CityView Magazine

food hat smell. It's a woodsy, outdoorsy smell. A smell not of this place. This place is the boule- vard — Bragg Boulevard — a long, multi-lane road of strip malls and pay-at-the-pumps. A thoroughly urban thoroughfare. Here you expect a whiff of diesel from the semis snorting by, or a waſt of fries-with-that combos from any number of franchised drive-thrus. But you don't expect this: the incense of oak logs burning, of pork and brisket charring slowly … tenderly … juice-drippingly. Between traffic lights and brake lights, the smoke sig- T Bar-Be-Classic A local couple serves up old fashioned barbecue from their new fangled food truck BY BRYAN MIMS nal comes as a savory shock to the senses. There I was on a warm lunch hour, watching Jay Carter sniff the air be- tween bites of his barbecue sandwich and swigs of his Dr. Pepper. He literally sniffs when telling how he discovered this place. "It's that …" sniff, sniff. Walking out of Carlie C's IGA one day, his head got caught in the aromatic cloud hanging over the parking lot, and he found himself pulled toward the source as if he'd been hogtied. Whatever other plans he had for lunch that day got lost in the smoke. "You can sure tell a difference," he told me when I asked how this wood-smoked pork compares to the variety prepared in gas or electric cookers. 26 | May/June • 2012 Here, the ribs, the pork shoulders, the beef brisket all cook on a grill inside a hulking smoker, where the temper- ature is kept between 225 and 250 degrees. The smoker is attached to a trailer that looks like a little log cabin with a bright red roof. Every morning around eight, Bob Illig and his wife Rebecca park their Ford F-250 pick-up and shack in front of the Eutaw Shopping Center. With all the white puffs driſting heavenward each day, it's fitting they call their lunch counter-on-wheels Holy Smoke Barbecue. All that smoke comes with a lot of sweat. "I'm pretty much cook- ing all day," Bob told me while taking a break from slicing brisket with an electric knife. "Burn wood all day every day. All day, all night." Bob retired from the Army in 2010, figuring he'd fran- chise a catering business run by a friend. But the two couldn't come to business terms, so he and his wife struck out on their own. They're both Southerners (he's from Ten- nessee; she grew up in Fayetteville) but they never dreamed they would earn a livelihood dishing out this quintessential, and famously nuanced, Southern delicacy. "This had been the farthest thing I had ever thought of," Bob said. And they're doing it in a state that does barbecue with

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