Friday night at the Barbecue Joint

In this part of the South barbecue is welcome food at any time of the day.  Friday night seems like an especially proper time to grab a barbecue sandwich for a quick and easy dinner.

I am still head cook and bottle washer here at home while my wife, Glenda, recovers from her broken ankle.  That means that I'm always ready for a quick meal that is easy to clean up.  For $7.95 per pound you can get a pound of chopped pork barbecue and 1/2 pint of barbecue sauce from Bastian's, our local barbecue eatery.  Add a pint of cole slaw at $2.50 and we were ready to go since we had a couple buns left over from cooking burgers last weekend.

Base on continuous sampling over the last few years, I would rate Bastian's Barbecue the number one chopped port barbecue in the Roanoke Valley.  The Three Little Pigs in Daleville would be my second choice.   I'm not sure there is a good number third choice in the valley.  My third trip to Henry's Memphis Barbecue wasn't up to my standards so I haven't been back.  You can read more above our barbecue experiences in my post Barbecue And More Barbecue.

The other nice thing about Bastian's is that they have a weekday buffet for just $5.95.  The hours are from 11am-2pm Monday through Friday.  The smart folks know they have fried chicken on every Friday.  Unfortunately they also have their version of Carolina barbecue on Fridays.  Being from North Carolina, neither my wife nor I are very fond of imitation NC barbecue, so we usually focus on the chicken and if we want our favorite Bastian's chopped pork barbecue from the noon buffet, we just pick any day but Friday.

So if its Friday night and you're in Roanoke with barbecue on the brain, just find the Sheetz on Route 419 near Lewis Gale Hospital, and Bastians is just west on Apperson on the left after you cross the Roanoke River.  Their telephone number is 540 387-2955 in case you need to call ahead.

Comments

[Stephen]

Barbecue is serious business, meant to be critically enjoyed. We have two local outfits in the Northern Virginia area which do good work, Famous Dave's and Dixie Bones. We also have Red, Hot & Blue, but it is a chain, and not up to the same standard as the other two.

http://www.famousdaves.com/
http://www.dixiebones.com/index.html

Of course, no trip to the Outer Banks is complete without a visit to Pigman's.

http://www.pigman.com/

Although my all time favorite barbecue is Arthur Bryant's at 18th & Brooklyn in Kansas City.

http://www.arthurbryantsbbq.com/

[ocracokewaves]

Then there was that barbecue place whose name I can't remember that we visited on the way back from the IAC Executive meeting in 2003 I believe.

I know people arrange golf tours around great courses. Someone should take the time to put together a NC-VA Barbecue Tour. It would be a worthy endeavor.

I actually mentioned a great barbecue place in Chapel Hill called "The Barbeue Joint" in this post.

http://viewfromthemountain.typepad.com/david_sobotta_weblog/2005/07/back_to_the_mou.html

We usually arrange our trips to the coast so we can catch a lunch or dinner there.

There a great article in the Roanoke Times about the music in SW Virginia and NC called "Going Down the Crooked Road."

In the first article in the series they had this to say.

http://www.roanoke.com/multimedia/crooked/franklin.html

"We knew that. Our traveling party hit the main stops -- the Blue Ridge Music Center on the Blue Ridge Parkway, the Birthplace of Country Music in Bristol, etc. -- but we also stopped by Ralph Stanley's festival, met fiddlemaker Arthur Connor in Floyd County's Copper Hill, admired Gooch Harmon's off-beat museum in Carroll County and ate approximately 8 pounds of barbecue from Galax to Rocky Mount."

Good music and barbecue, not a bad recipe.