a place · SCBrown's Bar-B-Que

A farm family's buffet house on the Williamsburg County Highway north of Kingstree, in the Pee Dee, opened in 1981 as a take-out window by Thomas M. Brown Jr., a row-crop farmer, with a dining room added about ten years on. Whole hogs are cooked and chopped, mopped on the pit with a vinegar-and-hot-pepper sauce the family calls barbecue gravy, and set on a long buffet with ribs, smoked ham, barbecued and fried chicken, barbecued and baked turkey, perloo, liver hash and rice, and vegetables the Browns grow themselves — corn, squash, okra, butter beans, collards, cabbage. The Barbeque Association names it among the state's top barbecue houses.

Thomas Brown learned to cook as a teenager laid up after a motorcycle accident broke his leg, working a hot plate within reach of the bed. He farmed — soy, wheat, hay and oats for market — and in 1981 opened a take-out window on the highway; the dining room came a decade later. The farm feeds the buffet: corn, squash, zucchini, broccoli, okra, butter beans, collards and cabbage in season. When the Southern Foodways Alliance came through the Pee Dee in June 2012, Rien Fertel recorded the Browns, and Angela Brown told him, 'We always take barbecue everywhere we go.' Kingstree is a whole-hog town — its Pig Pickin' festival each fall draws cooking teams, seventy of them in 2010, to compete on the county's vinegar-based barbecue — and Brown's is its standing barbecue house, more than forty years on. In April 2024 a visiting writer paid $14.95 for the buffet and ate liver hash over rice with salt, pepper and Texas Pete.

Whole hogs on the pit, mopped as they cook with the barbecue gravy — vinegar and hot pepper — then chopped. The buffet runs the length of the room: chopped barbecue, ribs, smoked ham, barbecued and fried chicken, barbecued and baked turkey, perloo (rice cooked with chicken), white rice, liver hash — hash with the liver in it, as the name says — macaroni, sweet potatoes, coleslaw, potato salad, the farm's vegetables, a salad bar and pecan pie. Buffet $14.95 in April 2024; a whole-hog plate with bread, baked beans and slaw is the take-out order.

Open Wednesday to Saturday 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. and Sunday 11 to 3, closed Monday and Tuesday, per Destination BBQ; 809 North Williamsburg County Highway (US 52), Kingstree. Checked September 15, 2026.