100-Mile Barbecue Report: The Skylight Inn, Ayden, NC

 

Jesse Sutton-

100 Mile Barbecue n.  Barbecue that is worth travelling 100 miles for.

Ok, y'all, barbecue is very important to me.  It was my second ever favorite savory food, after deep-fried seafood, Calabash-style.  Can you tell I'm from North Carolina?  

Now, barbecue is an interesting specimen.  It's everyday, inexpensive, workingman's fare, and yet can achieve truly mythic status among its adherents.  The best barbecue places get classified as '100 mile barbecue,' meaning they are worth a day trip, just for lunch or dinner.  In the south, barbecue places are plentiful, but perfect ones are few and far-between.

A true aficionado needs a system, to judge which places are worth the calories, and which places are not.  My opinion is that for inspiration, we need look no further than Michelin.  The three-star system places great restaurants into three categories.  (Remember, to get a Michelin star at all, it is necessary to be a great restaurant.)  One star means 'great restaurant, one of the best.'  Two stars means 'worth a significant detour to dine here.'  Three means 'this restaurant is worthy of a dedicated trip, all by itself.'  Putting the stars aside, it's easy to apply that same elegant logic to barbecue places.  However, since it's barbecue, the stakes are a little lower, so I'd like to recalibrate.

One Pig- Great BBQ place: worth waiting in a long line, paying a little more, or accepting the fact that they don't sell beer.

Two Pigs- Fantastic BBQ place: worth an hour's drive (or waiting in line for over an hour), worth having to sit on a picnic table even though it's 100F and humid and there's hornets everywhere, and the only thing to drink is Hi-C, which is all over your hands and your table, so it's hornet city.

Three Pigs- Perfect BBQ place: worth driving for hours to get to.  Worth eating at, even if the building looks like it should be condemned, and you cannot believe D-HEC let's them get away with the state of their kitchen.  (Not all 3pig spots are decrepit and busted, but if you go to a bbq spot, and it's grungy as hell, and you are still totally enthusiastic about eating there, that's a good sign you've found one of the places that's true.)

So anyway, my travels have led me to a few 3pig spots.  Roy Burns BBQ, outside Houston, is the best TX 'cue I've had.  (And no, I've not been to Aaron Franklin's.)  Western TN has two great ones I've tried, the defunct Craig's BBQ in Covington, and the very much alive Bozo's BBQ, in Mason.  For NC barbecue, it's hard for me to pick, but I grew up on Allen and Sons, in Pittsboro.  For West Carolina style, my favorite is Little Richard's, in Winston Salem.  For me, the holy trinity of BBQ states is North Carolina, Texas, and Tennessee.  

For SC, everyone talked about Rodney Scott's, in the upstate.  I was always a fan of their pork rinds and pepper vinegar, the former I scored at the Taste of Charleston one year (and it was the only great food there, and I'm including what Nate and I were serving in that analysis), and the latter is available bottled throughout South Carolina, but when he came to Charleston and set up shop, the pulled pork was just good.  Really good.  Not 100 mile BBQ, by any stretch.  Hell, their chicken isn't nearly as good as the chicken at nearby Home Team BBQ.  Don't get me wrong, I like it, I go there a lot for pork sandwiches, but if I drove all day to get dinner there and then drove all the way back, I would have been a little let down.  The other BBQ place in SC that everyone always talks about is Sweatman's, in Holly Hill, but I've never actually eaten there, because they are only open on Friday and Saturday, and that's tough, for a restaurant worker.  So if my home state of South Carolina has 100-mile barbecue, I haven't found it yet.

But Anyway

So there I was, driving back to South Carolina, from my friend's place in Northampton MA, where I'd just had a little vacation.  Now, the first day of that drive is pretty exciting.  From the mountains of Massachusetts through the beautiful parkways of Yonkers, into the insane Darwinistic experiment that is Manhattan, across the far-more-complicated-than-it-needs-to-be George Washington Bridge, across the industrial wasteland of New Jersey, and all the way through the Baltimore-DC corridor, there is a ton of stuff to see.  Then, you get about halfway through Virginia, and the drive really starts to suck.  There's NOTHING to look at.  Just a thousand trees, and a hundred billboards advertising southern staples: Jesus, flea markets, 'spas', country stores, and gun shows.  In order to break up the drive, I elected to take a little detour, and head to Ayden, NC, home of the Skylight Inn, which is one of those little BBQ places that has achieved that mythic status among the real heads.

So Where, Exactly, is Ayden?

No offense to Ayden, but nowhere.  It's literally nowhere.  It's a bit south and east of Rocky Mount and Wilson, two towns I've at least heard of.  It's in the 'Inner Banks' region, called so presumably because the area serves as the headlands for the rivers that flow into the eastern wetlands, and after, the Pamlico Sound, the body of water that defines the Outer Banks island chain where I used to vacation when I was a kid.  (It was GREAT!  It was like the white trash Caribbean!)  

I never did get to the Ayden town center, but there's a picture of it on Wikipedia, and I'd describe it as 'quaint.'   The Skylight Inn was more on the outskirts.  A squat brick building with a literal rotunda (like the Capitol Building, only small and fake) sprouting from the top of it, a gravel drive, and what I would describe as 'not a whole lot of stuff' surrounding it, it looked rural, tiny, and quirky, which are all very, very good signs for a barbecue.

