a place · SCMelvin's Legendary Bar-B-Que

A Charleston mustard-sauce house with rooms on Folly Road on James Island and on Houston Northcutt Boulevard in Mount Pleasant, opened in 1982 by Melvin Bessinger with his son David after Melvin left the partnership with his brother Thomas at Bessinger's. David Bessinger runs it now, and the thing that distinguishes it is a reversal: in 2015 he took out the gas-assisted pits and went back to cooking over wood alone. Pork shoulders go twenty-four hours at about two hundred degrees over smouldering hickory.

The line starts at the Holly Hill Cafe, where Joseph Bessinger — Big Joe — was cooking in 1939, and it runs out through his sons into four or five Lowcountry and Midlands businesses that share a mustard sauce and not much else. Melvin left the partnership with his brother Thomas at Bessinger's on Savannah Highway and opened his own on Houston Northcutt Boulevard in 1982, with James Island following in 1984. The Southern Foodways Alliance recorded David Bessinger on June 26, 2012, and he put the family plainly: as far as why they all got into the restaurant business, he thought it trickled down from one generation to another — it was in the blood. The turn came in 2015. Southern Living reported on October 1 of that year that David had made a weighty decision, installed new pits and gone back to the family's wood-cooking roots; the company's own history says he discontinued the gas-assisted pits and brought back smoking over all wood. Inference — that is a rare direction of travel. Most of the Carolinas' movement over seventy years has run from wood to gas, one pit at a time, and it is nearly always one-way. The Campaign for Real Barbecue certified both houses afterwards.

Pork shoulders, not whole hogs, cook about twenty-four hours at two hundred degrees in metal boxes the size of a pair of refrigerators, over smouldering wet hickory logs. Since 2015 the fire is wood alone; before that the pits were gas-assisted. The sauce is the Midlands mustard, which the Alliance's oral history records the Bessinger and Sweatman families as having worked out between them. Hash is not on the menu in any source read.

Open Monday to Saturday, 10:30 a.m. to 9 p.m., closed Sunday, at 538 Folly Road on James Island and at 925 Houston Northcutt Boulevard, Mount Pleasant. The map point here is the James Island house.