One person's idea of opening a small barbecue restaurant became reality on September 1, 1971. Steve Abernethy, known around Lincolnton as “The BBQ King,” and his wife Becky opened the doors to Bar-B-Q King for their very first day of business.
Before the restaurant existed, Steve was already smoking pork shoulders over hickory wood coals on a farm near Startown Road. He soon realized hauling smoked shoulders to the restaurant every single day was more trouble than it was worth. So he did something simpler: he built his first smoke pit right inside the restaurant's dining room.
That pit is still there. You can see it today, sitting quietly in the dining room where it always has, though it was retired from active use in 1987 due to local safety regulations.
The pit smoker BBQ King uses today sits just across the parking lot. Steve has always insisted the barbecue be smoked fresh, daily, over live hickory wood coals, with no electricity and no gas for the smoking itself, though an electric cooker is used afterward to roast and hold the shoulders once they come off the pit.
A Counter, a Holler, and a Hot Plate
BBQ King is a true old-school barbecue joint. There's no table service and no printed order tickets passed back to a kitchen window. You order at the counter, and an employee hollers your order back to the cooks, a tradition that has run, unbroken, since 1971. In a few minutes, you've got a fresh, hot plate of food in front of you. It's a small thing, but it's one BBQ King is proud to keep doing even as technology changes everything else around it.
The restaurant has grown a lot since that first day, from seating just 25 people to seating 150, but the way it runs hasn't changed. On an average day, the team still hand-chops around 25 pork shoulders, hand patties roughly 180 pounds of hamburger, and hand breads about 200 pounds of onions. All fresh. All the same day it's served.
Family, Not Just Ownership
Steve has hired plenty of great employees over the decades, but none closer than Keith Smith, who started working at BBQ King at the age of 15 back in 1976. Steve saw Keith's potential early and eventually made him manager and co-owner. Today, Keith's sons, Jordan and Jared, are fully involved in running the business as the next generation, carrying forward the same standards: hand-pattied burgers, hollered orders, and pork smoked low and slow over a real fire.
We will always holler orders, hand patty our burgers, and pit smoke our BBQ.
That's the whole philosophy, and it hasn't needed updating in over fifty years.