u/thestateyourein

Storytime!

Our first trip to Ponysaurus in Raleigh's Ironworks they had this dreamy special, you know the thing you have one time & then every trip back you hope to see in on the menu.

It was a Meatball Pizza with Burrata.

& they have never had it again. But our last trip we noticed Burrata on the menu as a topping, so we asked our servers (its one of those new age places where you order on your phone) & they said we could in fact order it, just to add it to the notes.

So this is a Sausage Pizza with no cheese, add Burrata & Basil.

BRUH. This is prob our favorite pizza we have ever had.

You have go to try it.

& yes this place is not really a restaurant, it's a brewery with food, but when we tell you the Italian food here out kicks its coverage, we mean it.

& as always, no one pays us to show up so when we recommend a place, its from the heart.

*ps. we hope one day with our support they can finally afford pizza stands

If you’ve eaten at Skylight Inn and never made it over to Bum’s, you’re missing part of the story.

They come from the same family tree, and the whole hog barbecue is remarkably similar. Same wood smoke, finely chopped pork and crispy skin mixed through it.

The difference has always been in the approach. Skylight Inn became famous and knew how to draw a crowd. Back in the early days they’d even bring in skydivers on Saturdays.

Bum’s mostly just made barbecue.

No big production. Just whole hog over wood, fried chicken, collards, cabbage, slaw and cornbread, steady and true in downtown Ayden.

One reached for the sky. The other just kept the fire going.

If you want to know who the good folks are, take note of who shows up for somebody else.

There’s three pretty great North Carolina barbecue stories in this one picture.

That’s Adam from Old Colony Smokehouse in Edenton. He drove all the way to Louisburg to be there when Mat Griner opened the doors on Southern Q’s first brick and mortar at Tar Banks Brewing Co.. Myron Mixon came in from Georgia. And back there in the crowd are the folks from Morris Barbeque in Hookerton.

Now technically, these folks are competition.

But good barbecue folks don’t seem to understand competition the same way everybody else does. They eat at each other’s places. They brag on each other. And when somebody finally gets to hang a sign over a door of their own, they get in the truck and go stand in line with everybody else.

Morris had a tree fall on their restaurant back in July. They’ve been closed ever since, and they’ve spent some of that unexpected time traveling around North Carolina visiting other barbecue joints.

Morris is an oddball even by North Carolina barbecue standards. They’re only open Saturdays. Whole hog barbecue, creamy slaw, hushpuppies, sweet tea and whatever dessert they made that week. That’s about it. Been enough for generations.

This Saturday, October 10, they fire it back up for the first time since July.

And I reckon a whole lot of folks ought to remember what Morris did when somebody else opened their doors.

Good folks show up for good folks.

That’s how you keep a thing going.

Morris Barbeque is reopening Oct 10th 8am-2pm

891 Morris BBQ Road, Hookerton, North Carolina

BBQ so good, that named the road after it

Benson Mule Days Parade

The Bologna BBQ Championship is an annual cooking competition using Bright Leaf Bologna Chubs, held at The Farm at 95 in Johnston County, NC.

Fuzzy’s has been around since 1954, tucked away in Madison in western Rockingham County. Lexington-style barbecue cooked over hickory coals, red slaw and dip, with the old lunch counter, stools and linoleum floors still there. Plenty of folks eating there have been coming most of their lives.

Dampf Good BBQ, out at Phillips Farms in Cary.

The NC Bigfoot Festival is this weekend in Marion.

It is a festival about Bigfoot.

There will be people who hunt for Bigfoot. There will be people dressed like Bigfoot. They sell a lot of Bigfoot stuff too.

They also have a Bigfoot calling contest. People get up and yell like they think Bigfoot sounds.

Nobody can really prove them wrong.

Nobody has ever really proved Bigfoot is real.

That does not stop anybody.

A lot of people go every year.

It is probably some of the best people watching in North Carolina.

You may not see Bigfoot.

You will see some people.

Tim Curry died last night. He was 80.

If you grew up in Raleigh in the 80s and 90s you probably remember Rocky Horror at the Rialto.

They showed it at midnight.

People dressed up and yelled at the screen. They threw rice and toilet paper.

Everybody did the Time Warp.

There was also an underwear run around the theater.

Tim Curry was the main guy. He wore fishnets and high heels.

It was a weird movie. That was why people liked it.

Going to the Rialto at midnight was just something you did back then.

Tim Curry was in a lot of movies.

But Rocky Horror is what a lot of us remember.

Skylight Inn & Bum's Restaurant

North Carolina Field Notes #11 • Tales, rooted in red clay.

