The barbecue bubble: How Lexington became synonymous with a distinctive NC flavor

When the first cooks get to Lexington Barbecue in the twinkling black of early morning, they open the fire box under the brick pit and brush off the ashes that smoldered through the night. The coals wake up like cat’s eyes as the air hits them and they take a breath, glowing orange and hot and ready to burn through the day.

Maybe led by a name that’s both a restaurant and a style, Lexington Barbecue is one of the busiest barbecue joints in North Carolina. Second generation owner Rick Monk appears to know everyone who walks through the door, shouting hellos as he expedites orders behind the counter.

A man picks up a to-go meal of chopped barbecue, because that’s what his wife likes. A family grabs three bar stools on their drive from Charlotte to Virginia for a basketball tournament, a stop that goes back decades. Rick accepts a pink cooler from a woman with a simple instruction: “Fill it up,” before heading to the dining room to grab a table for lunch. By noon, the line crowds by the door, pressing up against a man who stopped for a tray of chopped pork and slaw on his drive from South Carolina to Charlottesville, Va, the Cheerwine glowing red from within the Styrofoam cup.

“When you’re driving within a couple hours of a mealtime, it’s tough to pass by,” he said.

Lexington Barbecue

To be perched on a stool at the counter of Lexington Barbecue on a Friday afternoon is to have lunch at the center of something that started long ago and still burns today just as furious as ever.

But despite the buzz here, Rick Monk, whose father Wayne Monk co-founded Lexington Barbecue, worries the town is on the other side of its barbecue heyday, which depending on who’s counting, once included more than two dozen restaurants. But today, Lexington shares the pain of some of North Carolina’s most historic barbecue restaurants — that they might not be around forever.

“Barbecue restaurants in Lexington are slowly dying out,” Rick Monk said. “There aren’t no second and third and fourth generation people that want to get involved in it.”

Lexington Barbecue is the most prominent practitioner of the style that shares its name, but it’s not the originator of Lexington-style barbecue — a century-old tradition of smoked pork shoulders and tomato-tinged sauce that’s earned this region of central North Carolina the designation of Hog City.

Lexington is the kind of town people imagine when all they know about North Carolina is its barbecue. The way we imagine a village in the Swiss Alps to be awash in cuckoo clock shops or a stretch of the Maine coast bursting with lobster shacks.

Lexington does not exactly match those expectations, but it is North Carolina’s most distinctive barbecue bubble, a place where a long-lost pit was unearthed in a renovation of City Hall.

The two styles of NC barbecue

In fair Carolina, where we set our scene, there are two barbecue styles, each alike in dignity.

To the east, in the low coastal plain and tobacco fields, you’ll find whole hog barbecue, where an entire pig is smoked over coals, picked clean of its bones and then chopped up, mixing all the shoulders and hams and ribs and sweet belly meat together, then sauced with peppered vinegar.

It’s a style and method as old as any cooking and continued today by a collection of pitmaster purists in places like the Skylight Inn and Grady’s and Picnic.

Here in Lexington, it’s whole pork shoulders smoked in brick-lined pits over coals burned down from hickory and oak. The pork is offered chopped, sliced or in a chunked style called coarse chopped and sauced with a thin mix of vinegar and a few squirts of ketchup.

Some of the most popular Lexington restaurants include the Barbecue Center, the oldest in town, Smokey Joe’s, Speedy’s and Speedy Lohr’s, Backcountry Barbecue and Lexington Barbecue.

East vs West

Like any great divergence that’s fiercely debated and fought, the similarities between North Carolina’s two barbecue styles stack up higher than the departures. Compared to the likes of Texas barbecue, which is smoked on offset cookers pumping hot air over brisket and ribs, both East and Piedmont styles cook their pork directly over cherry red coals. Here the fat drips steadily, sizzling into puffs of smoke. If you hold your breath and listen closely you can hear that hiss and hum behind the heavy metal doors.

A whole pork shoulder is made up of the Boston Butt and the Picnic Roast. Within that large cut of pork are several muscles, each tasting a little different, some lean, some fatty, some sweet. Then there’s the smoky outside part of the shoulder, prized by some barbecue fans, and the more subtle, tender inside bites.

Rick Monk said a bite of Lexington Barbecue can vary wildly depending on what a customer likes.

“I could charge $20 per sandwich and still sell out of them,” Rick Monk said. “It’s my job to find out what you like and give you that. And if you don’t like it, I’m going to cry and follow you to your car and hug your pant leg and beg you to give us another shot. Because we need you.”

