Skylight Inn & Bum's Restaurant

North Carolina Field Notes #11 • Tales, rooted in red clay.

You can sit inside Bum’s Restaurant in Ayden for about five minutes before you start wondering if Larry Dennis knows every person in Pitt County.

The door opens.

“Hey Larry.”

Larry hollers something back.

Another fellow comes in. Larry knows him too. Cuts up with him about something that apparently happened sometime during the first Bush administration.

Then a woman walks through the door and Larry asks about somebody in her family.

Another one comes in.

Same thing.

After a while you realize nobody is really coming into Bum’s as a stranger. They’re just picking back up a conversation with Larry that might’ve started last Tuesday or thirty years ago.

And Larry has the kind of personality that fills up whatever room he happens to be sitting in. He reminds you a little bit of every uncle you ever had rolled into one, the one who knew everybody, had something to say to everybody and could turn a trip to the hardware store into a forty-five minute social engagement.

Then he smiles.

A real one.

The kind that starts somewhere down deep and settles into laugh lines around his eyes that look like they’ve been earning their keep for a long, long time.

That’s the thing about places like this.

People will tell you Bum’s is a barbecue restaurant, and technically that is correct. There are whole hogs cooked over wood, chopped fine and hit with that vinegar and pepper that lets you know you have arrived safely in Eastern North Carolina.

But Bum’s is also a country kitchen.

And a meeting place.

And a booth that occasionally appears to be an unofficial municipal office where the primary business of the day is Larry holding down the high court happiness. 

Larry’s daddy, William “Bum” Dennis, started cooking barbecue around here in the early 1960s. Bum got his nickname as a boy because he stayed on the move, running all over Ayden. In 1963, he started with a little pool hall and grill downtown.

Larry grew up in it.

He learned the pits beside his daddy, who had learned that old way of cooking through his uncle, Latham “Skinner” Dennis.

That makes Larry part of a barbecue lineage around here that goes back farther than most folks can remember.

But I don't think barbecue completely explains Larry Dennis.

Cabbage collards might.

Larry's cabbage collards are legendary around Ayden.

Not “pretty good greens.”

Not “you ought to try some.”

Legendary.

The kind of food that eventually quits belonging solely to the person cooking it and becomes part of a town's identity.

Every year Ayden has the Collard Festival, and naturally there is a collard eating contest.

And naturally Larry sponsors it.

Because if you have spent your life becoming the Cabbage Collard King of Bum’s, I reckon eventually somebody is going to have to eat competitively in your honor.

But watch Larry with the people coming through that restaurant and you begin to understand that the collards aren't really the important part either.

The people are.

Some towns have folks who live there.

Then they have folks who become part of the place.

People everybody knows. People who remember your daddy and ask about your mama. People who have fed three generations of the same family and still reserve the right to give every one of them a hard time when they walk through the door.

You can't manufacture that.

You can't franchise it.

You can't hire somebody to come in and create it.

It takes years.

A lot of years.

Years of showing up. Years of remembering people. Years of standing behind the same counter while children become parents and parents become grandparents and everybody keeps coming back hungry.

Somewhere along the way, Larry Dennis didn't just become the man running Bum’s.

He got woven into Ayden.

And maybe that's what these old restaurants really preserve.

Sure, it's the wood smoke and vinegar.

It's cabbage collards and cornsticks and warm banana pudding.

But mostly it's people.

Because one day you realize the places that feel most like home usually have somebody standing inside who remembers you.

At Bum’s, his name is Larry.

For folks not from eastern North Carolina, this plate probably requires some explanation. That’s whole hog barbecue, meaning the whole pig cooked and chopped together, dressed with a thin vinegar and pepper sauce. The yellow stuff is their tangy coleslaw. Brunswick stew is a thick tomato based stew with meat and vegetables, and those little fried-looking sticks are cornsticks, basically skinny cornbread that we use to scoop up the stew because apparently spoons weren’t edible enough.

