James Howell has been working as one of the main pit cooks of Pete Jones’ BBQ, AKA The Skylight Inn, in Ayden, North Carolina, for about fifteen years. The day I spent with him and the rest of Pete Jones’ staff in October of 2009 will figure heavily into a proposal I’m writing for a [...]

Last weekend I went to North Carolina with Joon and The Inspector for the 26th annual Lexington BBQ Festival.

Departing from Alexandria, we cruised down I-95 toward the holy land of traditional American barbecue. A detour towards the Skylight Inn promptly resulted in our getting lost for an hour and a half in Eastern [...]

After almost a year away from the Deep South, I’m finally back in North Carolina. I’ll be bouncing around the state for the better part of a week, tearing through the Hold Steady catalogue and conducting small n research for what I hope will be the book proposal that gets me a publisher’s ear in [...]