Barbecue is a NOUN that means pork, slow roasted to particular specifications. There is a lot of argument about where the word came from, but we think the best guess is that settlers learned to cook pigs over hot coals from the Indigenous people, who called the process “barbacoa,” which slowly changed to “barbecue.”

For more than 200 years, barbecue in North Carolina remained basically unchanged. Cooks used “every part of the pig but the squeal.” Split in half, the hog would be slow roasted over low heat and chopped, then served with a vinegar sauce. In the earliest days, oyster juice was added to the vinegar sauce, but that went out of vogue, marking the only significant change for centuries.

For most of our history, pigs have been a staple food. They are easy and inexpensive to raise and delicious. Sometimes pigs were let loose to root in the forest, and only captured when it was slaughtering time. Hog farms have been important to North Carolina’s economy since Colonial times, and the industry brings in more than $2 billion annually.

Historians say that for every one pound of beef that North Carolinians ate, we ate five pounds of pork!

Barbecue followed the trains west, starting on the coast and eventually spreading to the whole state. This is mainly because it was a very convenient food for travel.

In the late 19th century, the key differences that divide the state began to emerge. It’s said that it was German immigrants who brought tomatoes to the Piedmont, and one of the first ways North Carolinians used them was add them to their barbecue sauce.

Lexington, North Carolina, made history in 1919, when their first BBQ restaurant opened. It was just a tent in the middle of town, opened by Sid Weaver. Soon after that, Jesse Swicegood opened a stand as well, and their culinary choices formed the bedrock for a new barbecue tradition.

Lexington Style barbecue is always pork shoulder. It’s cooked in large wood-fired pits for hours, then chopped up and covered with “dip.” That’s a vinegar and spice based sauce with ketchup added, served hot. You won’t find the white slaw traditionally served with Eastern barbecue. Instead red slaw is served, with ketchup replacing mayonnaise in the recipe.

If you order a barbecue sandwich in Lexington, it will taste exactly like it would have one hundred years ago. It will taste exactly like it will twenty years from now.

Today, you’ll find regional differences in the barbecue for every 50 miles or so that you travel. Fortunately for the foothills, most barbecue restaurants here offer both sauces, and sometimes even more.

Barbecue all over North Carolina is served with slaw, but we offer up two types. White slaw is coleslaw-mostly cabbage and mayonnaise and it’s served with BBQ in the East. The creamy side adds nice balance to the tart vinegar sauce. Red slaw, also called BBQ slaw, leaves out the mayonnaise and replaces it with ketchup. The result is tangy and crunchy, and Lexington barbecue enthusiasts swear by it.