Dining review: Durham’s Picnic has great barbecue, but you can’t skip the fried chicken

We’re seated at a picnic table, dining al fresco. The spread – deviled eggs, fried chicken, potato salad – looks like it might have been just unpacked from a picnic basket. There’s pork barbecue, too, which suggests that the meal we’re enjoying might be the picnic’s Southern country cousin, a pig pickin.’

Whatever you call it, this is no ordinary outdoor meal. We’ve scored a table on the patio at Picnic, the highly anticipated joint venture between former Piedmont chef Ben Adams and Pig Whistle whole hog barbecue caterer Wyatt Dickson. A third partner, Ryan Butler, is the farmer whose Green Button Farm supplies the pasture-raised hogs that are Dickson’s culinary medium.

And indeed, the self-taught pitmaster is as passionate as an artist about his calling, uncompromising in his efforts to produce the quintessential pork barbecue. He cooks whole hogs the traditional way, for starters, low and slow over hardwood coals.

But Dickson is not afraid to break with tradition when he believes he can improve on it. Situated as he is on the geographic dividing line between North Carolina’s Eastern and Western barbecue styles, he defies both. Rather than chopping or slicing the pork, in pursuit of a more satisfying texture, he pulls it from the smoke-darkened carcass to produce coarse tatters and shreds. He doesn’t sauce the meat, either, preferring to let people experience its subtly smoky flavor on its own before saucing it to taste with his trademark sauce – which, wouldn’t you know it, is a fusion of Eastern and Western styles.

Just how much sauce you’ll add will likely depend not just on your taste, but also on how long the barbecue has been sitting on the steam table. Despite efforts to keep the pork moist, it can get dry after a while. When it’s just right, though, Dickson’s distinctive take on barbecue needs no sauce at all to impress even a diehard purist.

Adams, whose resume includes acclaimed Charleston restaurants McCrady’s and Hominy Grill, rounds out the Picnic spread with a few of his own ambitious tweaks of the classics. Those deviled eggs are pickled, and their mustardy yolk filling enriched with a rendered bacon fat. Brunswick stew nails the old school flavor, but comes loaded with more shreds of smoky pork than corn and lima beans. And those green flecks in the hushpuppies? Fresh scallions.

Nor is pulled pork the only winning entree option. Blackened N.C. catfish, served with a sweet onion tartare, is an unqualified keeper. Like all plates, it comes with your choice of two sides – a number of which are good enough to justify making a meal of the Picnic vegetable plate, which includes your choice of four sides. I’d make mine pimento mac ’n’ cheese, bacon-braised collards, baked beans (sweetened with molasses and amped up with bits of pork) and sweet potato puree with a spiced pecan crumble.

Unless the seasonal side happens to be smoked tomato gazpacho, in which case one of those other sides has to go.

Best of all, though – right up there with the pulled pork at its best – is Adams’ take on fried chicken. The chef raises the ante on this picnic classic by first brining it, then marinating it in house-smoked buttermilk before frying it to a juicy, golden brown in a raggedly crunchy batter. Dark meat devotee that I am, I couldn’t even object to the fact that you get a breast and a wing on the plate.

But if you insist, you can get a boneless thigh on a sandwich. Other sandwich options include pulled pork, a double patty burger with pimento cheese, and a vegetarian smoked squash sandwich with fried onion rings.

Like all picnics, this one isn’t immune to the occasional rain shower. Happily, they’re infrequent and minor enough – hushpuppies a little overdone, potato salad that could use more salt, banana pudding that’s mostly whipped cream – that they don’t dampen the experience for long.

A couple of wall-spanning chalkboards listing beers, seasonal specials and desserts (get the key lime pie if it’s up there) are the focal point in a minimally decorated dining room that’s suitably rustic for the concept. But all those hard surfaces, from worn linoleum tile floors to rough-sawn wood paneling, can make for a space that’s quite noisy.

You can always escape to the patio, if you’re lucky enough to score a table. Sure, the breeze comes from overhead ceiling fans, and the view – pine trees, a church steeple and a patchwork of lawns in the mostly residential neighborhood where Picnic opened in February – is seen over the hoods of cars in the restaurant’s parking lot. But it’s quiet, and you couldn’t pack a picnic this good yourself.

This story was originally published September 7, 2016 at 10:00 AM with the headline "Dining review: Durham’s Picnic has great barbecue, but you can’t skip the fried chicken."