a place · SCMidway BBQ

A hash house and meat market on Main Street in Buffalo, a mill village in Union County in the Upstate, in business since about 1941 and the last of the nearly fifty hash houses the county once had. Hash here is the Upstate's kind: beef, butter, onion, salt and pepper cooked down slowly in three hundred-gallon pots, sold over rice and by the quart, and it outsells the barbecue three or four to one. The barbecue is hickory-smoked shoulder and ham, chopped; a creamy, spicy chicken stew goes out by the hundred gallons a day; and the front of the building is a butcher's counter with sawdust on the floor.

Jack O'Dell opened Midway some time around 1941 — 'the date is sketchy', the family says. Union County was hash-eating country and O'Dell's was one of nearly fifty hash houses; the others closed and Midway stayed. His daughter Amy Allen owns it; her husband Jay Allen has managed it since 1994, and it was Jay whom Rien Fertel recorded for the Southern Foodways Alliance on June 12, 2012, at what the interview page lists as 811 Hash Boulevard. Jay's arithmetic: catering, three parts hash to one of barbecue; in the store, four to one. 'Without hash, we're done. We're closed.' The slogan calls Buffalo the hash and chicken stew capital of the world.

Hash: beef, butter, onion, salt and pepper, slow-cooked in three 100-gallon pots into a thick stew and ladled over white rice — no pork, no mustard, the Upstate's version. Chicken stew, creamy and spicy, a hundred gallons a day. Barbecue: shoulder and ham smoked over hickory, chopped or pulled, and chopped barbecue chicken. A full-service meat counter sells across the front of the store.

Open Tuesday to Friday 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. and Saturday 10 to 4, closed Sunday and Monday, per the company's site on September 15, 2026. 811 Main Street, Buffalo, Union County.