Whatever Happened to Virginia Barbecue?

There’s long been a knock against barbecue in Virginia. Though it was the historical birthplace of barbecue in America, the story usually goes, the tradition died out somewhere back in the 19th century and now is hard to find at all. Like most claims about barbecue, this one is disputed hotly by a small group of partisans, for lots of barbecue barbecue can still be found in the state of Virginia. But the real question is whether it's really "Virginia barbecue" or a style imported from somewhere else.

At Extra Billy's in Richmond, there's pulled pork and sliced brisket with slaw and potato salad, and each table has two bottles of barbecue sauce, one a spicy vinegar-based similar to that found in North Carolina, the other a reddish, thicker blend that locals call "Virginia style". (Hmm . . . so maybe there is a Virginia style sneaking around somewhere out there.) Smoked beef brisket is a hallmark of Texas barbecue, as is the smoked sausage that is also on Extra Billy’s menu, described explicitly as “Texas rope sausage with mustard flavor.”

One can be forgiven for thinking that there really is no Virginia barbecue anymore, and the advertising for many of the state's barbecue joints suggest that this once-proud barbecue region now has an inferiority complex.

In their “story” on their website, Buz & Ned’s in Richmond claims to have explored and sampled every great barbecue joint across America, returning with 150-year old recipes and bringing traditional barbecue to Richmond, “a great city, but without a real BBQ tradition.” The Silver Pig Barbeque Restaurant in Lynchburg claims to have “the most authentic Carolina barbeque this side of the North Carolina state line.” Three L’il Pigs in Daleville (just North of Roanoke) boasts “the tastiest, slow-cooked, hickory-smoked North Carolina-style barbeque anywhere in the valley".

The menu for the Virginia BBQ Company in Ashland offers the Original Virginia BBQ Sandwich, which it claims is “Virginia’s traditional style, hand pulled pork, tossed in a flavorful homemade BBQ sauce.” But, the owners are either not very confident in their local product or are simply pragmatic about market demands for they also offer the Classic NC BBQ Sandwich (“Folks down in North Carolina would never put none of that red stuff on no BBQ”) and the Texas BBQ Beef Sandwich.

It wasn’t always this way. The colony of Virginia was the birthplace of barbecue, the soil where the seed was planted and from which it spread throughout the South and, eventually, clear out to the West Coast. By the mid 18th-century, outdoor barbecues had become one of the key social events in Old Dominion society. References to barbecues are sprinkled throughout the letters and diaries of this country's founding fathers, including George Washington himself, and visitors described the gatherings in travelogues as a remarkable phenomenon peculiar to the colony. As Virginians left their home state and migrated south westward through the Carolinas into Georgia, Tennessee, and Alabama, they took their barbecue traditions with them, and it is common to see references in 19th century newspapers to "old-fashioned Virginia barbecues."

So what happened to make barbecue die out in its native state? That's a difficult question to answer. Throughout the United States in the early-to-mid 20th century, barbecue was making a transition from being served large-scale at free public gatherings to being a commercial product sold in individual portions at restaurants. In the 1920s and 1930s, Virginia had as many "good old fashioned" election and church-picnic barbecues as anywhere else.

Somehow, no legendary barbecue restaurants developed in Virginia that could rival the likes of Arthur Bryant's or Gates's in Kansas City, the Rendevouz in Memphis, or any of the two dozen joints in Lexington, North Carolina. These restaurants helped codify the style of barbecue unique to their regions and, in doing so, laid the groundwork for those regions' claims for being having the one "real barbecue".

People in Virginia still love to eat barbecue, though many don't seem to have much of a distinct local feeling for the dish. But this doesn't mean there isn't great Virginia-style barbecue out there to be found. (In fact, we enlisted Joe Haynes to give us a roundup of real Virginia barbecue and where to find it.)

Perhaps Virginia is poised for a barbecue revival of its own.