The Carolina BBQ Festival’s Best Bites
Dishes including BBQ pizza, whole hog, beef rib sliders, pastrami, and Moon Pie banana pudding impressed at the fourth edition of the fest.
This week’s guest article is written by Michael “Chigger” Willard, host of The Low & Slow Barbecue Show podcast, which is the official podcast for the Carolina BBQ Festival. If you want to write for The Smoke Sheet, please get in touch.
The 2025 Carolina BBQ Festival was the Charlotte event’s biggest and best installment yet. From an expanded schedule and wide-ranging menu to a larger geographic footprint of participating pitmasters, an assembled crowd of 2,000 people revealed that the Carolinas’ love is burning brightly for meat cooked over live fire.
“Whether you are a backyard cook, just really enjoy barbecue, or even if you are a business owner … you can come out here and see different styles of pits, different styles of cooking, different techniques. Every single tent that you see here, you are going to learn something different,” said first-time festival participant Ben Hooper from Ben’s Backdraft Barbecue
Plus, festival proceeds support Operation BBQ Relief, which served over 700,000 meals in the wake of Hurricane Helene’s impact in the Carolinas, Georgia, and Florida.
Let’s review some of the weekend’s best bites, starting with the expanded opening night festivities.
Kick-starting the Festival Fire
“The Kickoff” invited barbecue enthusiasts to mingle alongside the festival’s featured pitmasters in a relaxed environment fueled by a Friday evening menu of collaborations.
Among them, festival founder Lewis “Sweet Lew” Donald and Emmy Squared Pizza produced a deep-dish Detroit-style pizza with a Sweet Lew’s BBQ sauce base and topped with brisket, cheese, red onions, and Sweet Lew’s mustard sauce.
Beef short rib jambalaya from Community Matters Café and heaping plates of steak flights from The New York Butcher Shoppe brought more spotlight to event sponsor Certified Angus Beef. Mini “goopy burgers” from The Goodyear House were a huge hit as well. The night’s best bite, however, may be another “hand-held” perfectly suited for an evening cookout.
The Improper Pig’s slow-smoked brisket chow bao sliders with Asian slaw and spicy hoisin sauce were a two-bite delight of complementary flavors. They proved to be great fuel for the work, getting started as evening twilight turned into night.
While festivities waned near the mainstage, an adjacent lot at Victoria Yards began bustling with cinder block pit construction, burn barrel fires, and pitmasters starting smokers for an overnight cook.
Here, the whole hog tradition of Carolina barbecue was on display. Hard-working teams from Sweet Lew’s, Sam Jones BBQ, and Elliott Moss’ Barbecue Lounge started their late-night ritual of burning hardwood, shoveling coals, and monitoring meat until morning.
Best Bites Begin with Beef
Any time Jon G’s Barbecue pulls up, expect to find a line – and for good reason. With his restaurant ranked among Texas Monthly’s best “Texas-style” barbecue found outside the Lone Star State, Garren “Jon G” Kirkman never disappoints. His beef rib sliders, sliced and sauced on the spot, consistently attract the longest waits during every Carolina BBQ Festival. This melt-in-your-mouth meat offering is good enough to send you to the back of the line again, regardless of the wait.
Fork Grove Barbecue pitmaster Dylan Cooke is earning his own Texas Monthly accolades. Boasting a forearm tattoo tribute to Jon G’s, Cooke follows in his friend’s footsteps – while still forging a unique barbecue path. His brisket bite came in the form of a “fold-up” of slow-smoked Demkota beef topped with pickled chow-chow and Fork Grove sauce, all wrapped in a slice of white bread.
Meanwhile, County Smoak’s Ken Hess brings a personal perspective to brisket, too. A New York native, Ken, and wife Jess perfected a smoked brisket pastrami that rivals anything you’ll find in the Big Apple’s delicatessens. Served on rye bread and topped with Grandma’s Molasses mustard and fire and ice pickles, County Smoak’s pastrami is … “like buttah.”
Cookout Classics
While hot dogs, smash burgers, nachos, wings, and Frito pies may not be standard fare at your favorite BBQ joint, this year’s festival offerings prove they belong among the other fire-cooked classics.
