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It's a great story. It's just that the details change slightly with each telling. In Bob Garner's book, "North Carolina Barbecue: Flavored by Time," Mitchell's mother sold only $12 worth of groceries and explicitly asked for old-fashioned barbecue and "not that gas-cooked stuff." Garner writes that Mitchell cooked the pig the next day and it was a couple of years before barbecue became Mitchell's full-time job.

In Mike Mills' "Peace, Love and Barbecue," Mitchell says he was working for the state Department of Labor in Raleigh at the time. Mitchell is quoted as saying, "Got to where I was driving home from Raleigh like a wild man, pulling my tie off as I was driving down the highway. Had to get home to put the pig on." Labor officials say Mitchell worked for the department for three months in late 1978 and not in the 1990s.

Despite the fuzzy details, the story gained attention for Mitchell after Garner, a UNC-TV reporter and producer, wrote a chapter about him in his 1996 book. It was the first bit of notice Mitchell garnered outside of Wilson, a town dominated by such barbecue institutions as Bill's and Parker's.

By 1999, Mitchell says, the business had outgrown the family store. Erader A. Mills Jr., a local developer, agreed to do a $1.4 million expansion of the restaurant. Mitchell agreed to pay Mills back with a collateralized loan on the new building. In 2002, the new restaurant opened with its "pig bar," automated pits, a drive-through window, a private party room and classrooms to train staff and, Mitchell hoped, to one day offer cooking classes.

That summer, Southern Foodways Alliance director John T. Edge invited Mitchell to cook at the group's annual symposium. "For the people at the symposium, his barbecue was a revelation," Edge says. By the weekend's end, The New Yorker writer and barbecue-obsessed keynote speaker Calvin Trillin was fawning over Mitchell's pork. New York Times reporter and gourmand R.W. Apple Jr. wrote a front-page story about the event featuring a photo of Mitchell.

An invitation followed to cook at the inaugural The Big Apple Barbecue Block Party. Television chef Anthony Bourdain stopped by the restaurant to eat chitterlings and souse meat for his Food Network show, "A Cook's Tour." Mitchell got a second invitation to cook in Oxford.

As Mitchell looks back on his first appearance at Oxford in 2002, he says of the Wilson restaurant, "The Southern Foodways Alliance was the beginning of the end of this building."

Money troubles begin

By 2004, Mitchell was struggling to make the loan payments to Southern Bank & Trust. In October 2004, the bank foreclosed on his restaurant. Mitchell and Erader Mills say bank officials mishandled the loan and the foreclosure. Their arguments persuaded a Superior Court judge, who stopped the foreclosure and wrote in his ruling that he cannot find that the bank "comes into court with clean hands."

Mills and Mitchell also filed a federal lawsuit claiming that bank officials racially discriminated against them and conspired with Wilson's white barbecue establishment and pork producers in Eastern North Carolina to put Mitchell out of business. Mitchell's theory for the conspiracy: He was starting to get national attention for his idea of cooking only heritage-breed pigs instead of confinement-bred hogs. "Who would have an interest in trying to derail something that went counter to what they represent?" Mitchell asks. "It's all about money."

The bank, through its lawyer, declined to comment about the litigation or the settlement. The owners of Parker's declined to comment. Bill Ellis of Bill's did not return messages seeking comment.

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