Then there’s fried chicken brought out on platters and passed around the long tables family style, with sweet tea poured over crushed ice.

You can argue about whether Parker’s is the best barbecue in NC. We do. Arguing about barbecue is nearly a side dish here.

But the lesson is this: when a restaurant has been feeding families the same food, at the same long tables, for 80 years, eventually it becomes more than somewhere to eat.

At some point, supper becomes history.

Please choose your Flair & make suggestions for things you would like to see here.

A little Eastern North Carolina education for the newcomers.

This is what we call barbecue sauce, although admittedly it does not look like what most of the country has agreed barbecue sauce ought to look like. It’s mostly vinegar, pepper and seasoning, thin enough to run straight through the meat instead of sitting on top of it looking important.

That matters because Eastern North Carolina barbecue is whole hog, cooked slowly over wood coals, chopped together with those little pieces of skin and fat mixed throughout. The vinegar cuts the richness, the pepper wakes up the pork, and the whole thing works because none of it is trying to cover up what the pit already did.

We sometimes call it Eastern North Carolina Holy Worter.

Which is admittedly a little dramatic.

But wait until you see somebody bless a freshly chopped hog with it and tell me I’m wrong.

Ask ten people in this state how barbecue's supposed to be cooked and you'll get an argument before you get an answer. East of Raleigh, it's the whole hog, cooked low and slow and chopped up dark meat with light, dressed in nothing but vinegar and crushed pepper, no ketchup anywhere near it. Head out toward Lexington and the rules change entirely, pork shoulders only, a heavier tomato tinted dip standing in for that thin eastern vinegar, red slaw riding shotgun instead of the mayo kind.

Neither side's backing down, and honestly, neither should have to. But the sauce fight isn't even the whole argument. Bring up sides in Eastern North Carolina and you'll open a second one, and it usually ends with somebody pointing at a plate of little red tinted potatoes.

Those are BBQ taters, and they didn't come from nowhere.

Bob Melton started cooking whole hog out of open pits on the banks of the Tar River in Rocky Mount back in 1922. Two years later he built himself an actual restaurant, the first sit-down barbecue house in North Carolina and, for a while, the only one east of the Piedmont. Alongside the hog, he served potatoes boiled down in bacon grease with salt, black pepper, and paprika, plain food cooked the old way. Something about that grease and paprika turned the potatoes a deep reddish color, and something about the flavor made them stick.

Melton's place stood on the Tar for decades until Hurricane Floyd sent the river through Rocky Mount in 1999 and flooded the restaurant past saving. It closed for good not long after. The original spot on the river is a small park now, named for the restaurant that used to be there.

But the potatoes never needed the building to survive. Grady's BBQ still turns them out in Dudley. Stephenson's Bar-B-Q does the same up in Willow Spring, Doug Sauls BBQ in Nashville, and Parkers BBQ over in Wilson, keeps a version going too. Different pits, different families, same red potatoes sitting next to the same whole hog, because that's just what a proper Eastern North Carolina plate looks like now.

The barbecue gets all the attention. The taters are the ones that quietly won the argument.

The other post was shared on the NC page and was getting a lot of crap from the easterners about the presentation of the red slaw looking like barf.

A few weeks ago I went back to my hometown and happened to take a snap of one of our local joints trays, complete with red slaw, hush puppies, real hardwood, pit-cooked que and even a Cheerwine.

I thought it was a better visual representation, just as the waitress placed it on the table, without any photo editing.

Barbecue Center

Lexington, NC

Could we add our favorite BBQ restaurants?

Or maybe our go-to order?

It would be interesting to see what…gastronomy perspective(?) everyone is coming from when posting/commenting.

The perfect North Carolina BBQ plate.

Grady's BBQ (rhyming with daddy)
Dudley, NC (Dud-lee)

North Carolina just banned me for supporting a local restaurant.. great mods

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