Roadfood_ Revised Edition - Jane Stern [75]
Jay-Bee’s
320 Mocksville Hwy.
704–872–8033
Statesville, NC
LD | $
Jay-Bee’s has the feel of a drive-in, but technically it is a drive-through, like the soulless franchised places that crowd so many roadsides. But the menu is fetching, and the brash personality of this car-friendly (or dine-in) eat-place is irresistible. “This Ain’t No Fast Food Joint!” a sign outside brags. “We Proudly Make All Our Menu Items to Order and It Takes a Little More Time.” That would be about a three-minute wait until you are presented with a ready-to-eat Prairie Dog topped with barbecue sauce, chopped onions, and melted cheese or a Northerners’ Fancy Dog under sauerkraut and mustard.
Although Jay-Bee’s pride is hot dogs, hamburgers are very impressive. Available in quarter-pound or half-pound configurations, they are hand-formed from beef ground daily and sizzled to appealing succulence, particularly good when dressed with a heap of sautéed onions.
The beverage menu ranges from sweet tea and milkshakes to Dr Pepper and Mountain Dew, and if you dine inside, a refill of any soda is free. One-quart-size drinks—yes, thirty-two ounces—are available at the drive-through window.
Keaton’s
Woodleaf Rd.
704–278–1619
Statesville, NC
LD Weds–Sat | $
A cinder-block bunker in North Carolina cattle land between the High Country’s natural beauty and High Point’s unnaturally low-priced furniture outlets, Keaton’s serves some of the best fried chicken you ever will eat.
Step up to the counter and order an upper or a lower (the polite country terms for breast and wing or thigh and drumstick). Pick side dishes from a soulful repertoire of mac and cheese, baked beans, hot-sauce slaw or white-mayo slaw, choose iced tea (sweet, of course) or beer, then go to your assigned table or booth, to which a waitress brings the food.
In Keaton’s kitchen, the chicken is peppered and salted, floured and fried, at which point it is simply excellent country-style pan-fried chicken. Then comes the distinctive extra step: just-fried pieces are immersed in a bubbling vat of secret-formula red sauce, a high-spiced, opaque potion similar to what graces High Country barbecued pork. This process takes only seconds, but the hot and spicy sauce permeates to the bone. You eat this chicken with your hands, pulling off crisp strips of sauce-glazed skin, worrying every joint to suck out all the flavor you can get.
Lexington Barbecue #1
10 Hwy. 29-70 South
336–249–9814
Lexington, NC
LD | $
Welcome to Lexington, North Carolina, a small city with more than one barbecue restaurant per thousand citizens! Of the nearly two dozen eateries that specialize in hickory-cooked pork, Lexington Barbecue, which opened in 1962, is definitive. Monk’s Place, as locals know it (in deference to founder Wayne “Honey” Monk), looks like a barn with some smelters attached to the back. From those smelters issues the tantalizing aroma of burning hickory and oak wood and the sweet smell of slow-cooking pork, one of the most appetite-inducing aromas in the world. Honey Monk’s is a straightforward eatery with booths and tables and little in the way of décor other than pictures of rural life on the wall. Much business is take-out.
There are no complicated techniques or deep secrets about Lexington barbecue. After about ten hours over smoldering smoke, pork shoulders are shredded into a hash of pieces that vary from melting soft (from the inside) to burned crisp (from the “bark,” or exterior). The hacked meat is served on a bun with finely chopped slaw or as part of a platter, on which it occupies half a small yellow cardboard boat, with slaw in the other half. Like the meat, the slaw is flavored with a vinegar–sweet red barbecue sauce. As part of the platter with the meat and slaw, you get terrific, crunch-crusted hush puppies with creamy insides.
Historical note: in 1983 the North Carolina General Assembly designated Lexington as the “Hickory-Cooked Barbecue Capital of Piedmont