a place · NCSpeedy's Barbecue

A Lexington pork-shoulder house that Paul 'Speedy' Lohr opened as a drive-in in 1963 and the Dunn family has run since the early 1970s. Roy and Ella Dunn hold it now. The pork cooks in five electric cookers that look like large rotisserie ovens — not over wood, which is why the house appears on no wood list and on no trail, and which makes it a plain case of how much of the Piedmont cooks. The tray is the Piedmont tray: chopped shoulder, the dip, red slaw, hushpuppies.

Roy Dunn started at Speedy's as a curb boy. In the early 1970s Paul Lohr sold the business to Roy and a cousin, and the Dunn brothers have run it together since 1978; a local paper gives the purchase year as 1970 and Our State as the early seventies, a small gap left open here. What the Dunns bought included the name, which is why a Lexington driver can pass two Speedys in twenty minutes and find two different fires. Our State's writer stood in the kitchen in September 2013 and described what is actually there: the pork cooking slowly inside five electric cookers that look like giant rotisserie ovens. A visiting writer put it flatly in July 2016 — Speedy's of Lexington cooks over electricity, not wood. Neither the Historic Barbecue Trail, which requires wood or charcoal, nor the Campaign for Real Barbecue, which requires the same, lists the house, and both absences follow from the cookers rather than from anything about the food. In about 2023 the restaurant left Winston Road after some sixty years and moved to Piedmont Drive, pushed out by the state highway widening that also took Smiley's down the road.

Shoulders — a short shank is the cut the kitchen prefers — cook slowly in five electric cookers. The meat is chopped and served with the dip, the thin vinegar-and-ketchup sauce of the Piedmont, with red slaw dressed from the same jug and hushpuppies on the tray. The room runs eleven to eight, six days a week.

Open Monday to Saturday, 11 a.m. to 8 p.m., at 408 Piedmont Drive, Lexington, the address it moved to after roughly sixty years on Winston Road. OpenStreetMap last checked the listing on August 10, 2025.