Doing The Lord's Work

Bucky’s Barbecue is a true American success story. About ten years ago Wayne Preston’s machinery business was going under. Nearing bankruptcy, he needed $500.00 immediately to keep the lights on in his house. He didn’t know where he was going to get it. In a fit of desperation he fired up his smoker in his back yard on Roper Mountain Road near Greenville, SC and began selling barbecue. He got his $500.00 and embarked on a path that would change is life forever.
He was a welder by trade, and continued his welding business while selling pork on the side. Then, in church one Sunday morning, his preacher challenged the congregation to try something they thought was impossible and trust in the Lord to see them through. Despite Jesus’ anti-swine bias, --he was a Jew, of course, and he did cause a bunch of hapless porkers to dive lemming-like into the sea, while he simultaneously invented the verb “to demonize”--Wayne took his preacher’s sermon as a sign from God and decided go into the barbecue business whole hog (so to speak.). After a brief struggle with the zoning board, and some help by members of his church family, Bucky’s Barbecue became a reality. (He chose the name because it had a catchy sound to it.) Now Preston has three restaurants, the original on Roper Mountain Road, near where he sold his first shoulder off his back yard smoker, and a second at the Donaldson Center of US 25 South of Greenville, and one in Fountain Inn, SC.
The Bucky’s on Roper Mountain Road is usually packed at lunch time. Men in suits and ties eat and rub shoulders with guys with their names over their shirt pockets. The walls are covered with pig paraphernalia, ball caps, and patriotica. Bucky or his son, a graduate of the Economics program at Anderson College, often man the counter, where the plate comes with pork and your choice of sides, including sweet potato crunch, and my personal favorite, pleasantly spicy Cajun pintos. Plates are accompanied with that epitome of gastronomic efficiency, sliced bread. The table squirters allow a choice of Wayne's own vinegar, or tomato-based sauce plus a mustard –based condiment created by his son-in law who’s from the Shealy clan, the last name in barbecue in the South Carolina Midlands. Drinks are self service, and the ice is dipped out of a portable plastic cooler--the kind you take to the beach.
The quality of the food and simplicity of service have made Bucky’s an icon of the local lunch crowd. It seems Wayne’s prayers have been answered. Maybe Jesus was only joking about the pigs…. (Photo by Chris Lipp)
Diner rating: 4

Pigging Out

High Marks. Hite's Barbecue occupies a small cinderblock building on a two lane road in West Columbia, SC. Note the smoke emanating from the rear of the building and the pickup, which obscures a large pile of wood by the back door.

The Caroliner Diner's Rules for Spotting a Good Barbecue Restaurant

It’s a shame to go to a ‘Q joint and plunk down good money for sorry meat. So how do you know if a BBQ place is good or not before having to pay nine or ten bucks for a plate? Below are some guidelines that have served me in the past. Think of your favorite place and see if it doesn't fit several of these criteria.

1) SMOKE. Al Gore be damned! There must be smoke, and to hell with the carbon footprint! Real barbecue is cooked with smoke, and the smoke has to come from good hardwood trees. You should see it, and smell it when you pull into the lot, or at least when you get out of the car.

2) WOOD. There should be a wood pile on the premises, and it should be used for cooking. Oak will pass, but Hickory is king. Mesquite will do in a rush if you’re out west. Other viable woods are apple and pecan, though these are scarce and expensive and usually only used to put a finish on the meat. Beware of “decorator wood” that is only for show where the pork is actually cooked on a gas flame.

3) FAT PEOPLE. Fat people love to eat and usually know good food when they taste it. If there are no fat people eating there, the food is probably only so-so. Beware of a restaurant filled with skinny people in exercise gear. Those people don’t know how to eat.

However fat people can’t be the sole indicator. They sometimes indicate food that is simply cheap.

4) PORTABLE COOKING RIG parked outside. Serious barbecue cookers love to compete with their fellows to see who can make the best barbecue at a given time and place. This is where their skill is honed to a high art and where they learn secrets from other cookers about how to improve their product.

5) TROPHIES. If you’re gonna compete, you better be able to win at least once in a while.

6) PIGS. Like the ancient Minoans who worshipped bulls and kept images of them around house, True BBQ aficionados keep porcine totems around them. The more pictures, statues and stuffed pigs in the dining room the better the restaurant. One of my favorites is a sign hanging on the wall at Henry’s Smoke House in Greenville, SC. Inside the outline of a pig, it says, “People Eat People’s Meat."

Nice Rack. Stacks of decorator wood outside Maurice's Piggy Park in Cayce, SC. The Barbecue is actually cooked next door.
7) COUNTRY MUSIC has to be playing on the speakers. Anyone who cooks pork in the presence of any other mode, except gospel or bluegrass has no sense of proportion.

8) PICKUP TRUCKS in the parking lot. A lot full of BMW’s indicates the pork is either too expensive or too artsy or both.

9) SAUCE ON THE SIDE, not on the meat. If they have to sauce the meat to make it palatable, there’s something wrong with it.

10) THE BUILDING. Don’t even slow down for one of those cookie cutter fancy brick and steel facades that look like they were built last year. Somebody has to pay for that building. Real barbecue cookers build the pit first and then as an afterthought put some kind of enclosure around it, perhaps getting the idea when they hear the first raindrops sizzle on the grill. Look for a simple wood or cinderblock building, preferably out in the country. The fewer lanes to the road that goes there the better. Extra points are given if it has a gravel parking lot, tables in the yard, or a porch to eat on. Barbecue is meant to be eaten outside where the smoke in the air enhances the smoke in the meat for a complete barbecue experience. Screens are optional.

11) THE MENU should have barbecue as the main, or only item. If the menu has the barbecue listed somewhere down there between the Fiesta Chicken and the Shrimp and Sausage Penne, It probably comes to the restaurant frozen in a tub or plastic bag.

12) A SINGLE ENTITY. Beware of chain restaurants. A man runnning a pit out in the country is free to live his dream. Chains come with a large beauracracy whose main job quickly becomes maintaining the status quo vs. making excellent food.