a style · NCLexington-style barbecue

Pork shoulders cooked slowly over hardwood coals, usually hickory, then chopped, coarse-chopped or sliced and dressed with a thin red sauce the Piedmont calls dip: vinegar, ketchup or tomato, water, salt, pepper and red pepper, sweeter or hotter by the house. It comes with red slaw — cabbage dressed with the same dip instead of mayonnaise — and hushpuppies, on a tray or a bun. The style belongs to the Piedmont west of Raleigh. Lexington, a Davidson County town of about 20,000 that calls itself the Barbecue Capital of the World and counted more than twenty barbecue restaurants in 2003, is its center; Greensboro, Salisbury, Shelby and High Point are its other towns.

Sid Weaver sold barbecue from a tent by the old Davidson County courthouse in 1919, and Jess Swicegood ran a stand a few yards from his within the decade. Warner Stamey, born in 1911, boarded with his sister in Lexington for high school and learned the pits from both men; he sold barbecue in Shelby after graduating, came back in 1938 to buy Swicegood's place and rename it, and in 1953 opened Stamey's on High Point Road in Greensboro. Stamey's own history credits him with putting hushpuppies beside barbecue. Alton Beck, who had worked for Weaver, built the town's first bricks-and-mortar barbecue restaurant on West Center Street in 1938. Wayne Monk, who had worked for Holland Tussey and took Stamey as his model, opened Lexington Barbecue beside U.S. 29/70 in 1962; in 1983 a politically connected local attorney asked whether he would cook for President Reagan, and he served the heads of government at that year's economic summit in Williamsburg, Virginia — Thatcher and Mitterrand among them. In 2003 the James Beard Foundation named the restaurant an America's Classic.

The east–west argument is a newspaper invention that outlived the columns. Jerry Bledsoe of the Greensboro Daily News, self-styled 'world's leading, foremost barbecue authority', and Dennis Rogers of the Raleigh News & Observer, 'oracle of the holy grub', traded columns for decades over whether ketchup belongs in the sauce. Bledsoe said Rogers 'has ruined any chances of this state being distinguished in its barbecue'; Rogers wrote that people who would put ketchup in sauce fed to innocent children 'are capable of most anything'. The joke reached the General Assembly in the 2005–06 session, when House Bill 21 and Senate Bill 47 would have made the Lexington Barbecue Festival the official barbecue festival of North Carolina; with nearly half the state eating eastern, neither passed. House Bill 433 passed in 2007 with a narrower title — 'Official Food Festival of the Piedmont Triad Region of the State of North Carolina' — which named no style official for the state.

Shoulders roast for about ten hours over coals from a wood fire beside the pits — at Lexington Barbecue mostly oak, with hickory when it can be had — meat side down over the embers until it browns, then turned. Some Piedmont places cook on gas or electric cookers. The cooked shoulder is chopped, coarse-chopped or sliced to order, and the crusty outside can be asked for as 'brown'. The dip goes on at the block and stands on the table. A tray is barbecue and red slaw; a plate adds hushpuppies; a sandwich is chopped pork and red slaw on a bun.

Lexington counted more than twenty barbecue restaurants for about 20,000 people in 2003; Lexington Barbecue, Bar-B-Q Center and Cook's are in and around town, Stamey's in Greensboro, Red Bridges Barbecue Lodge in Shelby. The Lexington Barbecue Festival closes Main Street each October — October 24 in 2026 — and has been the Official Food Festival of the Piedmont Triad since 2007.