a place · SCCarolina Bar-B-Que

A mustard-sauce buffet house on South Main Street in New Ellenton, Aiken County, founded by Willie Mae Walker and her son Jess. She was born Willie Mae Baltzegar, daughter of the Rowesville pitmaster Willie Baltzegar, which puts a pit-cooking line behind the place two generations deep. Pork shoulders cook over wood in smokers out back — not open-pit whole hog. The buffet was twelve dollars in April 2025 and the hash is rust-orange and thick enough to lift on a fork. Thomas Zeigler has run it since about 2022.

Willie Mae Walker came out of Rowesville, where her father Willie Baltzegar cooked, and she and her son Jess opened in New Ellenton — 1969 by two accounts, 1968 by a third. Naming her as a founder is not a courtesy: the sources put her first, with her son second, which is unusual enough in this trade to be worth saying once. Jess 'Bubba' Walker carried it on. Then the place slipped. Michael Stern, writing for The Food Section on April 22, 2025, said it had been losing its footing four or five years earlier — the food not up to standard and the staff getting cranky — before Thomas Zeigler took the business over about three years before he wrote, tweaked a few recipes and turned it round. Destination BBQ's page, updated April 2025, still names Bubba Walker as the owner, so the two listings disagree and the later, purpose-built piece is followed here. Southern Living put it on the South's Top 50 barbecue list in 2016, a list Robert Moss compiled, and the Barbeque Association gives it the hundred-mile designation. The Campaign for Real Barbecue certified it. Destination BBQ traces the hash recipe to the Dukes family tradition, which is the Orangeburg line reaching west.

Pork shoulders only — no ribs — cook over wood in smokers behind the building, which is not the open-pit whole-hog method of the Pee Dee and is described that way by the writers who visit. The sauce is the Midlands mustard. The buffet is all you can eat, twelve dollars in April 2025. The hash is rust-orange, thick, with an organ-meat sweetness, ladled over rice; one writer put it slightly thicker than Maurice's and a little less tart.

Open Wednesday 11 to 1:30 and Thursday to Saturday 11 to 8, closed Sunday to Tuesday, at 109 South Main Street, New Ellenton. Cards and cash. A search result circulating a South Main address in the eight hundreds is not supported by any page read here.