84 CHARLOTTEMAGAZINE.COM // JUNE 2019
Case study: the western, or Piedmont,
style of Carolina barbecue, which you
might as well call the Stamey genus. In
the 1920s, two of the rst commercial
vendors in Lexington, Jess Swicegood
and Sid Weaver—guys who sold barbe-
cue from tents across the street from the
courthouse—taught a youngster named
Warner Stamey a peculiar spin on the
traditional method: shoulder instead of
whole hog and a sauce, or “dip,” reddened
and enriched by a bit of ketchup. Stamey
moved west to Shelby but came back
in 1938, bought Swicegood’s place, and
renamed it aer himself.
Fifteen years later, he opened a
Stamey’s Barbecue on what was then
called High Point Road in Greensboro.
Six years aer that, the city opened a new
arena, Greensboro Coliseum, across the
street. Stamey’s has fed countless basket-
ball and concert crowds since then, and
the two Greensboro locations remain in
the hands of Chip Stamey, who vows to
keep doing it the way his grandfather did.
He’d better. Dozens of cooks learned
directly from Stamey, including those
who established Lexington Barbecue and
Bar-B-Q Center in Lexington and Red
Bridges Barbecue Lodge in Shelby—all
cornerstones of the western style. “You
can name about 30 dierent restaurants
in the Piedmont,” Moss says, “that trace
their roots back to Warner Stamey.”
JIM EARLY AND I MEET in the rst week
of March, before the news about Wilber’s
in Goldsboro. He laments that since he
converted the list of authentic Carolina
barbecue spots to The NCBS Historic
Barbecue Trail on the Barbecue Society
website, he’s had to remove ve places
that closed, three within the previous
90 days: Jack Cobb and Son Barbecue
Place in Farmville; Allen & Son Barbeque
in Pittsboro; and Speedy Lohr’s BBQ of
Arcadia, between Winston-Salem and
Lexington. He was worried enough about
the dwindling list to reduce his years-
in-business requirement from 15 to 12.
“I’ve taken people o for non-compli-
ance,” he says, referring to the apostates
who switch to electric or gas heat. “But I
haven’t had three retirements in 90 days.”
The restaurant names provide a clue as
to why they closed. Especial-
ly in rural and small-town
areas like eastern North Car-
olina, prior generations stuck
around, and parents passed
knowledge and business to
their children. Farming’s
decline and the relocation of
young people to cities have
broken generational chains
and, as North Carolina cit-
ies have grown more cosmo-
politan, eroded emotional
ties to traditional food. If you
move to Raleigh from Scran-
ton, or to Charlotte from Syr-
acuse, you may nd that you
like Carolina barbecue. But
it won’t remind you of your
childhood, and you probably
won’t take a four-hour road
trip to a dot-on-the-map
town near an old tobacco
farm to eat it.
“I truly believe that every-
one’s barbecue touchstone
starts with the barbecue they
grew up with,” says Elizabeth Karmel,
also known as the “Grill Girl.” Karmel is
a Greensboro native who’s turned her
love for eastern-style ’cue into Food Net-
work fame and the online business Car-
olinaCueToGo.com, which ships whole-
hog barbecue around the country. “Barbe-
cue is one of those things that’s very much
about comfort, about family, about good
times, poignant times.”
Karmel, who lives on the eastern tip
of Long Island now, won’t look down
on any barbecue style—western Carolina,
KC burnt ends, beef ribs cooked over mes-
quite from the Texas Hill Country. She
refers to herself as “an equal-opportunity
barbecuer.” If you grew up with it, go
ahead and love it. But she, like Jim Early,
grew up with eastern-style. “That vin-
egary tang—I think it’s the best barbecue
out there, and I’ve basically put my career
on it,” she tells me. “For me, when I take a
bite of a North Carolina-style sandwich,
it takes me back. It’s a visceral thing. It’s
not just food. It’s a lifestyle, a community.”
And it’s shrinking. The Historic Barbe-
cue Trail winds through towns like Mur-
phy, Flat Rock, Little Switzerland, Granite
Quarry, Willow Springs, Dudley; the only
two city names are Winston-Salem and
Greensboro—no Asheville, no Raleigh,
no Wilmington, no Charlotte. The small-
town people, Early says with a deep sigh,“are the ones who have supported and
caused these iconic barbecue places, like
the ones on the Trail, to grow. It wasn’t
people coming from the cities out there.
It was people who ate there ve times a
week and went on back, generation aer
generation, with their families.” There’s
not much le for them. So the children
leave, and the tables empty.
Some of the places and people hang on,
though, like Chip Stamey in Greensboro,
and Red Bridges’ daughter and grandchil-
dren over in Shelby, and, in tiny Dudley,
near Goldsboro, Steve and Gerri Grady of
Grady’s Barbecue, which Early describes
this way on his website: “This ’cue is so
good you don’t want to swallow it. It is
one of the best eastern-style ’cues one will
ever taste—pure ’cue heaven on Earth.”
And once you drive the state and ask
people where the good barbecue is, you
apparently nd no shortage of people
who want to discuss it, and pay for it, and
eat it. “I’d stop highway patrolmen,” Early
tells me, as he reminisces about his travels
two decades ago. “I’d stop people on the
highway.”
I ask him how that went over.
“Fine,” he responds, “’cause you’re talk-
ing about barbecue.”(^) OUR BARBECUE STORY
CONTINUED FROM PAGE 54
GREG LACOUR is the senior editor for this
magazine.
Elizabeth Karmel calls herself “the original grill girl” and
proves the grill isn’t just a man’s domain.
COU
RT
ESY