‘This is all we’ve ever known.’ How one of NC’s last whole hog joints survived COVID

When the barbecue pilgrims hop in the car and set off down the road, they hope to end up at a place like Grady’s Barbecue. The road to Grady’s is a left and a right south of Goldsboro, past the yards set ablaze by the pink of April azaleas, winding by farms and brushing the edge of Seymour Johnson Air Force Base, though you’d never know it for the trees.

Suddenly, after miles, Grady’s appears at a crossroads, a small white cinderblock building, the name painted on the side. Out back, the pitched roof of the smokehouse makes it look like a chapel, wafting that holy smoke all night long into the thick black darkness of the Eastern North Carolina sky.

Grady’s could have been lost this year, and with it a precious piece of North Carolina’s barbecue tradition. That tradition, though cherished, has been teetering in recent years, following the closings of some of the state’s historic restaurants.

Today, Steve and Gerri Grady’s restaurant stands as one of North Carolina’s few whole hog smokehouses, and currently the only one that’s Black-owned.

The COVID-19 pandemic put the Gradys’ lives, at 86 and 76, at risk and could have made the restaurant one of the many closings of the past year.

Still they persevere, lighting a fire four times a week that keeps the state’s barbecue torch burning.

“Can you cook the bread? I can cook the pig.”

Grady’s is actually named after Steve’s brother, who first wanted to open the barbecue restaurant. He quit after the first day, deciding a life of smoke and grease was not for him and offered to sell it to Steve and Gerri.

“Can you cook the bread? I can cook the pig,” Steve said to Gerri. She said alright.

At that time, Steve and Gerri were newlyweds, he at 52, she at 43, the second marriage for each of them. They had grown up in Seven Springs and rode the same school bus. Now he worked at the sawmill and she had just been laid off from the hospital.

They opened Grady’s on July 4, 1986 and sold out of barbecue by noon. Mrs. Grady was frying hushpuppies in a cast iron pan that couldn’t keep up with the flood of orders, sending some out without the “bread,” she said.

Mr. Grady learned to cook whole hog barbecue from his father and grandfather, who cooked a couple pigs a year in the fall or winter for holidays and celebrations, the pits dug into the ground. Mrs. Grady learned to cook at 9 or 10 years old, she said, from her mother and grandmother and later her mother-in-law. The recipes might as well be written in smoke.

“This is cooking the old fashioned way,” Mrs. Grady said. “This is all we’ve ever known. This is country. It’s a dash of this and a dash of that. There are no measurements.”

In the smokehouse, Mr. Grady lives by the same rules. The heat of the coals in the brick pit is measured by feel; he hasn’t used a thermometer in the 30 years he’s cooked the hogs. He seasons the pigs with a box of salt, not a shaker.

The pig goes on the smoker around 10 p.m. and comes off by 7 in the morning, then it’s chopped and seasoned and kept cool in a pan until it’s heated and served throughout the day.

Mrs. Grady begins each morning between 3 and 5 a.m., frying bacon and chopping vegetables. Though it’s known for whole hog, Grady’s is one of the few barbecue restaurants where a vegetable plate is just as popular. The menu might include sweet fresh butter beans or rich porky limas, black-eyed peas, tender steamed cabbage and roughly chopped coleslaw that looks like green and white confetti.

Wayne County farmer Chris Wiggins has been coming to Grady’s at least twice a month for 20 years, introduced to it by friends long ago, he said, as the cure for too many drinks the night before.

“It’s the best barbecue,” Wiggins said. “It’s wood cooked, it’s just the best.”

Peggy Daniels lives down the road from the restaurant, which her parents ran as a grocery store in the 1960s. She stops in four days a week, or just about every day Grady’s is open.

“I like everything about it,” Daniels said. “This is the only place I come to.”

If you call Grady’s on the phone, more than likely, Mrs. Grady will answer. She’ll say “Grady’s Barbecue,” announcing it with a long A in Grady’s, then it’s your turn to speak. If you’ve dialed the number, you likely already know the menu and what you want by heart. It’s likely the order you’ve placed for years, taught to you by the person who took you to Grady’s in the first place.

When you get there, there’s a novelty sign hanging in the dining room: “Warning: You are about to eat the world’s best barbecue.” No one’s asked them to take it down.

‘Felt like I was going to die that day’

In June, the pandemic came for the Gradys. A few days after grocery shopping, Mr. Grady caught a fever.

“I woke up one morning and felt like I was going to die that day,” Mr. Grady said.

After two negative tests from two different doctors, he got a positive for COVID-19 and was hospitalized. Eventually his fever broke, and he came back home.

“It wasn’t nothing but God intervening,” Mrs. Grady said. “You read about (COVID), you hear about it, you try to be cautious, then bam! When you experience it, it’s different.”

The restaurant stayed closed until July, but reopened in time for the Grady’s 34th anniversary. It stayed takeout only for weeks, but by the fall reopened its dining room for some guests. Mrs. Grady said customers took the changes in stride, just happy to get a bite of barbecue.

‘They understood,” Mrs. Grady said. “We’re all experiencing something we’ve never seen before.”

After their scare, the Gradys posted signs on the door and in the dining room reminding people to wear masks, a requirement in North Carolina as one effort to stop the spread of the virus.

“I might mention it if I can, if I come across them,” Mrs. Grady said. “But if I don’t, I don’t say anything. Everybody everywhere knows what’s going on. And I’m not about to have my feelings hurt from a grown-up. Because they made up their mind and they’re going to do what they want to do.”

