Roadfood_ Revised Edition - Jane Stern [78]
Breakfast at Sonny’s is especially wonderful off-season, when the tables and counter are occupied by locals who carry on room-wide conversations, read the paper, and keep each other posted on news and gossip. At lunch, it is a more hurried scene (and during tourist season it can be a madhouse). But we do recommend lunch at Sonny’s. It is the best place in town to have a hamburger. A real, short-order kind of burger, handmade and grilled to crusty succulence, served on a bun with lettuce, tomato, and mayonnaise. The hot dogs are excellent, too: all-beef beauties with a snapping-taut skin, available plain or in true southern style, topped with chili and coleslaw.
Stamey’s
2206 High Point Rd.
336–299–9888
Greensboro, NC
LD | $
Stamey’s serves Lexington-style North Carolina barbecue, which means that the meat of choice is pork shoulders that are pit-cooked over smoldering hickory wood until ridiculously tender, then chopped or sliced. “Chopped” means chopped so fine it is nearly pulverized. Slices are actually more like shreds of varying sizes, some soft, others edged with crust from the outside of the meat. The sauce is peppery with a vinegar tang, and thin enough to permeate the soft, sweet pork rather than blanket it. If you get a platter (as opposed to a sandwich), it will be accompanied by a powerfully zesty coleslaw and odd-shaped, deep-fried corn squiggles that are Stamey’s version of hush puppies. This is a Piedmont meal that connoisseurs consider the best barbecue in a big state that is fanatical about barbecue and has at least six different regional variations from the coast to the western mountains.
Warner Stamey started the business in the 1930s; his descendants have tended it ever since, and many of the other good barbecue pitmasters in the area learned their trade from him. Although the restaurant started as a rustic shack, a modern barnboard building was erected in the 1980s, and today customers dine in country comfort.
The barbecue pit outside is one of the wonders of the culinary world—the largest pit we’ve ever seen, actually more like a vast barbecue factory…but where everything is done the old-fashioned way. Wood is burned down to coals in fireplaces; the coals are shoveled into huge brick pits; and in the pits, the shoulders bask in smoke on grates two feet above the coals, where they are turned periodically with a pitchfork by the pitmaster.
Oh, yes, one more thing: try to leave room for dessert. Stamey’s warm peach cobbler is nearly as famous as the barbecue.
Ted’s Famous Chicken Restaurant
4695 S. Main St.
336–650–0290
Winston-Salem, NC
LD | $
Ted’s cooks chicken the same way they do at the venerable Keaton’s (North Carolina): after being pan-fried, each piece is briefly dipped in sassy, vinegar-based, hot-pepper barbecue sauce that quickly soaks into the skin and meat down to the bone. The result is chicken that is permeated with flavor and heat, and is impossible to stop eating. It is known as Kickin’ Chicken.
The menu is minimal. You order an upper (breast and wing) or a lower (leg and thigh), and there is such a thing as a chopped chicken sandwich. Wings are available in counts of 10, 25, 50, or 100. Side dishes are unremarkable beans, slaw, and potato salad; tables are outfitted with rolls of paper towels, which are a necessity when eating this stuff.
Last we looked, Ted’s had a second location in North Wilkesboro and a franchise operating in Pfafftown. A sign in the restaurant noted that franchises were currently available in all fifty states.
Wilber’s Barbecue
4172 US 70 East
919–778–5218
Goldsboro, NC
BLD | $
Pilots who take off from Seymour Johnson Air Force Base have flown the fame of Wilber’s far and wide, and legends abound regarding