When Joe and Edna Hill moved to Winston-Salem in 1947, people were driving to Lexington to get barbecue. Lexington was the Hills' hometown, so they decided to bring Lexington-style barbecue to Winston-Salem.
In 1951, the couple opened Hill's Lexington Barbecue on Patterson Avenue just north of the city limits. Eventually their son, Gene, and his wife, Sue, came to Winston to help with the restaurant.
The restaurant recently celebrated its 60th anniversary, and now a third generation of the family helps to run the business. J.R. "Slugger" Hill, Gene and Sue's son, manages the restaurant and Sharon Schroderbek, one of their four daughters, keeps the books. "We are still family-owned and run," Sue Hill said.
Hill's Lexington Barbecue's sauce is thin and red, with a "sweet and sour tang." Customers as far away as Statesville take the sauce home by the pint or more. The restaurant's sauce was recently selected as the best in North Carolina by an online magazine for Toyota owners.
Pork shoulders are pit-cooked each day over mostly hickory hardwood. The meat is then cut to order, either chopped, blocked, or sliced, on a well-worn chopping block and sauced in the restaurant's kitchen.
The barbecue is served with red slaw, baked beans, and house-made hush puppies and onion rings. Customers tend to favor sweet tea and Cheerwine to drink. "Our tea goes out of here ... by the gallon," Sue Hill said. And for dessert, banana pudding is still made from the restaurant's original recipe, which was recently featured in Our State magazine.
When the restaurant started, the menu included barbecued pork, grilled food, and shakes, but customers' tastes have changed over the years. Vegetables and salads are now available, and recently the Hills added pit-cooked beef brisket, coated with a thicker sauce that J.R. Hill developed. "Years ago," Gene Hill said, "people around here wouldn't eat beef at a barbecue restaurant."
Hill's also serves breakfast including homemade buttermilk biscuits, country ham, red eye gravy, pork brains and grits. "Some of the stuff that's hard to find anymore," J.R. Hill said.
The restaurant is open every day except Monday. "Sunday lunch is the biggest (crowd)," J.R. Hill said, "followed by Saturday breakfast and weekday lunches."
Deciding to stay open on Sunday, unusual for a barbecue restaurant, was a decision that Joe and Edna Hill made from the start, a decision J.R. Hill calls good business.
The restaurant is on the north end of Winston-Salem, in the Mineral Springs section of town just east of U.S. 52. The family said that over the years, the closing of Piedmont Airlines and some Reynolds, Hanes, and Western Electric facilities have affected the neighborhood and the restaurant's business somewhat. "But we have a good clientele," said Sue Hill, "I'm seeing a fourth generation of customers now."
And what does the family have to say after 60 years in business? "We're still here," J.R. Hill said.
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