You can sit inside Bum’s Restaurant in Ayden for about five minutes before you start wondering if Larry Dennis knows every person in Pitt County.

The door opens.

“Hey Larry.”

Larry hollers something back.

Another fellow comes in. Larry knows him too. Cuts up with him about something that apparently happened sometime during the first Bush administration.

Then a woman walks through the door and Larry asks about somebody in her family.

Another one comes in.

Same thing.

After a while you realize nobody is really coming into Bum’s as a stranger. They’re just picking back up a conversation with Larry that might’ve started last Tuesday or thirty years ago.

And Larry has the kind of personality that fills up whatever room he happens to be sitting in. He reminds you a little bit of every uncle you ever had rolled into one, the one who knew everybody, had something to say to everybody and could turn a trip to the hardware store into a forty-five minute social engagement.

Then he smiles.

A real one.

The kind that starts somewhere down deep and settles into laugh lines around his eyes that look like they’ve been earning their keep for a long, long time.

That’s the thing about places like this.

People will tell you Bum’s is a barbecue restaurant, and technically that is correct. There are whole hogs cooked over wood, chopped fine and hit with that vinegar and pepper that lets you know you have arrived safely in Eastern North Carolina.

But Bum’s is also a country kitchen.

And a meeting place.

And a booth that occasionally appears to be an unofficial municipal office where the primary business of the day is Larry holding down the high court happiness. 

Larry’s daddy, William “Bum” Dennis, started cooking barbecue around here in the early 1960s. Bum got his nickname as a boy because he stayed on the move, running all over Ayden. In 1963, he started with a little pool hall and grill downtown.

Larry grew up in it.

He learned the pits beside his daddy, who had learned that old way of cooking through his uncle, Latham “Skinner” Dennis.

That makes Larry part of a barbecue lineage around here that goes back farther than most folks can remember.

But I don't think barbecue completely explains Larry Dennis.

Cabbage collards might.

Larry's cabbage collards are legendary around Ayden.

Not “pretty good greens.”

Not “you ought to try some.”

Legendary.

The kind of food that eventually quits belonging solely to the person cooking it and becomes part of a town's identity.

Every year Ayden has the Collard Festival, and naturally there is a collard eating contest.

And naturally Larry sponsors it.

Because if you have spent your life becoming the Cabbage Collard King of Bum’s, I reckon eventually somebody is going to have to eat competitively in your honor.

But watch Larry with the people coming through that restaurant and you begin to understand that the collards aren't really the important part either.

The people are.

Some towns have folks who live there.

Then they have folks who become part of the place.

People everybody knows. People who remember your daddy and ask about your mama. People who have fed three generations of the same family and still reserve the right to give every one of them a hard time when they walk through the door.

You can't manufacture that.

You can't franchise it.

You can't hire somebody to come in and create it.

It takes years.

A lot of years.

Years of showing up. Years of remembering people. Years of standing behind the same counter while children become parents and parents become grandparents and everybody keeps coming back hungry.

Somewhere along the way, Larry Dennis didn't just become the man running Bum’s.

He got woven into Ayden.

And maybe that's what these old restaurants really preserve.

Sure, it's the wood smoke and vinegar.

It's cabbage collards and cornsticks and warm banana pudding.

But mostly it's people.

Because one day you realize the places that feel most like home usually have somebody standing inside who remembers you.

At Bum’s, his name is Larry.

A lot of restaurants serve what they call pork tenderloin, which is generally a pork chop with a better publicist.

Nothing wrong with a pork chop. I’m for them. But taking the bone out of one does not make it a tenderloin any more than taking the doors off a Buick makes it a Jeep.

Real tenderloin is that little strip tucked along the backbone, and there ain’t much of it. During hog harvest season, it was one of the prizes, often saved fresh for breakfast. Folks understood which part of the hog they were eating back before menus started taking certain liberties with the truth.

Here in Pitt County, that knowledge never entirely went away.

So this is the real thing. Pieces of actual tenderloin browned up with black pepper, soft scrambled eggs, grits, and a biscuit filled with hoop cheese, which is about as close as Eastern North Carolina gets to putting jewelry on breakfast.

And this being Ayden, you’re sitting in a town that might as well be the Barbecue Capital of North Carolina. Lexington probably has more barbecue restaurants, but they only cook part of the pig, and I don’t know that we ought to reward unfinished work.

Anyway.

Pork tenderloin. Eggs. Grits. Hoop cheese biscuit.

Pitt County still knows which part is which.

Bum's Restaurant

Ayden, North Carolina

Lasagna, Meat Balls & Crispy Pesto Marinated Mozzarella Balls with Tomato "Gravy"

Paul’s Grill & Grocery in Knightindale, NC