The Food

I stepped inside and looked at the menu.  It was astoundingly brief and simple (another very, very good sign).  They have only two entrees, pork and chicken (listed, charmingly, as 'Pig' and 'Yardbird.'  For sides, they offered slaw, baked beans, potato salad, and cornbread (which came with all orders anyway).  For dessert, they offered 'cake' by the slice (details were not forthcoming), and banana pudding.  The only 'appetizer,' so to speak, was pork rinds, which they had on display on the counter, in a huge heap of transparent plastic bags.  I ordered a medium pork plate, with potato salad as my side, grabbed a bag of those rinds, and drew myself a Dr. Pepper off of their well-travelled soda fountain.  By ordering the only app, one meat, and getting 1 side (while also receiving a complimentary slab of cornbread), I had effectively ordered just about half the menu, which I feel is plenty of food to make an evaluation.

How Was It?

Well, barbecue evaluation comes down to three things: meat, sauce, and sides,  The sides?  Well, I only had two of the four options, and the results were mixed.   The potato salad was good.  Not perfect.  I always want my potato salad to be a lot more acidic than what they give you at barbecue places.  But this was a good example of a classic southern potato salad, just absolutely loaded down with mayo.  It was lacking salt, but since the tables had pepper vinegar and salt shakers, it's hard to really get upset about this.  Shaking off my big-city, fine-dining mentality, having to salt your own BBQ is actually pretty common, even at the best places.  (Craig's, my platonic ideal of what a BBQ place should be, gave you a little salt packet with each sandwich, and you needed it.)  

The cornbread was interesting, by which I mean it was the worst cornbread I have ever had, ever, but in kind of a unique way.  It was almost entirely unleavened.  It was almost corn pudding.  In a way, it was kind of like a panisse.  Perhaps if we'd fried a few pieces in some lard on a griddle, it would have been palatable, but instead, the cold, dense, pasty interior was bland and rubbery.  The texture was strangely like the bottom crust of a pie that's been somewhat underbaked.  No crunch, no lift, and virtually no salt, to boot.  But that's fine.  Every BBQ has at least one side that totally sucks.  Usually it's the mac and cheese.  (Seriously, the mac and cheese at BBQ places ALWAYS SUCKS.)  But the Skylight Inn doesn't have mac and cheese, so I guess it had to be the cornbread.

The table had 2 sauces on it, a sweet red (for the kids, I guess), and Eastern Carolina's barbecue sauce of choice, pepper vinegar.  The sweet red tasted homemade and subtle, not over-sweetened and cloying like a bottled sauce.  But the pepper vinegar was flawless.  It was just the thing to wake up that flabby, needlessly rich potato salad.

And the pork?  Man, the pork was good.  Was it great?  Hard to say, more on that later.  It was chopped to order, I could see that with my own eyes, the chopping station was right behind the cashier's station.  It looked like they were working in maybe 5# batches, and with 2 lines going, 6 people deep the entire time I was there, there's no way that was going to dry out.  Now interestingly, I don't always like whole hog (which this was) as much as Boston butt BBQ.  There are more lean cuts (like loin, which struggles in the flavor department in with the fatty ones, so be a little anemic sometimes, but that's a personal preference thing, and I can't blame an East Carolina place for doing their thing.  It needed salt, and a little jot of the pepper vinegar, but then it was really good.  The best part?  There were crunched up pork rinds in the chopped pork.  Stop the presses, that's some next level stuff.  That's what really set this place apart from me.

Still, as I was driving away, I was forced to contemplate something.  How much better was the Skylight Inn, really, compared to Rodney Scott's?  I was impressed by the Skylight Inn, but a little disappointed by Scott's.  Still, the whole-hog BBQ is done largely the same way, whole hogs, all wood, low and slow, so how much of a difference is there, really?  I mean, the pork rinds were a nice touch, but I feel like that can't usurp the importance of the way the pork is cooked.  Is it possible that all that driving, all that anticipation, primed me for a little bit of confirmation bias?  Is it possible that when I tried Scott's for the first time, the fact that it was within a 5 minute drive of my place detracted from its mythic status?

Yeah, it's definitely possible.  It's totally possible that the mythic Skylight Inn, in far-off Ayden, and Scott's, down the street from my house, serve almost perfectly comparable barbecue, and the only real variable is how much effort I had to put to get to it.  It works on the same principle as kids that dump $5 in quarters into one of those claw machines at the bowling alley, just to get to a toy they wouldn't have paid $1 for.  The human mind is a complicated machine.  At any rate, if, for whatever reason, you find yourself within an hour's drive of Ayden, it's worth a detour.  If not, just go to Scott's on Upper King, and make sure to get some rinds,  crunch them up, and add them to your pig meat.  You'll be just as happy, and you'll save on gas.

Oh, I Almost Forgot

Speaking of rinds!!!!  Holy wow, these were amazing.  These weren't those little wafers of compressed pig skin you get off the Sysco truck, that fry up just like Baken-ets from the snack machine at a rest area.  These are the real deal, perfect little nugs of crunchy goodness.  Occasionally, they will have a little bit of unrendered fat on them, for an unexpected burst of savory softness.  Unlike some cracklin's, they are never so tough that they are effectively dog treats.  I want to say they were better than the ones at Scott's, but then, given the previous paragraph, how can I know for sure?  What I know is that they were absolutely amazing, and perfect, to boot.  They achieved a level of flawless perfection that even the really, really good chopped pork didn't hit.

-js