Something special

For decades, Grady’s has been one of North Carolina’s barbecue cathedrals and is a stop on the Historic North Carolina BBQ Trail. Nearly 20 years ago, GQ food writer Alan Richman came in on a tour of the state’s barbecue and declared the pork from Grady’s “so delicious I found myself contemplating the possibility that it was even better than the Skylight Inn’s,” the famed Jones family restaurant up the road in Ayden.

About seven years ago, Gerri started keeping a guestbook, signed by the passing-through and out-of-the-way diners who had stopped by. Now there’s a stack of three filled notebooks, yellowed by smoke and sunlight, marked by people traveling from Brooklyn or Toronto, Japan or Connecticut who made a special trip for a sandwich. Mrs. Grady said a former Seymour Johnson base commander once flew down from New York for lunch. Last fall, a Pennsylvania couple on their honeymoon stopped in on their way to the beach.

Generally, Mrs. Grady shrugs at the fanaticism around her barbecue restaurant, but something about the thousands of miles some people have traveled to be there seems to stoke a bit of pride.

“Isn’t that powerful?” Gerri Grady said about a name from Sweden. “It’s amazing.”

Black-owned barbecue

As the only Black-owned whole hog restaurant currently open in North Carolina, Grady’s preserves the very roots of the state’s barbecue history and traditions. This month, food historian Adrian Miller will publish “Black Smoke: African Americans and the United States of Barbecue” with UNC Press, examining the role African Americans had in developing and shaping one of the country’s most culturally important food traditions, starting with enslaved Africans adapting smoking methods from Native Americans.

Miller said a narrative in food media took hold in the 1990s that started to remove Black barbecuers from the picture, particularly as barbecue began to rise in popularity.

“It wasn’t always this way, it’s a recent phenomenon,” Miller said, pointing to food shows on TV including only white people and a Bon Appetit issue from 2003 proclaiming “Who’s Who in Barbecue,” with an illustration of only white men, and one white woman.

“It’s just glaring how few African Americans are featured. ... The thing is, with the rise of media coverage and non-diverse people in charge, we fall into an echo chamber. People seeing information on barbecue were presented with only a bunch of white people.”

Grady’s was one of Miller’s stops on his nationwide tour researching Black-owned barbecue restaurants.

“What I love about that place is it’s not trying to be everything to everybody,” Miller said of Grady’s. “What it is is North Carolina barbecue, and that’s what you get.”

Today, barbecue is one of the nation’s hottest food trends, a frenzy largely ignited by the popularity of Texas-style barbecue and brisket and a shift in perception of barbecue as a craft and not just cheap cuts of meat smoked low and slow, then chopped or sliced.

That shift comes from two recent James Beard Award wins for pitmasters, first Aaron Franklin in Austin for Franklin Barbecue and more recently Rodney Scott in Charleston for Rodney Scott’s BBQ, which specializes in whole hog. Those wins put barbecue on the same food pedestal as fine dining chefs, with Beard Awards being among the highest honors in the food industry.

NC’s barbecue revival

North Carolina is experiencing a barbecue Renaissance of its own, with a new generation of pitmasters opening up restaurants mostly in the Triangle, including Sam Jones BBQ, Lawrence Barbecue, Wyatt’s BBQ, Longleaf Swine and Prime BBQ. The state’s most famous whole hog cooker, Ed Mitchell, will also open a new restaurant in the next year called The Preserve, joining popular existing whole hog joints like Buxton Hall in Asheville and Picnic in Durham.

Famed barbecue writer John Shelton Reed sees the urban shift of barbecue as just another evolution, starting in the churchyards and backyards, then with the ubiquity of cars into rural restaurants, and now into cities. The tradeoffs are good and bad, he said.

“I think it’s a good thing, if whole hog is going to last it’s going to have to change,” Reed said. “They’re maintaining whole hog traditions, but there are other traditions they’re not maintaining. Barbecue brings all kinds of people together, people with their name stitched on their pockets, lawyers, teachers, police officers. When you have to charge $12 for a sandwich, you’re not going to see the working man. That’s the tradition that’s endangered.”

“Grady’s is one of the precious institutions,” Reed said. “It should be nurtured and kept alive, if possible.”

This summer, Grady’s will turn 35 on July 4. They don’t know how long they’ll stay at it but, they aim to make it that far.

Neither Mr. or Mrs. Grady are particularly sentimental about the restaurant or its future. If they ever wanted to sell, Mr. Grady said someone offered to buy it, with plans to turn it into a convenience store.

“It wouldn’t break my heart,” Mrs. Grady said. “I wouldn’t resent it.”

Mr. Grady has not been shy about wanting out of the barbecue business for years. In that same GQ feature, Mr. Grady planned to retire within five years. That was 15 years ago.

“‘I’m thinking it might be my last year,” Mr. Grady said. “It crosses my mind near about every day.”

The truth is he does it because Mrs. Grady wants to. She said she’s used to doing something and wants to keep on doing something. And that something might as well be running an iconic barbecue restaurant.

“We’re just praying and going forth,” Mrs. Grady said. “We’re taking it one day at a time.”

Grady’s Barbecue

Address: 3096 Arrington Bridge Road, Dudley, NC

Phone: 919-735-7243

Hours: 10 a.m.-3 p.m. Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. 10 a.m.-4 p.m. Saturday.

This story was originally published April 23, 2021 at 11:30 AM with the headline "‘This is all we’ve ever known.’ How one of NC’s last whole hog joints survived COVID."

Drew Jackson

The News & Observer

919-829-4707

Drew Jackson writes about restaurants and dining for The News & Observer and The Herald-Sun, covering the food scene in the Triangle and North Carolina.