a place · NCMelton's Barbecue

The Rocky Mount whole-hog house that Wikipedia records as North Carolina's first sit-down barbecue restaurant. Bob Melton, a horse trader, cooked hogs for friends in an open pit by the Tar River, sold meat by the pound, and in 1924 (some accounts say 1922) opened a shed of a restaurant that grew room by room. It served finely chopped whole hog with a vinegar sauce, boiled potatoes, slaw, corn sticks, hushpuppies and Brunswick stew, and sent barbecue out by bus to parties across the state. Floods from Hurricanes Fran and Floyd drove it out of the river bottom, and it closed in 2005.

Robert Benjamin Melton traded horses in Rocky Mount and cooked whole hogs on the banks of the Tar River for his friends; by 1922 he was selling barbecue there, and in 1924 he built the shed that Wikipedia and UNC's North Carolina Miscellany call the state's first indoor, sit-down barbecue restaurant. In 1929 a plate with boiled potatoes cost 45 cents and a sandwich 15. Food writer Beth Tartan recorded that a Raleigh hostess with company coming would call and say 'Ride me a party,' and Melton's would put barbecue and fixings on the bus. Life magazine called him the King of Southern Barbecue in 1958, the year he died; his partners W.B. Melton, T.O. Fulghum and Add Smith carried on. By the time John Egerton visited for Southern Food (1993) the pits had gone from charcoal to gas with wood chips, a change he judged for the worse. The low ground flooded: after Hurricane Fran the restaurant reopened in ten days and customers came by boat for a stretch, and a plaque later marked the high-water line. Hurricane Floyd in 1999, the 75th-anniversary year, put water over the ceiling and silt through the building. The restaurant moved to a strip mall, could not make the numbers in a shrinking local economy, and closed in 2005.

Small hogs of 80 to 90 pounds, cooked whole over charcoal in the early decades and over gas with wood chips by the 1990s, chopped fine — 'the consistency of chopped peanut butter,' a 1988 Boating writer said — and seasoned with a vinegar sauce. The sides were boiled potatoes, slaw, corn sticks, hushpuppies and Brunswick stew, the plate of the Coastal Plain.

Closed since 2005. The original site was in the Tar River bottom at Rocky Mount; the map point marks the town, not the building.