AYDEN, N.C. — Staying true to a decades-long barbecue tradition, Skylight Inn BBQ in Ayden does simple whole hog, wood fire, North Carolina barbecue.

What You Need To Know

  • Sam Jones' grandfather opened Skylight Inn BBQ in 1947

  • They focus on simple whole hog, wood fire, North Carolina barbecue

  • The hogs are cooked overnight to get the meat tender and the skin crispy

  • The barbecue ingredients are simple: pork, salt, pepper, vinegar and hot sauce

This barbecue is really just five ingredients. Pork dressed with salt, pepper, vinegar and hot sauce.

Skylight Inn BBQ's barbecue recipe is pork, salt, pepper, vinegar and Texas Pete hot sauce. (Photo: Jenna Rae Gaertner)

“It's just simple, and it tastes good,” Joe Kelso said. “But usually that's the best stuff. When it's just simple, but good. ... It's just the love in it, I guess. Or maybe it's just the measurements that we put in.”

Kelso grew up coming to Skylight Inn BBQ.

“I'd sneak in here and be like, 'hey let me get a tray of barbecue.' Little broke me. ..,” Kelso said. “I moved away for about eight years, and I still thought about this stuff.”

Now he's worked there for a year and a half, and the barbecue never gets old.

“There's not really a gimmick. The closest thing to a gimmick is the fact that we use whole hogs,” he said.

Every morning, the hogs are placed on top of a wood fire. They stay there overnight to get the meat tender and the skin hard and crunchy.

The hogs are cooked overnight over a wood fire. (Photo: Jenna Rae Gaertner)

That is what makes Skylight Inn BBQ unique. Owner Sam Jones says his grandfather started the business in 1947 when he was just 17 years old.

“I started [working] here as a boy,” Jones said. “In my family if you were male, you were going to work in some facet of what my family did. But I hated it with a passion. For every moment I spent in that building, I felt like I was wasting my life.”

Jones says Skylight Inn wasn't a job to his family — it was a lifestyle. However, it took him a while to adopt that way of thinking. Now, he doesn't think he could do anything different.

Sam Jones and his dad and uncle.

Jones loves interacting with customers and seeing how much they love his barbecue.

“I think a lot of times barbecue places try to be everything to everybody where they got everything on the menu,” Jones said. “And you can't be good at everything.”

But they're good at barbecue. On weekends the line of customers runs out the door and almost to the road out front.

Their secret? Jones says let pig taste like pig.

Jones opened a couple of other barbecue restaurants under the name Sam Jones BBQ in Greenville and Raleigh. They are run by the same simple principles of Skylight Inn BBQ but with a slightly expanded menu.