It’s in the sauce where things get sticky. The differences are equally subtle but colored by exaggeration. Fans of Eastern Style will swear those in the Piedmont glaze their pork with a bottle of ketchup like it’s a meatloaf. And Piedmont people will offer their sympathies to those in the East who don’t know any better than to eat their pork swimming in vinegar. The truth is the sauces are just about the same body and weight, each easy to glug-a-lug from a squeeze bottle and both imparting a tang and bite to stand up to the rich and fatty pork.

In Lexington, the squirt of ketchup and added sugar brings in a sweet, savory note and a dull red glow in the bottle.

“I’m not sure there is a signature style. You have two signature styles,” barbecue historian and author John Shelton Reed said. “You’re far more likely to find a wood cooker in the Piedmont than in the East. And it’s easier to cook a pork shoulder than whole hog.”

Barbecue’s birthplace

Lexington’s claim as a barbecue birthplace goes back more than a century, to when tents were set up downtown and Sid Weaver and Jesse Swicegood sold smoked pork sandwiches and a peculiar red slaw, sauced with a signature red barbecue sauce instead of mayonnaise.

“The reason the barbecue slaw is so good here (in Lexington) is whenever they had it for sale in the streets, there was no way to refrigerate it so the slaw wouldn’t go bad,” said Nathan Monk, the third generation behind Lexington Barbecue.

The proliferation of Lexington barbecue isn’t easily explained, Reed said. Perhaps it was the railroad or the furniture factories or the textile mills fueling a demand for smoked pork.

But very quickly, the barbecue founding fathers shared their secrets and methods and their apprentices opened their own restaurants bearing their own names.

“All of a sudden you have 17 barbecue restaurants for a town of 17,000 people,” Reed said.

German origins

Anyone making Lexington-style barbecue today or in the last century can trace their smoke and methods back to a few founding fathers. In their book “Holy Smoke,” Reed and his late wife Dale Volberg Reed make the case Lexington-style barbecue is a German immigrant story, mirroring a pork shoulder with a sweet and sour sauce that came from Bavaria.

Reed said Piedmont style barbecue follows a path through North Carolina once made by Lutherans.

“(Piedmont style) resembles a German pork shoulder dish that’s served with a sweet and sour sauce, but no cayenne pepper,” Reed said. “Besides that it’s Lexington-style barbecue. This is a German dish. Religion and food don’t change that fast.”

The Barbecue Center: A local icon

The oldest Lexington barbecue restaurant today is The Barbecue Center, opened in 1955 and made famous by the late Sonny Conrad, one of the founders of Lexington’s annual Barbecue Festival.

The restaurant is owned and operated today by Conrad’s wife, Nancy, and sons Cecil and Michael.

Located near downtown, The Barbecue Center is emblematic of Lexington’s cruising culture, a drive-in style restaurant where for decades teenagers revved engines and made long, slow loops from one side of Main Street to the next. The Barbecue Center was one of the main turn-arounds, filling the parking lot with cars and chrome and servers bringing out smoked pork to the curb.

A young Wayne Monk worked curb service at the Barbecue Center before founding his own restaurant.

In the dining room at The Barbecue Center, you’ll find a more local feel on weekdays for lunch and dinner, couples and families and co-workers cozied into red vinyl booths. Just before closing a little league team might stop in for a nightcap of milkshakes.

Cecil Conrad, not necessarily planning to carry on the family business, went to college and worked for years as a sports trainer. As his parents looked to wind down their careers in the restaurant, he moved back to split time with his brother managing this local icon.

“I always knew I was going to come back at some point,” Conrad said.

A famous banana split

One of the most famous dishes in all of Lexington Barbecue isn’t barbecue at all.

In the dining room of the Barbecue Center a hush might fall in the evening — or maybe gasps and nervous chuckles — as the restaurant’s prized dessert, a four pound banana split, is delivered to a table. Assembly involves three grapefruit-sized scoops of ice cream, bananas, chocolate syrup, walnuts in a candied syrup, a cloud of whipped cream draped over it all and a cherry on top.

The banana split hearkens back to the Barbecue Center’s origins as The Dairy Center, an ice cream shop serving scoops made from the milk of a local dairy. As winter temperatures dipped, so did the demand for ice cream. Conrad said the restaurant started smoking pork shoulders on the side.

Today, The Barbecue Center carries on with some of the most prized pork in the state, barbecue that recently earned the 48th spot on Southern Living’s 50 best barbecue joints in the South. Conrad said whole shoulders make for a moist, clean barbecue.

“The fat of the shoulders keeps the flavor and the moisture in the meat,” Conrad said. “You’re trying to cook it from the inside out. We try to let the flavor of the wood do all the seasoning.”

