You know South’s best barbecue? Throw it on the list for this ‘Dreamland’ trip to Texas
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You think you know the best barbecue? Chew on this.
South Carolina has two of the top 5 barbecue joints in the whole dang South. Which we all know is the whole civilized world when it comes to pigs on the pits.
Just when you thought the only thing we’re first in is shot-up road signs and Clemson football, comes this.
South Carolina is home to the South’s No. 1 barbecue joint — Scott’s Bar-B-Que in Hemingway, according to the 2019 list in Southern Living magazine.
Lewis Barbecue in Charleston is No. 5.
“Lewis is the truth,” came the smokin’ text from my son on Sunday evening.
He was lost in the woody aroma, trying to hold onto his “El Sancho” LOCO sandwich, with pulled pork, chopped beef, “hot guts sausage” and pickled red onion.
It was so good, he took the menu home to frame it.
The barbecue was by pitmaster John Lewis. The interior design — yes, we have entered the Age of Interior Design in barbecue joints — is by B. Berry Interiors and Betsy Berry, whom we knew as Betsy Cranswick when she grew up on Hilton Head Island.
Thus began our Barbecue Tour.
This week, Burke and I will drive from Hilton Head Island to Dallas, Texas, with his dog, Winston, hitting as many of the South’s Top 50 barbecue joints as humanly possible.
It started quite simply. Burke, April and baby Bram are moving from Brooklyn, N.Y., to Texas. The others flew out, but Burke and Winston the 11-year-old Labradoodle are taking the Subaru to glory land. He asked about barbecue joints we loved in North Carolina because he might be able to stop on the way here. And the Barbecue Tour was born.
I sent him the Top 50 list from Southern Living. Mind you, this is no reader poll, although they have one and there’s plenty of good barbecue on that list as well. This one is by Robert F. Moss of Charleston, who wrote the book “Barbecue: The History of an American Institution.”
None other than the late John Egerton, author of “Southern Food: At Home, on the Road, in History” and so much more, said: “It’s truly the first comprehensive history of American barbecue.”
So tell your mama, we be ridin’ high on the hog.
Ten of the Top 50 joints are on my son’s spreadsheet, yes I said spreadsheet, for the road that lies ahead.
And that doesn’t count the four he hit in Charleston before getting here: Lewis Barbecue, Rodney Scott’s Whole Hog Barbecue (No. 28), Home Team BBQ (No. 35) and Swig & Swine (No. 46).
From here, we head toward Atlanta and Fox Bros. Bar-B-Q, but not before pigging out at the No. 6 joint in God’s country: Fresh Air Bar-B-Que in Jackson, Georgia.
And there’s Dreamland and Archibald’s in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, before we head north, if you’ll pardon the expression, to Memphis, Tennessee.
You may be asking how one eats smoky ribs and chicken and hand-chopped pork six times in one day in Memphis without looking like the latter-day Elvis.
Good question, but the answer is: Who cares? We’ll figure it out as it comes. And if it’s a coma that comes, they can run that last bottle of sauce through the IV.
As a matter of fact, I’d like to know about more stops between Hilton Head and Texas, which, by the way, is part of the South, and home to our last stop: No. 11 Cattleack Barbeque in the Big D.
Email me if you’ve got a place we need savor.
I’m calling it the Rolaids Tour.
And if the barbecue overdose kills me, scrape my ashes into Skull Creek on an outgoing tide, raise a glass into the sunset and murmur in your best funeral parlor voice: “That’s just the way he would’ve wanted it. He died with a smile on his face.”