And the Bright Leaf hot dog is most certainly an eastern North Carolina classic. Southern Smoke BBQ pitmaster Matthew Register topped these red hot dogs with brisket chili, cheese, and slaw. In doing so, he stated the case for widespread adoption of hot dogs to the barbecue menu – and ensured that this Carolina tradition gets a place at the table alongside pulled pork.
Elsewhere, Ronald Simmons celebrated his Master Blend Family Farms pork production with loaded nachos and his secret barbecue sauce. Keith Henning’s jumbo Korean sticky wings and chili crisp slaw proved Black Powder Smokehouse can hold its own in Asian Fusion cuisine.
Lawrence Barbecue’s Jake Wood spent the day smashing brisket burgers and serving them topped with cheese and onions. Expect to find variations of these meaty samples when Lawrence Barbecue opens its new location in Cary, N.C., later this year.
You’ll have to wait until Sundays to see a Frito pie creation on the menu at City Limits BBQ, even though pitmaster Robbie Robinson confesses his love for the Texas staple.
Last week, Robinson was named a James Beard Award Finalist for Best Chef Southeast for the second straight year.
“I honestly eat one of these after every Saturday service. It is a really great texture bite and the flavors are there, of course,” he says of the “Little Frito” that combines house-made brisket chili, cheese, cumin crema, onions, and Fritos. “What is really great about this bite, the chili takes an ever-so-slight edge off the crispiness of the Frito, but it still has a crunch to it.”
Pork on Parade
The Carolina BBQ Festival was founded to celebrate the “heritage of whole hog barbecue.” So, a big share of the menu is reserved for pork. Of course, whole hog was well-represented by Sam Jones BBQ and Elliott Moss. The “Classic Jones Family Tray” offered whole hog pork barbecue chopped and served alongside traditional sweet slaw. Elliott’s team stuffed smoked whole hog into potato roll sliders.
Lexington Barbecue limits its pork offering to the shoulder, chopped and paired with red slaw and vinegar-ketchup “dip” on the side. The Monk family has been serving barbecue this way since 1962, and third-generation pitmaster Nathan Monk isn’t changing things.
Many people debate their preference between the “Eastern” vinegar style of Sam Jones against Lexington Barbecue’s Western/Piedmont style, which adds ketchup to the sauce.
Here’s a different fuel for the debate: the ribs reigned supreme among the pork at the Carolina BBQ Festival, even though both offerings came from outside the Carolinas.
Bryan Furman – a Charlotte-native who built his brand in Atlanta and now is launching a pig farm near Florence, S.C. – drizzled his signature peach mustard sauce on St. Louis-style ribs. The sweet and tangy kick was a show-stopper for his perfectly cooked rib with crispy skin and firm but tender meat bite.
The founder of Smoked Pickle Barbecue in Knoxville, Eric Pickle, brought his own saucy kick with Duroc baby back ribs dipped in Jerk Nashville Hot Sauce and served with a spicy pickle garnish. Again, the cook on his ribs was just right to produce a firm bite that easily pulled off the bone.
Together they may have defeated the pulled pork pitmasters, but choosing one rib over another may be more difficult than deciding East vs. West.
Dessert Delivers Sweet Finish
Dessert landed in the official Carolina BBQ Festival line-up for the first time, and it won rave reviews. Ben Hooper, who attended the festival last year and opened his Ben’s Backdraft BBQ brick-and-mortar location in March is already making a strong impression locally and across the Carolinas. While he “felt naked” without a smoker, Hooper’s Moon Pie banana pudding was a sweet treat and a perfect end to a food festival. Light and fluffy whipped cream, atop banana pudding, a thin layer of chocolate, and never-soggy Moon Pie pieces – it was good enough to eat twice … maybe even as a main course before the barbecue.
Regardless of your barbecue stand on beef vs. pork, East vs. West, or favorite cookout and rib preferences, the 2025 Carolina BBQ Festival offered a diverse menu of bites to please every palate.
Now in its fourth year, the event continues to grow, and the future is bright. As the craft barbecue scene booms in the Carolinas alongside old-school traditionalists, expect the Carolina BBQ Festival to maintain a place in the annual calendar of barbecue events you don’t want to miss.
Michael “Chigger” Willard
Host, The Low & Slow Barbecue Show
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