Four Consistently - Inconsistent North Carolina Barbecue Institutions:
*Parker’s Bar-B-Q & *Bill’s Barbecue & Chicken, both in Wilson, NC, respectively and . . .
*Hog Heaven BBQ-Chicken-Seafood in Washington (affectionately called “Little Washington” by Tar Heel Natives) NC
by
H. Kent Craig ©2004
The hallmark of virtually all very average, very ordinary, very “well, we’re here at it so we might as well stop and eat” restaurants, not just barbecue, isn’t that the food is terrible because if it was they wouldn’t be in business, but that the quality of the fare presented is consistently inconsistent, going from maybe usually average most days to spectacular the next and then to absolutely terrible dog-food-level before bouncing back to edible but nothing to remember the following days.
This is oh-so true for the following four Eastern-NC-Style BBQ institutions: Parker’s Bar-B-Q & Bill’s Barbecue & Chicken, both in Wilson NC, respectively; and lastly but not leastly Hog Heaven BBQ-Chicken-Seafood in Washington (affectionately called “Little Washington” by Tar Heel Natives) NC.
I know I will literally receive hate mail if not death threats for putting Parker’s on this list and in the “2 pig” category, but after eating at Parker’s for over thirty years, this is my considered opinion.
Parker’s is now serving its fourth generation of customers, having opened in 1946, and I think many of Parker’s loyal legions come from having been taken there lots of times when they were kids growing up nearby. There’s nothing wrong with that.
Food, more than nutrition for the body, is often comfort for the soul, and familiarity of surroundings and sensory inputs of tastes can bring back memories from the happy past to assuage the rougher present.
There’s nothing wrong with that, nothing wrong with enjoying any dining establishment because of the ethereal more than internal physical comfort it brings, but myself, when I have to be on-guard constantly not to bite down on a piece of gristle hard enough to chip a tooth or spend five minutes picking out large gross pieces of fat and burned bits off the carcass before I can actually attempt to eat what’s left, well, if what was left wasn’t at least passable to pass between my lips then I’d put them on my 1-pig-rated-dog-food list along with Allen & Son.
And what is the deal with those truly almost inedible cornsticks, found at no other BBQ joint except for nearby Bill’s, those hard but sticky-chewy cornsticks being more suited to feed the hogs for eventual barbecue bringings more than for people forced to try to eat them instead of actual hushpuppies? I actually believe they serve these cornsticks because they can make a batch up in the morning and serve them cold all day to uncomplaining customers instead of continually having to make fresh and hot batches of real hushpuppies to their customers, what other reason could there be for foisting such a non-traditional sidedish in The Cradleland Of North Carolina barbecue?
Speaking of Bill’s Barbecue & Chicken which is just around the country-corner from Parker’s in Wilson NC, their decline from a true 4-pig establishment basically ever since they had opened up to a consistently disappointing 2-pigger after the massive almost-biblical flood waters from Hurricane Floyd back in 1996 destroyed their original restaurant, flood waters literally reaching the roof which you won’t believe happened if you were to go there now since they sit on a flat plain in town, they building a new building and kitchen around what used to be a picnic shelter out in their parking lot which I have eaten their pre-Floyd-Flood 4-pig fare at many times, is something which I am truly sad about, their decline I mean to say, but I’ve eaten there a half-dozen times since the flood and the results have always been the same, from average to near-bad. Bill’s only saving grace is their betters sides than Parker’s or a lot of other places; I can’t eat collard greens and okra and other such Southern delicacies, but my dining companions who can have told me their sides like the forementioned are pretty good to very good indeed, almost as good as the sides served at Mitchell’s BBQ (also in Wilson) which is up the street from Parker’s. But their good sides doesn’t change the fact that their barbecue is bland at best and nose-twitching-bad at worst, again, consistently unpredictable.
At least at Hog Heaven BBQ-Chicken-Seafood in Washington N.C. down on the mouth of the Tar River where it empties into the Pamlico Sound, the last focus of this report, they heap the portions on you much like the better establishments do, the amount of meat on their barbecue plate being more generous than lots of their competition, not like they have a whole heckuvalot of competition in this basically isolated and mostly rural area. And their hushpuppies, though filled with fresh bits of onion in the batter-mix, are always served right from the fryer and pipping-hot to your table.
But the meat, their barbecue? That’s a strange and somewhat difficult call to make. Sometimes the chop is large and chunky, more like you’d pull off a freshly-cooker pig carcass at a home pig-picking, other times it’s a traditional Eastern-NC-Style fine chop, and that would all be allowable, except for the meat itself, which is, well, just being honest, often if not usually strange tasting to me, and I’m not sure why this is, and even after I asked a couple of times all I got was a sincere smile and a polite “well, we don’t know” response.
Sometimes their barbecue is close to 3-pig quality, then the next time it will taste like it has an oyster or shrimp over-flavor to it, sometimes even a mild mix of pork and beef flavors, and one memorable time it tasted almost “plastic-cy” and I didn’t eat that, it tasted too much like biting into thermos-cooler. Strange. Strange, but, yes, again, the mantra of this combined review, consistently all over the preparation and cooking and presentation dartboard, sad to say, since the folks at Hog Heaven seem unusually nice even for the traditionally hospitable trade of barbecue restauranting.
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