a place · SCShealy's Bar-B-Que

A buffet house on East Columbia Avenue in Batesburg-Leesville, Lexington County, opened in June 1969 by Victor and Sara Shealy with their teenage children Tommy and Nancy, and family-run since. It is the barbecue buffet in its fullest form: pork shoulders smoked by the thousand each week and served chopped with mustard sauce — vinegar and tomato sauces alongside — hash over rice, fried chicken, ribs, country-fried steak and more than forty home-cooked sides, with a salad bar and a dessert bar, all you can eat. The South Carolina House marked its fiftieth anniversary with a resolution in 2019.

Victor and Sara Shealy barbecued whole hogs in their back yard on weekends in the early 1950s, and word of Victor's sauce spread until they were cooking four or five hogs a week. They quit their jobs, borrowed about $20,000 to buy a building, and in June 1969 opened Shealy's Bar-B-Que House with Tommy and Nancy, then teenagers, working beside them. Tradition holds — Sara put the food on a buffet from the first year, and the family counts it among the first barbecue buffets in the state. On April 30, 2019 the South Carolina House of Representatives adopted a resolution for the fiftieth anniversary, naming the 'all-you-can-eat buffet' of 'renowned barbeque and over forty home-cooked sides'. The house stands at the western edge of the Midlands mustard belt; Inference — by the map, a quarter mile across the railroad from where Jackie Hite's cooked whole hogs until 2018.

Everything is on the line: chopped pork and ribs with a choice of mustard, vinegar or tomato sauce; hash — the thick pork gravy of the Midlands — over white rice; fried chicken by the heap, and off the menu the pulley bone, the wishbone piece; country-fried steak with milk gravy, lima beans, creamed corn, collards, mac and cheese, green and butter beans, mashed potatoes, a salad bar and a dessert bar. A 2015 review put the buffet under $15 a head with a drink. Carry-out plates go from 10 a.m.

Open Monday, Tuesday and Thursday to Saturday, buffet 11 a.m. to 9 p.m., carry-out 10 to 8:30; closed Wednesday and Sunday. 340 East Columbia Avenue, Batesburg-Leesville — OpenStreetMap records the building at number 240. Checked September 15, 2026.