Trailer Trad North Carolina: An Eastern North Carolina BBQ Institution

Wilbers Barbecue in Goldsboro is one of a half dozen barbecue pillars in North Carolina, especially eastern north Carolina barbecue. Located about half way between Raleigh and my daughter's camp, we make a point to stop there on the way home. Wilber's doesn't go overboard with cooking methods, sauces, atmosphere, etc. It just makes a nice pulled pork sandwich that is really representative of the style. Make no mistake, it is not as good as Allen & Son in Chapel Hill (not really Chapel Hill-more like less chic Hillsborough) but, then again, none is. Allen & Son really should be its own unique category separate from Lexington Style (Lexington Barbecue and Barbecue Center in Lexington) west of the Triangle and Wilber's, Kings, etc. in the east. 

Wilber's is one of three pork-related tourist attractions in that area of the state. Another is the Nahunta Pork Center. Wilber's has a bright red bench out front that proudly proclaims "America's Largest Pork display."Walmart might disagree when they assert that. I only mean that Walmart has really, really large refrigerated cases filled with pork products. - Actually, I've never seen them but I assume that they do.

This is what barbecue is all about. Located behind the restaurant, the shockingly crude fire pit and smoke house combo looks like they were constructed by two drunk brick masons while camping one weekend in 1954. Awesome. This may be some of the crudest, yet most profitable fixed capital stock known to modern, Western man.

Allen & Son BBQ

I recently visited a shrine to Eastern North Carolina style barbeque. Although technically in Chapel Hill, its location couldn't be further from Brie n' Chablis Franklin Street. Sitting along side the country road going to Hillsborough, it's easy to miss.

But get of your car and you will have no doubt that succulent pork is nearby. The aroma of hickory-smoked barbeque is so unearthly that Allen & Son should really charge cars $2 just for the privilege of sniffing what's being slowly cooked out back.

That first sniff is like a mind-altering drug. Burning leaves when you were a kid. That campout with the magical fire you huddled around. The eons of men hunting and gathering in the fall during harvest time. These experiences flash through your mind with that first whiff.



Allen & Son Barbeque's stash of hickory firewood. The importance of this cannot be overstated. Slowly smoking meat over real hickory coals adds a depth to the flavor that cannot be realized with spices, rubs, etc. As a matter of fact, the more you smell and taste this fast-disappearing barbequing style, the more you realize that much of the injecting, marinating and rubbing of meat is an attempt to make up for the fact that natural gas btus can never achieve the magic of wood smoke.