Lunch at The Pit—a new Raleigh, North Carolina, restaurant that showcases the craft of pitmaster Ed Mitchell—raises the question: Is barbecue ready for its white-tablecloth moment?
Translation: There are botanical prints on The Pit’s walls; the wine room is glass-fronted and prominent; there’s an elegant floor lamp in the men’s room; and pendant lights hang over padded tables draped in thick white linen.
Other restaurants have inspired similar queries—Blue Smoke, Danny Meyer’s temple of pig in Manhattan, most famously; and more recently Daisy May’s, also in NYC, helmed by a former cook on the Good Ship Boulud.
Barbecue, as cooked and eaten in North Carolina, is simple. A marriage of smoke and swine and little else. But it’s not simplistic. Barbecue raises questions. The white-tablecloth question is, at its core, a meditation on class. And race. And regional pride. And that countervailing influence, regional insecurity.
It’s all part of the barbecue dialectic. (Note to readers: I’ve been biding my time since grad school, knowing that some day, some way, I would have the chance to use barbecue and dialectic in the same sentence. Thank you, gourmet.com.) Who owns barbecue? Black? White? Poor? Rich? Who gets to cook it? Who gets to eat it? How should it be served? On Spode china? On Chinette?
The Pit is an ideal place to pose those questions. For the Pit is different. Ed Mitchell is different. He isn’t a big city chef bent on rediscovering the roots of his forebears. He isn’t a cock-of-the-walk chef gone slumming. He’s a pitmaster of long experience, a North Carolina native, schooled in the African-American tradition.
A few years back, Mitchell got into a legal squabble. Some believe his problems were driven by a past-due tax bill. Others argued that Mitchell, a black man enjoying great success in a business that has long been controlled by whites, was the victim of selective prosecution, driven by age-old prejudices.
Those troubles are now behind him. Mitchell has a new partner, who installed the region’s reigning whole-hog king in a palace befitting his rank, on the edge of North Carolina’s capitol city.
But enough backstory. Enough issues to ponder. If you’ve read this far you’re no doubt wondering whether the food at the Pit is good. Whether it’s worth a pilgrimage. It is.
Stick with what those people who run consultancies call “core competencies” and you’ll eat very well at The Pit. As in whole hog, hacked to bits, doused with a sauce of vinegar and peppers. Brunswick stew, despite the curious topping of croutons. Brussels sprouts, halved and skillet-blackened and kissed with mustard.
Steer clear of the brisket and the biscuits. And let me know if you try the fried chicken. I didn’t get that deep into the menu. Credited to Mitchell’s mother, it looked crisp and ruddy crusted, a dish straight out of family-reunion central casting.
The Pit 328 W. Davie Street, Raleigh, NC (919-890-4500; thepit-raleigh.com)
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