2025 Carolina BBQ Festival’s Best Bites

The 2025 Carolina BBQ Festival was Charlotte’s biggest celebration of barbecue traditions yet. From an expanded schedule and wide-ranging menu to the assembled crowds and a larger geographic footprint of participating pitmasters, the event revealed that the Carolinas’ love is burning brightly for meat cooked over live fire.

“Whether you are a backyard cook or just really enjoy barbecue, or even if you are a business owner, No. 1 it’s a great cause where the money is going toward,” said first-time festival participant Ben Hooper from Ben’s Backdraft Barbecue. “No. 2 you can come out here and see different pits, different styles of pits, different styles of cooking, different techniques. Every single tent that you see here, you are going to learn something different.”

Proceeds from this year’s festival support Operation BBQ Relief (OBR) which served over 700,000 meals in the wake of Hurricane Helene’s impact in the Carolinas, Georgia, and Florida. Dozens of OBR volunteers participated in the festival, too, serving smoked chicken tacos to a crowd that totaled more than 2,000 people throughout the two-day event.

The OBR wasn’t the only place to find tacos. Holy City Hogs’ Tank Jackson dished out hundreds of sweet & spicy shrimp tacos topped with home-grown jalapeno dressing and Green Mountain Gringo salsa.

And while tacos were a crowd-pleaser, many of the 17 participating pitmasters leaned toward more traditional barbecue offerings. Let’s review some of the weekend’s best bites, starting with the expanded opening night festivities.

Kick-starting the Festival Fire

“The Kickoff” invited barbecue enthusiasts to mingle alongside the festival’s featured pitmasters in a relaxed environment fueled by a Friday evening menu of collaborations. Among them, festival founder Lewis “Sweet Lew” Donald and Emmy Squared Pizza produced a deep-dish Detroit-style pizza with a Sweet Lew’s BBQ sauce base and topped with Sweet Lew’s brisket, cheese, red onions, and Sweet Lew’s mustard sauce.

Beef short rib jambalaya from Community Matters Café and heaping plates of steak flights from The New York Butcher Shoppe brought more spotlight to event-sponsor Certified Angus Beef. Mini “goopy burgers” from The Goodyear House were a huge hit as well, however, the best bite of the night may be another “hand-held” perfectly suited for an evening cookout.

The Improper Pig’s slow-smoked brisket chow bao sliders with Asian slaw and spicy hoisin sauce were a two-bite delight of complimentary flavors. They proved to be great fuel for the work getting started as evening twilight turned into night.

As festivities waned near the mainstage, an adjacent lot at Victoria Yards began bustling with cinder block pit construction, burn barrel fires, and pitmasters starting their smokers for an overnight cook.

Here, the whole hog tradition of Carolina barbecue was on exclusive display for curious ticket holders following their noses to sweet-smelling smokestacks. Hard-working teams from Sweet Lew’s, Sam Jones BBQ, and Elliott Moss’ Barbecue Lounge started their late-night ritual of burning hardwood, shoveling coals, and monitoring meat until morning.

Best Bites Begin with Beef

Any time Jon G’s Barbecue pulls up, expect to find a line – and for good reason. With his restaurant ranked among Texas Monthly’s best “Texas-style” barbecue found outside Texas, Garren “Jon G” Kirkman never disappoints. His beef rib sliders, sliced and sauced on the spot, consistently attract the longest waits during every Carolina BBQ Festival. This melt-in-your-mouth meat offering is good enough to send you to the back of the line again.

Fork Grove Barbecue pitmaster Dylan Cooke is earning his own Texas Monthly accolades. Boasting a forearm tattoo tribute to Jon G’s, Dylan closely follows in his friend’s footsteps – while forging his own barbecue path. He served a unique brisket bite in the form of a “fold-up” of slow-smoked Demkota beef topped in pickled chow-chow and Fork Grove sauce, wrapped in a slice of white bread.

Meanwhile, County Smoak’s Ken Hess brings a personal perspective to brisket, too. A New York native who crossed paths with the festival’s founder while they worked at The Greenbrier, Ken says he taught Sweet Lew how to barbecue. Now, he and wife Jess are raising their family in the Jewish tradition and their smoked brisket pastrami is a labor of love that rivals anything you’ll find in the Big Apple’s most popular delicatessens. Served on rye bread and topped with Grandma’s Molasses mustard and fire & ice pickles, County Smoak’s pastrami is … “like buttah.”

Collection of Cookout Classics

Carolina BBQ Festival always pushes the boundaries of “barbecue.” While hot dogs, smash burgers, nachos, wings and Frito pie may not always be standard fare at your favorite BBQ joint, this year’s festival offerings prove they belong among all the other classics.

