Review Of Dillard's Bar-B-Q 3921 Fayetteville St. Durham, NC 27713 Open Tuesday thru Saturday ~ Lunch & Dinner Phone: 919-544-1587 By H. Kent Craig Reviewed: February, 2005

I've been going to Dillard's Bar-B-Q for many, many years now and each and every single time I've gone the Dillard family has never failed to impress me with their consistently great vinegar-&-mustard-sauce-based fine chop pork barbecue.

Each and every time, my taste buds have been treated to what I would call South-Carolina-Style mustard-base barbecue but which co-owner James Dillard (along with his co-owner and sister Wilma) would insist only half-jokingly is the "third leg" of North Carolina styles of pork barbecue, plain vinegar-and-pepper-sauce Eastern-NC-Style and ketchup-&-vinegar-sauce Western/"Lexington"-NC-Style being the other two - which James would then claim that South Carolina "stole" because they couldn't come up with their own style and after eating the exquisiteness of James' and Wilma's porcine heureux I'm inclined to believe them.

For those of you who may or may not have tried mustard/vinegar-sauce based chopped barbeque before, it's a unique taste sensation. I've eaten at several SC-Style places in South Carolina and will review a couple of them eventually, and much like their ketchup/vinegar-Lexington-NC-Style BBQ cousins, if you're not very careful and don't know exactly what you're doing when cooking it, all your customers end up tasting is the sauce and not the flavor of the pork, the mustard drowning out all hope of actually tasting the meat.

When I asked James what his secret was to finding that perfect balance between the otherwise strong taste of the mustard if it was anyone but himself creating their "secret" sauce and the succulent flavor of their consistently perfectly cooked pork Boston Butts and pork shoulders ("we use one Boston Butt to every two pork shoulders because that's the best parts of the pigs, we do not use the whole-hog just to save money like so many other barbecue places do"-James) which are then fine-chopped but not mushy-chopped, he looked me right in the eye and replied: "salt . . . I use just a tiny bit of extra salt to help bring up the flavor of the meat once the sauce is applied to it; too little salt and you don't taste the pork at all, too much and it makes it taste, well, too salty; I also slow-simmer each batch of sauce that I make myself for hours on hours, hand-stirring and slowly working the consistency of it to where it needs to be, based on my now 50 years experience working here, learning the secret to it at my father's knee".

For those of you concerned with that tiny bit of extra salt added to the sauce, well, if you're concerned about the effects of barbecue on your system then let me just slightly smart-alecky suggest perhaps you shouldn't be eating barbeque at all, James assured me that ". . . what would be an extra pinch of salt in the sauce for a typical serving would be the equivalent to the salt on a single potato chip", so don't sweat it.

The main thing about dining at Dillard's is that a meal there is, like eating at all other four-pig-rated barbeque establishments and other great restaurants, a truly sensuous experience, a delight for the nose and the eyes as well as for the tongue and taste pallet.

Their sides are a little unusual, too. In addition to the typical sides of hush puppies (which are excellent) and cole slaw and green beans and pinto beans and potato salad, they also serve completely authentic and for-real pig's feet and home-cooked chitterlings/chitlins, two items that used to be traditional in North Carolina barbecue joints but which are almost impossible to find now, let alone home-cooked on premises like Dillard's does. They also serve turnip greens and collard greens and both fried and stewed okra, which are not too common, either. Myself, because of the host of my food allergies, I always get the rice and brown gravy and black-eyed peas.

While no longer cooked over an open pit with hardwood coals because the City Of Durham and the EPA made them quit doing that a few years back because of local air quality issues (we're in one of those "urban air quality watch zones" where the regional air quality is monitored and bullied by the EPA), the pork itself is still slow-cooked as close to the old-fashioned way as possible, and the meat itself is served so clean without any globs of fat or skin that you'd be hard-pressed to find any fault with it at all.

This is the way "Mr. Bagley" who taught James and Wilma's father, Sam Dillard, how to do it and which is how they've been doing it at their same location in Durham since 1953 and I can tell you that since I've been going there, since the 60's, it has always been this way, this good.

If you need an "amen" or two, consider the fact that the only barbecue allowed to be sold at the most famous minor league baseball park in America, the Durham Bulls Athletic Park (think Kevin Costner and the movie "Bull Durham" which was based on the team) just down the road a bit, is theirs and at any given home game they routinely sell every single ounce of the 1,200 pounds of their 'cue they bring in to fans hungry for the best of the best minor league baseball experience and best of the best major league barbecue legacy.

Portrait of Sam Dillard, the founder of Dillard's Bar-B-Q	James Dillard, son of founder Sam Dillard and co-owner with sister Wilma of Dillard's Bar-B-Q	Alan Dillard, Jr., grandson of founder Sam Dillard of Dillard's Bar-B-Q, and the 3rd-generation of Master barbecue chefs to keep the tradition alive.
Dillard's Bar-B-Q Serving Line	Dillard's Bar-B-Q Dining Area

Click on this GoogleMaps link for directions on how to get to their place.

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