Barbecue fills the void

Just like in Eastern North Carolina, where the tide of tobacco pulled back and left towns reeling, Lexington lost its textiles and furniture factories, Conrad said. That void forced a larger identity on barbecue.

“With the closing of the furniture plants and textiles going overseas, Lexington’s job market suffered,” Conrad said. “But barbecue kept our name out there. … Barbecue was a constant, something they’ve been able to hold on to. It’s comfort. When you walk in it’s the same meal cooked the same way they were eating it when they were young. It’s not a trend, it’s just tradition.”

In 1984, Lexington started the Barbecue Festival, celebrating the city’s style of barbecue and its restaurants. This year’s festival is Saturday, Oct. 28 and is expected to draw more than 100,000 visitors to Lexington.

“The goal of the festival to celebrate the world famous barbecue heritage here in Lexington,” said Stephanie Saintsing, whose late mother, Kim, helped found the festival. “It’s unique and deserves to be celebrated. … It’s not a contest or competition, and it only celebrates one style of barbecue.”

This year’s festival also honors the latest class of inductees into the city’s barbecue Wall of Fame. The names this year include Nancy Conrad of the Barbecue Center, Scott and Kaffee Cope, second-generation owners of Smokey Joe’s, Jimmy Troutman of Troutman’s Barbecue in Denton and Doug Cook, who owns Backcountry Barbecue.

Backcountry Barbecue

Opened in 1987, Cook’s Backcountry Barbecue is the newest true Piedmont-style restaurant to open in Lexington.

Cook grew up in the Smoky Mountains of North Carolina and came to Lexington in 1965 with two dollars in his pocket and a hard luck Ford. To that point, he’d never tasted barbecue, but it reminded him of Smoky Mountain campfires, the charred wood smell in the air.

“I really liked the barbecue, and I ate a lot of it,” Cook said. “The more I was around barbecue the more I liked it. ... My big thing is keeping Lexington-style barbecue alive.

“It’s the best in the world and known all over this country. If it’s done right, it’s the best meat I’ve ever tasted.”

The next generation

At most Lexington barbecue restaurants, both the ones sticking with wood or those who’ve given into gas, it takes at least eight hours to cook a pork shoulder, often 10 and sometimes as many as 12.

Nathan Monk, the third generation of Monks to keep the pits lit at Lexington Barbecue, said the pork shoulders are seasoned with throws from a salt shaker, not a pat or massage or a complicated rub of spices.

Rick Monk plans to step back some next year, his 52nd in the restaurant. As he hands the reins fully to his son, he remembers how he felt when it was his time to take over.

“I was scared to death,” Rick Monk said. “The hardest thing is not learning the business, it’s making sure you can please your father, and worse, your father’s friends.”

Nathan Monk grew up in the restaurant. When he got in trouble he served his timeouts in a broom closet in the prep kitchen. He once needed stitches from a hard-won lesson on why there’s no running in the kitchen and his high school job was cleaning out a week’s worth of ashes from the cookers on Saturday nights, shoveling the pits clear and dousing the soot with water to ensure no coals would burn down his family’s legacy.

He got as far away as one week of college in Wilmington before he decided Lexington Barbecue was what he was born to do.

“You think about doing other things, but then you get here. You know it, and you’re doing it,” Nathan Monk said.

Nothing better than a sandwich

Despite barbecue’s rise nationally to the top tiers of the culinary world, Lexington-style remains largely outside that spotlight.

Modern pork shoulders are often cooked on offset pits — Texas style — and pulled apart by hand. Social media has fueled that national momentum, with reels from Texas beamed into smartphones, showing briskets squeezed of their juices, beef ribs tinged with smoke rings and pork butts smashed to shreds with the palm of a hand.

Inside the Lexington bubble, there’s little that might go viral.

There’s certainly some succulence to sliced pork, colored with a ladle of dip, but otherwise little love for Lexington on TikTok.

Nathan Monk doesn’t seem concerned about the intrusion of barbecue trends. He’s seen them come and go. And art is always a matter of personal taste.

“It doesn’t get much better than a barbecue sandwich with slaw falling off of it,” Monk said.

Barbecue Festival: If you go

The 39th annual Barbecue Festival in Lexington will be held Oct. 28, with gates opening at 8 a.m. and barbecue for sale starting at 10 a.m. The festival is free to attend and will include craft vendors, live music local civic groups and, of course, Lexington-style barbecue. Four local restaurants will sell their smoked pork, including The Barbecue Center, Smokey Joe’s, Speedy’s and Stamey’s of Tyro. The festival ends at 6 p.m. For more information visit thebarbecuefestival.com.