Bar-B-Q King, Lincolnton, North Carolina: On the North Carolina Historic Barbecue Trail

After I had lunch at Fuzzy’s, I headed up to Blowing Rock to see my older brother Jim and his wife, Cantey. It was a great time. We had a nice visit, and Wilis Underwood’s (of Wilber’s fame) sister Missy gave me a bottle of Wilber’s sauce. This was the view from their deck around sunset.

After a lovely dinner and breakfast, I got back to my Jim Early Tribute North Carolina Historic Barbecue Trail Trip with a trip to Lincolnton and Bar-B-Q King.

Bar-B-Q King is a good sized place with plenty of parking. You go in and place your order at the counter.

Then, much to your surprise, the diminutive young (high school or college age?) woman who took your order will yell out the order to people who are assembling orders behind the menu/partition. I mean she’ll holler! They’ve been yelling orders at Bar-B-Q King for 50 years.

They yell for every single order, including the highly complex orders of large groups. No one ever writes anything down. It reminded me of Ollie’s, where the servers never wrote anything down (except Harold), not even for a party of seven adults and six rambunctious children. See here.  Your food arrives promptly, precisely as ordered. You then move to a largish dining room, or to one of Bar-B-Q King’s outside picnic tables, serenaded by the distant murmur of orders being yelled.

I ordered a pork plate with red slaw and green beans, confident that, this being North Carolina, the plate would be garlanded with hushpuppies.

Glorious. The pork at Bar-B-Q King is excellent, outstanding, redolent of smoke and pork and the tang of the sauce, a good Piedmont sauce. And they give you plenty, as you can see, easily enough for two. 

Their red slaw also is top notch, with a nice light tang of vinegar and pepper to go with the crisp cabbage. And the hushpuppies are very good. They even look crunchy, don’t they? The green beans, alas, had been cooked with sugar rather than side meat. Corn bread, collards, and now green beans: another great food purposefully infected by the dread sugar virus. Sigh. “I remember the old days and I cry.” Next time I go to Bar-B-Q King, and there will be a next time, I’ll get a different vegetable, probably macaroni and cheese.

That’s as far as I got on the Trail. I would have gone to M&K Barbecue and Country Cooking, but the Internet told me M&K is now “permanently closed.” Pik and Pay, of course, is temporarily closed after a fire. The two remaining Trail places, Hubba Hubba Smokehouse in Flat Rock in Henderson County and Herb’s Pit BBQ in Murphy in Cherokee County, are both in the far western reaches of the state, and I had to get back. Well, I could have made it to Hubba Hubba, but at the cost of missing the Alabama-Florida game.

I was able to round out the trip with two more barbecue places with special meaning, one (Mr. Bar-B-Q) to make up for a previous Day of Debacle, and the other (Clark’s) that offers two very special treats. Stay tuned.

And make it a point to go to Bar-B-Q King. It’s one of the Ten Best Piedmont-style Barbecue Places in North Carolina. I’ll probably try them as I make my way over to Flat Rock and Murphy to finish the Trail. There’s a dream. Meanwhile, you really should head to Lincolnton and listen to them yell your order. And enjoy your meal.

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