A "Real" Southern Experience

So, while Brian and I are here, we wanted to make sure we tried some real southern BBQ. Every state in the South boasts about it's BBQ, and sense we live in a area with a lot of mom and pop type stores we were excited to go try the real thing.

So I start researching places we could go, looking at reviews, asking around. And I always ended up coming back to R.O's Barbecue. It's been around sense 1946, and advertises, "The slaw flows at R.O's" Now if that doesn't sound southern I don't know what does. :)

So we map quest it and head out. As we find it we notice a line of guys all in R.O's attire hanging out on the side of the building, as we pull up, one of them comes to our window and says, "What can I get,cha" (of course in a deep southern accent). By now we've realized that it's a curb side type place. We tell the guy that we've never been here, and he heads off to get a menu. As we looked over the menu we realized it could have been in another language. Things like sliced cue with slaw, hush puppies, and cherry sundrop, are things your not going to find on a menu at home. So we went on the wild side, and got two large cues with slaw (because we heard the slaw was out of this world), some hush puppies (which the waiter finally described as fried cornbread, but he really had to think about it, it's like trying to describe what a french fry is to someone who doesn't know what a potato is) and Brian got a cherry lemon Sundrop. The waiter described the drink as "It's just sundrop with lemon and cherry's and stuff to make it all special" all in southern, it made us laugh. When we asked what Sundrop was he said "Ya'all's never had sundrop?? Oh, you'll be back" Pretty much it's like carbonated lemonade.

He brings everything hot to our car, and that's it. We headed to a park to eat, sense Kyler doesn't do well with food in the car :). We munched on the hush puppies as we went, they grew on us and we actually really liked them by the time they were gone. Our sandwiches were a completely different story. You could see the slaw even before you unwrapped the sandwich there was so much of it. I came to the conclusion that their "slaw" is like really finely chopped cole slaw in kind of a creamy BBQ sauce. The meat is thinly sliced pork. It was pretty good, most of the slaw is on the wrapper, so the middle of the sandwich was kinda dry. The flavor was unique, which is what we were going for. All in all we decided we probably wouldn't go back, but that we're glad we went and that we'd recommend going if you want a "real" southern experience.