The BBQ joint that's a Slurpee machine now
Drive down Tyvola today and you'll blow right past 838 without a second look. It's a 7-Eleven. Gas pumps, a cooler wall, somebody's kid begging for taquitos. But for a good long run, that address was Carolina Country Barbecue, and if you worked anywhere near the old Charlotte Coliseum, you ate there more times than you can count.
Tyvola, 1987
Carolina Country Barbecue opened on Tyvola Road in July 1987, right before that whole side of town got loud. The Coliseum went up the next year, the arena traffic came with it, and suddenly a plain little pork joint off I-77 in Montclaire South had a lunch rush. It never tried to be anything fancy. It was a Carolina BBQ counter doing Carolina BBQ things, which was exactly the point.
What you actually ordered
This was a plate place, not a buffet, no matter how anybody remembers it. Chopped pork, a tomato-based sauce leaning hard on sugar and vinegar, and hush puppies the Observer politely called heavy and sweet. The plates came stacked with fries, slaw, and Brunswick stew, and there were weekday specials cheap enough that you could eat there on a Tuesday without thinking about it. Nobody was writing poems about it. In 2008 the Observer's Helen Schwab summed it up as "a serviceable introduction to the art of 'cue," which, if you're from here, you know is a compliment wearing work boots.
The lunch counter with a guest list
Here's the part regulars still bring up. Carolina Country pulled a crowd that punched above a pork sandwich. City people, working folks, and Charlotte politicians ate there, and more than one person swears they watched Sue Myrick, the city's first female mayor, having lunch at a table like anybody else. It was the kind of place you brought out-of-town relatives to prove Charlotte had real barbecue, then got into a friendly fight with them about whether the sauce had any business being that sweet. That argument, tomato and sugar versus the vinegar purists, has been going on in this state longer than any of us have been alive, and this place was firmly on the sweet side of it.
Smoke, then no smoke
Every good BBQ joint runs like the roof is on fire. That's the whole trade. Low smoke curling out over a parking lot, pits going before the sun's up, the smell hitting you two blocks before the sign does. Carolina Country had that going for years, and then one day it didn't. The exact last day isn't written down anywhere we could find, which is its own kind of Charlotte tragedy. The building kept the faith for a while as Hillbilly's BBQ & Steaks, kept a pit going under a new name, and then that closed too. Now it's the 7-Eleven. A corner that smelled like hickory for decades smells like a car wash and roller-grill hot dogs.
Why it's on a shirt
Because this is exactly the kind of place Charlotte forgets on purpose. No skyline view, no cocktail program, no line down the block. Just a pork plate, a mayor at lunch, and an address that quietly turned into a gas station while everybody was looking at Uptown. That's worth a shirt. Somebody should remember the smoke.
If Carolina Country was your lunch, wear it: Carolina Country Barbecue, The Roof's On Fire Edition.