Review Of Wilber's Barbecue 4127 Highway 70 East Goldsboro, NC Open 7 Days A Week 919-778-5218 // 919-778-5219 Monday thru Saturday 6:00AM - 9:00PM Sunday 7:00AM - 9:00PM wilbersbarbecue.com By H. Kent Craig Original Review: 1999 // Revised Review February 2008

More interesting photos of Wilber's Barbecue can be found at the bottom of this page

Revised Review, February 2008 I admit that I was pure shame-faced when I admitted to Mr. Wilber Shirley that I hadn't actually visited his place in four or five years despite being a fan of his barbecue from the beginning, my initial review of his place being the second one ever posted on this site. When I told him that, he just smiled and said with a polite chuckle "well, Kent, don't let another five years pass before you come back again!" It won't be. If anything, his barbeque has seemingly gotten even a little better over the years if that's possible and is still some of the best of the best , perfectly consistent in taste, texture, presentation and after-taste as well and deserving to me in my pantheon of Top Three places I personally recommend even among the other worthy places in my 4-pig category, Clyde Cooper's in Raleigh and Byrd's in Durham (now that Bullock's has been downgraded to three pigs) being the other two. Perhaps the most pleasant surprise was his "new" Brunswick stew that was so similar in taste and mixture of vegetables and meat to Melton's when they were open that I would have sworn it was made by the same cook. Unlike many similar creations in other establishments, this one doesn't have celery or string beans or bits of fresh onion or any other ingredient I'm allergic to, it's simply tomato sauce, corn, peas, lima beans, tiny bits of carrots, small potato pieces and delicious bits of pork and chicken barbecue for the meats, slow-cooked so that it's thick and rich that reminisces of home more than restaurant. It was also my pleasure to go out back to the pithouse and visit a while with Leamon Parks who is Mr. Shirley's pitmaster. We talked about the fine alchemy of cooking perfect pigs, Mr. Parks having a lifetime of turning fresh hot hardwood coals and fresh cool pig carcasses into some of the finest barbecue this side of, well, this side of your particular vision of paradise. Mr. Shirley is lucky to have Lemon as his pitmaster considering that young folks usually aren't interested in a career that involves long - long - hours making and shoveling hot coals underneath pigs cooking that have to have meticulous attention paid to them for all those hours to make sure they're cooked thoroughly but not overly so, maintaining that perfect balance between too moist and too dry, between succulent and just plain sucky. I'm don't know how much Mr. Shirley pays Leamon and I wasn't about to ask but I can speculate that considering the decades-long-learning curve he apprenticed and journeymaned before becoming a real pitmaster, it probably is not enough. How could you find someone to replace him? You couldn't. Lose someone with his skill and you'd have to go to cooking the pigs with gas which requires little if any knowledge of how "real" barbecue is to be prepared. Fortunately we don't have to worry about that happening. Wilber's is one of the true founding institutions of Eastern North Carolina barbecue and it's not going anywhere any time soon and hopefully not ever, not if Mr. Shirley has anything to do with it.

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Original Reviww, 1999

If Wilber's BBQ in Goldsboro didn't exist, then God would surely direct Wilber Shirley to create it. After all, even God enjoys a perfect BBQ plate now and then. I'll never forget my first time visiting Wilber's when I was a 16-year-old, and was cruising around "Down East" with some of my friends. Having grown up eating perfectly acceptable Eastern-NC-Style BBQ at such local favorites as Cooper's BBQ in downtown Raleigh and Johnson's BBQ in what then and still passes for downtown Cary, places which used natural gas as a cooking heat source for the pigflesh, I had never really had hardwood-cooked BBQ before. Noticing the couple 'hundred cars or more that filled the parking lot and overflowed to the shoulders of Highway 70 near Seymour Johnson AFB in Goldsboro, logic said that we were all hungry and that with so many cars that Wilber's probably had good barbeque.

Pulling into the parking lot, I noticed not one but two railroad cars full of dried hardwood logs directly behind the restaurant, and an empty railcar to one side. I thought to myself that was probably a few months' supply of the source of the wonderful aroma that filled the air much like the cherry trees do in the Tidal Basin in DC each springtime, a beckoning of good things to come. Later I learned that it was a couple of weeks' supply of hardwood that was used in making the coals which cooked the pig so perfectly, not a couple of months.

Being a Saturday and it seemed like a Saturday after a payday on the Base (a lot of obvious Air Force personnel and their families), they were packed, but we were seated within five minutes, ordered within two minutes, and were served within three minutes after ordering. And my, My, MY, what we were served! On the non-descript square table covered in a K-Mart red-and-white-checkered plastic table cloth, was placed the ultimate offering the North Carolina BBQ Gods for us to taste-test first. The first bite of that perfectly-cooked, almost zero-seasoned/moistened with the faintest hint of vinegar "sauce", with the flavor of real hardwood smoke from real hardwood chips which had spent their useful 16-18 hour lives sacrificing themselves (along with the pigs, of course) to create the perfect moment of NC-BBQ epiphany, locked my mind and heart on Wilber's in that moment of time that will last forever.

I've eaten at Wilber's probably 15-20 (usually about once a year) times since then. That number would have been higher, save for the fact that they're just a little too far away for an easy drive there and back from Raleigh. Every time I've eaten there over the decades has been as consistently good as the last. The texture of the meat meets my personal preference of a medium-to-fine chop, with no pieces larger than a dime and no smaller than a "00" shotgun pellet. Again, like Bullock's in Durham, it's not just that it has super-excellent BBQ, it's that is has consistently super-excellent BBQ. They don't have any weak spots on their side dishes, either; whatever you order will be good, but no matter what you order, be sure to at least try the pork BBQ, it's what God put Wilber Shirley on this Earth to do.

To find Wilber's is easy; it's on Highway 70 in Goldsboro, just past the merge with 70 Business, more or less across from the southern edge of Seymour Johnson AFB if you're heading east, obviously just before the merge if you're heading west. Their phone number is 919-778-5218.

> Wilber's Barbecue hardwood woodpile	Wilber's pitmaster Leamon Parks	> Beautiful pigs slow-cooking in the put
Pitmaster Leamon Parks lovingly tending to that day's pigs	An F-14 from nearby Seymour Johnson AFB	Mr. Wilber Shirley, a true founding father of Eastern-NC-Style barbecue cuisine

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