Bar-B-Q Center, Lexington NC - By Marie, Let's Eat

Original article published by: Marie, Let’s Eat

Snippet
“Here’s another silly reason why this circumnavigation was unlike the three previous ones. On those outings, the best meal of the trip – the life-affirming, revealing, “this is better than I was expecting” visit to a legendary old place – came halfway through the jaunt, roughly at the furthest point from Atlanta. Those were Brick Pit in Mobile, Scott’s BBQ in Hemingway, and Brooks Barbecue in Muscle Shoals. However, the high point this time out came at my fourth stop, Lexington’s Bar-B-Q Center. This was an astonishing little meal.

I should clarify here that the three different spellings of one word – slash – term in a single paragraph are deliberate. It’s policy here to always spell the name of a restaurant as it appears on the business’s main public sign. In the case of this particular restaurant, there’s extra confusion, as it is almost always written as “Barbecue Center.” “Bar-B-Q Center” is how it appears on the sign, however. I think it’s possible that the shorter spelling was only done for the sign because the original restaurant in this building was an ice cream shop called Dairy Center, and new paint and neon were installed in 1967. That’s when the late Sonny Conrad took over the business, twelve years after his brother-in-law first opened it in 1955. Sonny had first worked here in the early 1960s, and later apprenticed with Warner Stamey, one of the legendary figures of this region’s food culture.“