Southern Style BBQ & Fried Chicken / Clinton

A photo assignment had me in Clinton and then down Wilmington way recently. It's a route I've taken a few times and each of those times I visited my BBQ Numero Uno Southern Smoke in Garland.

Now Garland is not exactly on the way to anywhere unless you plan it to be, but I can easily justify an extra 30 minutes or so out of the way for my favorite barbecue sandwich and a visit with pitmaster extraordinaire Matt Register. I have dined there three times, most recently back in April, so I decided to try a new place and save a little bit of gas by not driving over to Garland.

So that's how I wound up at Southern Style Barbecue & Fried Chicken in Clinton.

It's received great reviews so I went in with high hopes. My hopes were dashed upon my arrival. No wood pile. No smokehouse out back. No smoke wafting into the Sampson County air. Nada. Ugh.

It's basically a take-out restaurant that has a separate, detached dining room building. A tad confusing with the drive-thru window line between the two buildings. So if you go, be sure to step into the building where the cars are first, not the space that looks like a restaurant, cause you'll be embarrassed by stepping in and then right back out like I did (about a half dozen others did too it seemed). The "eating room" is nice and air conditioned. They have bathrooms, catsup, napkins, ice, and sweet tea. No servers. Just the take-out window next door.

The take-out counter lady was super sweet and patient while my lunch companion contemplated her choice of veggie plate or kids' tender meal. She ultimately opted for the fried chicken tenders. Which she thought were pretty dang good. She was super satisfied, so I was relieved.

Not so relieved for me with my BBQ sandwich though. I hoping that the lack of wood out back or smoke would be made up for in product. I was disappointed.

I unwrapped the sandwich to not even a single whiff of smoke. No hickory. No oak. Nothing. I mean I took a deep, long lung-filling nasal pull and got bupkis on the nostrils.

What sparse amount of meat between the sad hamburger bun was overly dry and mealy in texture. Not one hint of moisture. Thankfully I have hypersalivation or I might have choked on these arid morsels of stringy pork.

To make matters sadder, they did not even have any barbecue sauces of any kind in the dining room. Other than catsup, there was nothing. No bottles of Eastern NC vinegar and red pepper sauce. No Lexington sweet catsup sauce. Hell, I would maybe (maybe) settle for - gulp - SC mustard sauce. This sandwich was in desperate need of something, anything, damp to way-lay the dryness.

The teaspoon of Cole slaw was right pitiful. I honestly thought they'd forgotten it. But there it was, under the barbecue. UNDER. That's right, friends, under the dang meat. I mean, in what insane world does anyone put the slaw on the bottom? It's not even worth typing the word "slaw" as it almost didn't seem to exist and had no flavor, so it doesn't even factor in to the rating of the overall sandwich.

Flavor-wise it was not overly horrible and nowhere near the worst I have had. However... it had neither heat nor vinegar. Unsure what if any mop sauce may have been used in the baking (yes, baking, not smoking) of the pork. Their web site says "whole hog" but a Facebook photo shows parts and pieces of what was once a "whole" hog in an electric smoker, but not the traditional "WHOLE" or even "HALF" hog that the best of the best smoke (over wood).

Speaking of their Facebook photos... they have a lot of chicken pictures. Tons of fried chicken pix. There's that one of the barbecue being cooked I mentioned and a few plates of chopped 'cue interspersed with poultry and veggies and desserts. Looking back over three years of images and there's not one single photo of a BBQ sandwich. That's weird for place with "Barbecue" in its name. To me, anyway.

On a side note... the fried chicken thigh I had was awesome. The batter was crispy and crunchy like my Granny's fried chicken was. The meat was moist and flavorful. Tick off all those boxes for delicious chicken. Southern Style Barbecue & Fried Chicken should drop the "Barbecue" from its name and focus on poultry because that chicken stole the show and should have more a more prominent place on the sign. I know it's the star of their Facebook photo feed, that's for sure.

So if you're in the mood for fried chicken, by all means, stop by Southern Style Barbecue & Fried Chicken if down Clinton way and eat some fantastic chicken. But if you're really hankering for BBQ, keep on truckin' down US-701 South for 20 minutes to Southern Smoke in Garland and eat the best dang 'cue in North Carolina. It's worth every extra mile!

3/10

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Southern Style Barbecue & Fried Chicken

338 Martin Luther King Jr Blvd

Clinton, NC 28328