us the opportunity to take something simple and humble like barbecue and put a lot of meaning and and integrity behind it by supporting those farms and supporting those people and enjoy that and be part of that community farm.

- Buxton Hall Barbecue is at 32 Banks Avenue South in Asheville, and they're open daily from 11:30 AM to 3:00 PM, and they reopen for dinner at 5:00 PM.

For more information, give them a call at [828] 232-7216 or go online to buxtonhall.com.

New barbecue restaurants are popping up all the time, and I recently visited one in Knightdale called Prime Barbecue where they're really drawing a crowd.

[upbeat music] This is unbelievable.

It's a full-blown barbecue campus.

I've heard about the long lines that people wait in just for the chance to eat at Prime Barbecue.

And now I'm finally here.

Can't wait to meet Chef Christopher.

He is a pitmaster.

[upbeat music] - I'm Christopher Prieto.

I'm head barbecue nerd here at Prime Barbecue in Knightdale, North Carolina.

I really wanted to create a space where you can enjoy great barbecue and you can still go out and live life within the community of Knightdale.

The building is built so that you have to slow down a little bit.

See, barbecue's all about patience.

It's all about pace.

It's all about slowing down and just enjoying the moment, smelling the smoke, tasting the meat.

- Oh my God.

- But also enjoying the people you're there with.

We have a beautiful kids area beside our building where kids can commune and play and meet each other.

We have a giant line that's intentionally slowed down so you can meet your neighbor, you can meet the person who drove here, you can meet people from other states.

We've actually had people that met here, proposed here, and got married here.

[gentle music] Our saying here is we want to make it worth the wait.

One of the goals of Prime Barbecue is to cook every style and really identify and be really champions of every style.

So we do have our pool pork here.

Again, lightly salt and pepper cooked over live oak and pecan wood coals.

Then we have our whole hog barbecue on Saturday.

So that's old school East Carolina style.

It's a whole pig cooked over rendered down coals.

The skin is crispy.

You get all the different components of the pig.

The only difference is we do it a little bit with a Puerto Rican fusion.

[upbeat music] This is where we're gonna cook our hogs.

Right now he's roasting the jalapenos for the jalapeno pimiento cheese sausage.

This is where we process our hog.

[upbeat music continues] Here we put up a little bit of trophies, so we have hundreds and hundreds of these trophies.

My wife arranged something beautiful here.

We had them all laid out here before we started and she just kind of arranged something nice.

Every trophy took a lot of hard work and practice.

These pits are made in Texas.

One of the first commercial cookers I ever cooked on.

They're the all wood fire commercial cookers.

So there's no gas, there's no fans, no assist.

- The real thing.

- The real thing.

These hold 1,300 pounds of meat at a time.

So this is our chef's table where we bring our veterans.

I sat at a lot of chef's table.

I've sat with the very important people at chef's table.

That's when I came to the realization that why isn't there a table where we can value the underappreciated?

And that's what we do here at Prime.

We support different Wounded Warrior organizations.

We have the chef's table.

Every military holiday here, they eat 100% free.

[gentle music] - Chris, what a spread.

And I have myself to blame for ordering all this stuff, but tell me about the side orders.

- Sure, so we wanted the sides to be scratch made and intentional, and they all tell a story.

Starting with my favorite side, this is our barbecue rice.

This is something that my mother and I kind of put together.

We have our coleslaw.

This is a North meets South Carolina based slaw.

Our beans are a meal within themselves, chopped brisket, barbecue sauce, lots of great seasoning.

Our green beans are actually cooked in clarified brisket fat, shallots, garlic, salt, and pepper.

Then we have our smoked gouda mac and cheese.

We ship in our own cheese, we grind it from scratch, make the cheese sauce from scratch.

All our desserts are made in-house from scratch.

Then we get to the meats.

- The meat of it all, yes!

- And again, everything's hand sliced by the ounce or by the pound, kind of however you want.

It's called market style.

So you get as little or as much as you want in this case.

We have our burnt ends, our sliced brisket, both our housemate sausages, our custom cut ribs.

We have chopped pork, we have sliced turkey.

- Christopher, I feel like I've done a lot of damage in the order here.

So let's dig in.

- Let's dig in.

You want a rib?

- I want a rib.

- Yeah, I want a rib too.

Let's get it.

Cheers?

- Cheers.

- No sauce.

- Fall right off the bone.

- In all of my barbecue travels, that's the one thing I see consistently is the community communes at the barbecue restaurant.

They meet each other, they have their meetings there.

And I really wanted to create something the same but new.

And I wanted to drive hospitality.

I wanted to drive experience.

I wanted to live beyond the plate of food I serve.

[upbeat music] - Prime Barbecue is at 403 Knightdale Station Run in Nightdale, and they're open Tuesday through Saturday from 11:00 AM to 4:30 PM.

On Saturdays, they're open till 5:00.

For more information, give them a call at [919] 373-8067 or go online to prime-bbq.com.

Well we've come to the end of another show, and Bob, it has been such a pleasure visiting with you.

- Well, thank you for me as well.

And I'll tell you what, I'll be glad to share some barbecue with you any time.

- Well, let's dig in.

But first we wanna thank Sam Jones in Winterville for hosting us.

And if you've missed anything in today's show, remember you can always watch us again online at pbsnc.org.

Have a great North Carolina weekend, everyone.

[upbeat music continues] ♪ [upbeat music continues] ♪ [upbeat music continues] - [Announcer] Funding for "North Carolina Weekend" is provided in part by Visit NC, dedicated to highlighting our state's natural scenic beauty, unique history, and diverse cultural attractions.

From the Blue Ridge and the Great Smoky Mountains across the Piedmont to 300 miles of Barrier Island beaches, you're invited to experience all the adventure and charm our state has to offer.