Roadfood_ Revised Edition - Jane Stern [77]
Next time we visit Short Sugar’s, we are going to try to pull ourselves away from the fine barbecue to have a few chili dogs. One morning during an early barbecue lunch, we saw two guys laying waste to braces of them, which sure looked good.
Skylight Inn
S. Lee St.
919–746–4113
Ayden, NC
LD | $
You know that pig meat is serious business the moment you enter the Skylight Inn, for just behind the counter is a window where big hunks of pork from the pit are being chopped with a heavy cleaver on a cutting block. The sound of pork being hacked to pieces is sweet music to accompany a Skylight meal.
Known to one and all as Pete Jones’s Skylight Inn, after its late pitmaster, it is now run by his progeny, and still dedicated to whole-hog barbecue. Pork is cooked for up to fifteen hours over oak wood coals until it is moist, tender, and laced with smoke. It is hacked into meat of nearly infinite variety, including tender inside shreds and crunchy skin from the outside of the pit-cooked meat, all tossed together and dressed with just enough vinegar and hot sauce to make the natural sweetness blossom. Sandwiches include coleslaw atop the meat, or you can have it in a cardboard tray with corn bread and slaw.
You can’t miss this place. It has a dome like the Capitol in Washington, D.C., with the U.S. flag flying overhead. Not by looks alone can the Skylight Inn claim primacy. It is one of the best—if not the best barbecue in North Carolina. And in North Carolina, that is saying a lot!
Snappy Lunch
125 N. Main St.
910–786–4310
Mount Airy, NC
BL | $
As Yankees, we never heard of a pork chop sandwich until we traveled south. Even in Dixie, it is not all that common, but you’ll find it on menus in various configurations ranging from a bone-in chop with superfluous bread that serves merely as a mitt so you can eat the meat without utensils to the boneless beauty at Snappy Lunch. Surely this is the king of pork chop sandwiches. It is a broad slab of meat that is breaded and fried, similar to the tenderloins of the Midwest, but with more pork, and with more cushiony breading. It is luscious and tender.
Few customers of Snappy Lunch get a plain pork chop sandwich. The ritual here in Mount Airy (Andy Griffith’s hometown, and the inspiration for TV’s Mayberry) is to have it all the way, which means dressed with tomato, chopped onion, mustard, meaty/sweet chili, and fine-cut cabbage slaw speckled with green peppers and onions. The total package is unwieldy in the extreme. Served in booths or at the counter in a wax paper wrapper, this is a sandwich that requires two big hands to hoist and eat. There are no side dishes available other than a bag of potato chips, and the beverage of choice is tea—iced and presweetened, of course.
There are, however, other items on the menu, including a weird Depression-era legacy known as the breaded hamburger, for which ground beef is extended by mixing it with an equal portion of moistened bread. The result is a strange, plump hamburger that resembles a crab cake. Definitely an acquired taste!
Sonny’s Grill
1119 Main St.
828–295–7577
Blowing Rock, NC
BL | $
In the heart of the Smoky Mountains, less than an hour north of the furniture outlets in Hickory, Blowing Rock was named for a huge cliff over Johns River Gorge, where the wind blows so hard that it snows upward in the winter. The town itself is a quiet hamlet with a charming café on Main Street named Sonny’s Grill, and in this three-table, eight-stool eatery you will find one of the most delicious quick-bites of the South: a ham biscuit. It is a stunning harmony of two dramatically disparate ingredients: complex, zesty cured country ham and a pillowy biscuit with creamy insides that readily absorb