Esquire magazine has named our local barbecue restaurant here in Chapel Hill/Carrboro, North Carolina, as having the best barbecue sandwich in America! We wholeheartedly agree. Allen & Son Bar-B-Q serves a vinegar-based, hickory-smoked pulled pork sandwich the likes of which we haven’t found anywhere else except, perhaps, at an old-fashioned outdoor pig-pickin’.
Five days a week, barbecue cook Keith Allen gets up before dawn to start a fire in the dual pits behind the restaurant. He uses only hickory logs, one of the last barbecue joints to do so. That’s what gives Allen & Son’s barbecue sandwich its distinctive backwoods flavor. It is truly a taste sensation. The restaurant also serves a popular plate of ribs.
Look for the cinderblock building on your left as you drive north away from Chapel Hill toward Hillsborough on Highway 86. The restaurant is just before the railroad tracks. Don’t be surprised by the lime-green walls inside or the deer head or the stuffed fox, which by the way is not a local dish but rather a decoration.
Allen & Son Bar-B-Q, 6203 Millhouse Road, Chapel Hill, NC, 919-942-7576.
