The Best Bites from the Carolina BBQ Festival
The Barbecue Bros share their favorite dishes from the recent Carolina BBQ festival in Charlotte.
This week’s guest article is written by Monk, a native of North Carolina and co-founder of the Barbecue Bros blog. Along with his friends and fellow Barbecue Bros Speedy and Rudy, Monk has traveled around eating, rating, ranking, and reviewing barbecue joints since 2012. If you would like to write a guest article for The Smoke Sheet, please get in touch.
For this year’s edition of the Carolina BBQ Festival, some pitmasters were new, and the festival changed locations from Camp North End to Uptown (not to mention it was now part of the Charlotte SHOUT! Festival). That said, not much seemed to change in terms of the quality of the barbecue served from two years ago when I went to the first edition of the festival.
Strike that: there was one other big change. My fellow Barbecue Bro Speedy made an appearance. It's such a great festival in large part due to the effort of Lewis Donald along with so many others, and I’m glad Speedy happened to be in town to attend and eat some great barbecue.
Without further ado, here are mine and Speedy's six favorite bites from the festival.
Elliott Moss made his third straight appearance at the Carolina BBQ Festival. While he is now under his own banner of Moss & Moore Barbecue instead of Buxton Hall Barbecue, he brought his ever-familiar whole hog. They may have been out of slider buns for us, but with a few dashes of vinegar-pepper sauce in a cardboard boat, this whole hog was reminiscent of the pork from Buxton Hall, of which we are both big fans.
Moss did give me a little bit of an indication of what will be next for him as he posted last month that he would be leaving Asheville this spring, but I will leave the details of the forthcoming announcement up to him. It looks like he is staying in the Carolinas and will still be cooking whole hog barbecue. More to come from Moss in the coming weeks and months.
Walking up to Jon G’s Barbecue tent, Speedy and I saw a heavenly site — a tower of beef rib bones — and we both knew we were in for a treat. A beef rib slider with pickled onions on a potato roll? Yes, please! The bar is high for Jon G’s, and they did not disappoint. This sammie is what dreams are made of, and this was Speedy’s winner for bite of the day.
I always enjoy catching up with Matthew Register of Southern Smoke BBQ at barbecue festivals, and for this festival, it was a family affair with his wife and three kids in tow helping him serve some delicious smoked cheeseburger sliders. Despite some issues with wood, Register more than delivered on this burger and was one of two non-traditional barbecue bites that stood out in the afternoon.
Speedy is on record as saying that any item that is not strictly smoked meat is secondary in the barbecue setting, but City Limits Barbeque had him questioning that stance with the pork belly hash and Carolina gold rice. He stated that he would easily eat a generous portion of this as a whole meal and might even be willing to venture down to Columbia to check out the full experience at the James Beard Award finalist for Best Chef: Southeast, which was announced just days before the festival.
While they were out of consommé by the time I got there, the mini smoked brisket quesabirria taco with avocado salsa from Lawrence Barbecue was still one of the highlights of the festival for me, traditional barbecue or otherwise. It’s also a nice crossover of Lawrence Barbecue with owner Jake Wood’s sister concept Leroy’s Tacos. Both are worth making the trip to Durham for a visit to their restaurants, which are next to each other. Or perhaps even Wood’s upcoming barbecue festival next month in Raleigh, Gettin’ Piggy With It, another great collection of Carolina barbecue talent.
Going in, I had been raving to Speedy privately about Sweet Lew’s upgraded sausage game, so I was pumped to sample a link at the festival, which did not disappoint him. He found the sausage to be flavorful and smoked perfectly, while not crumbling. According to Speedy, Lewis Donald (the man behind Sweet Lew’s) knows what he’s doing around a sausage stuffer.
If, after reading this, you are thinking about attending next year, I can’t recommend enough for anyone within driving distance (or even flying distance, which was Speedy’s case) to make the trip to Charlotte and attend because there are not too many other instances where you can taste so much good new school barbecue from throughout the Carolinas in one afternoon.
See more highlights from the Carolina BBQ Festival in this video from Master Blend Family Farms.
Monk
Co-Founder, Barbecue Bros
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