And the Bright Leaf hot dog is most certainly a classic in eastern North Carolina. Southern Smoke BBQ pitmaster Matthew Register topped these bright red hot dogs with brisket chili, cheese, and slaw. In doing so, he stated the case for widespread adoption of hot dogs to the barbecue menu – and ensured that this Carolina tradition gets a place at the table alongside pulled pork.

Elsewhere, Ronald Simmons celebrated his Master Blend Family Farms protein production with nachos loaded in pulled pork, jalapenos cheese, and his own secret barbecue sauce.  Keith Henning’s jumbo Korean sticky wings and chili crisp slaw proved Black Powder Smokehouse could hold its own in Asian Fusion cuisine. Lawrence Barbecue’s Jake Wood spent the day smashing brisket burgers and serving them topped with cheese and onions. Expect to find variations of these meaty samples when Lawrence Barbecue opens its new location in Cary later this year.

You’ll have to wait until Sundays to see a Frito pie creation on the menu at City Limits BBQ. Although pitmaster Robbie Robinson confesses his version of the Texas staple is a personal favorite. Last week, Robbie was named a James Beard Finalist for Best Chef Southeast for the second straight year.

“I honestly eat one of these after every Saturday service. It is a really great texture bite and the flavors are there of course,” he says of the “Little Frito” that combines house-made brisket chili, cheese, cumin crema, onions and Fritos. “What is really great about this bite, the chili takes an ever-so-slight edge off the crispiness of the Frito, but it still has a crunch to it.”

Pork on Parade

The Carolina BBQ Festival was founded on the premise of “celebrating the heritage of whole hog barbecue.” So a big share of the menu is reserved for pork served in a variety of ways. Of course, whole hog was well represented by Sam Jones BBQ and Elliott Moss. Sam Jones brought the “Classic Jones Family Tray” with whole hog chopped alongside traditional sweet slaw. Elliott’s team served whole hog sliders on potato rolls.

At the same time, Sweet Lew’s served different pork parts blended with beef and hand-stuffed into in Lewis’ signature sausage. and Lexington Barbecue limits its pork offering to the shoulder, chopped and paired with red slaw and vinegar-ketchup “dip” on the side. The Monk family has been serving barbecue that way since 1962 and third-generation pitmaster Nathan Monk isn’t changing things.

Many people debate their preference between the vinegar and hot pepper “Eastern-style” of Sam Jones and Elliott Moss, and Lexington Barbecue’s Western/Piedmont style with ketchup added to the sauce. That argument won’t be solved today, so here’s a new shot across the pork battlefield: ribs reigned supreme at the Carolina BBQ Festival.

Technically both rib options came from outside the Carolinas, but Bryan Furman and Eric Pickle brought bones that will knock your socks off.

Furman – a Charlotte name who built his brand in Atlanta and now is launching a pig farm near Florence, S.C. – drizzled his signature peach mustard sauce on St. Louis-style ribs to bring a sweet and tangy taste to a perfectly cooked rib with a crispy skin and firm but tender meat bite.

The founder of Smoked Pickle in Knoxville, Pickle brought his own saucy kick with Duroc baby back ribs dipped wing-style in Smoked Pickle’s Jerk Nashville Hot Sauce and served with a spicy pickle garnish. Again, his ribs were perfectly cooked to produce a firm bite that easily pulled off the bone.

Together they may have won the battle over the pulled pork pitmasters, but picking one rib over another may be a more difficult debate than East vs. West.

Dessert Delivers Sweet Finish

Dessert landed in the official Carolina BBQ Festival line-up for the first time and it did not disappoint. Ben Hooper, who attended the festival last year, opened his brick-and-mortar location in Waynesville N.C., in March. Already, he is making a strong impression locally and across the Carolinas. While he “felt naked” without a smoker, Hooper’s Moon Pie banana pudding was a sweet treat and a perfect end to a food festival. Light and fluffy whipped cream, atop banana pudding, a thin layer of chocolate, and never-soggy Moon Pie pieces – it was good enough to eat twice … maybe even as a main course before the barbecue.

Regardless of your barbecue stand on beef vs. pork, East vs. West, or favorite cookout and rib preferences, the 2025 Carolina BBQ Festival offered a diverse menu of bites to please every palate. Now in its fourth year, the event continues to grow, and the future is bright. As the craft barbecue scene continues to boom in the Carolinas alongside old-school traditionalists expect the Carolina BBQ Festival to maintain a place in the annual calendar of barbecue events you don’t want to miss.