You told us where to find the Triangle’s best hushpuppies. We tasted 4 favorites
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- The News & Observer asked readers to share their favorite Triangle hushpuppy spots.
- Jean’s was praised for airy, sweet hushpuppies and offered maple butter.
- Cook Out’s hushpuppies were described as dense, dry and one-note.
The hushpuppy is ephemeral, lightly crisp for a brief joyous moment, something to savor even though it’s often just a bonus bite on the side of a seafood platter.
Yes, the humble hushpuppy, the cornmeal fritters we slather in honey butter or snack on before a meal, is a beloved piece of North Carolina restaurant culture.
A few weeks ago we at The News & Observer asked readers to share their favorite hushpuppy spots, collecting dozens of recommendations for the best fried pups out there.
In the responses, we noticed something: Durham has a high concentration of puppy love. We knew we needed a taste test.
Multiple readers shouted out Bullock’s Bar-B-Cue, Cook Out, Jean’s By The Sea and Saltbox Seafood Joint as their favorite hushpuppies, restaurants that are each just a few minutes from one another. One is the oldest restaurant in Durham, one is a fast food giant, one is brand new and one has a James Beard medal on the wall.
Here’s how they stacked up.
Drew’s Take
I have many blind spots in my taste palette. Even as a North Carolina native, I’ve had too few barbecues to weigh in on any heated debates about the culinary tradition with any authority.
Taking a hushpuppy tour of Durham, therefore, was an overdue pilgrimage. Embarking upon it bestowed a surprising sense of honor, learning and tasting how different recipes came to life. Unlike our sweet tea taste test, no “right way” to make good hushpuppies emerged.
I pride myself on objective measures in these reviews. But every time I felt so sure that the batch of hushpuppies in front of me just fell short of my criteria, I took another bite. And another. With each crunch, my certainty waned like the hushpuppy in my hand, leaving only grease and a need to revise my rubric.
In other words, each restaurant — well, except for one — executed their formulas so well, you should consider my rankings as a guide for those with personal taste similar to mine rather than impartial judgment.
Jean’s By The Sea
Just a few months old, Jean’s By The Sea has quickly established itself as a refreshing seabreeze in a former roadside burger joint. Most diners encounter the hushpuppies at Jean’s on the Calabash platter, an inland ode to North Carolina’s world-famous seafood capital.
These pups, which we encountered at peak freshness just out of the fryer at lunchtime, look like golden fingerling potatoes. There’s a crinkle to the crisp of the hushpuppies at Jean’s, a lightness that seems impossible and reminds you of old fashioned doughnuts. Yet in the airy crunch, the hushpuppies still have a pleasant chew that doesn’t for one second think about becoming dense.
Of the four hushpuppy orders, Jean’s were the sweetest, but it was just a note of summer corn, not cake-like cornbread.
Perhaps because we only ordered hushpuppies, Jean’s offered us a special off-menu accompaniment: a small tub of maple butter. Every great hushpuppy can stand on its own. But every great everything was made better dunked in maple butter, and the same can be said for these wonderful hushpuppies.
Drew’s Jean’s rating: 9/10
Saltbox Seafood Joint
James Beard-winning chef Ricky Moore doesn’t call them hushpuppies at Saltbox, they’re Hush Honeys. The name comes from the drizzle of honey the pups get just before they’re served, the warm hushpuppies sending a burst of floral sweetness into the air.
These Hush Honeys are dark, but not over-fried, crispy without being crunchy. There’s a snap to the bite, a warm, pleasant chew and crisp lightness. The honey takes care of the sweetness, finding a balance with the fritters, and the Hush Honeys get a dusting of lemon, pepper and fennel seasoning that takes it to a new brighter level.
At Saltbox, many things are not as they seem. It’s a fried fish joint, sure, but the fish on the menu is from just a few hours away and might have been driven in that morning from the coast, delicately fried and hit with a punch of seasoning.
The same is true of the Hush Honeys, where Moore has taken something classically North Carolinian, served it true and familiar, while making it his own, winking at the tubs of honey butter he surely dunked his hushpuppies in as a kid.
Drew’s Saltbox rating: 9/10
Bullock’s Bar-B-Cue
Down the street from one of Durham’s newest restaurants is Bullock’s Bar-B-Cue, the oldest restaurant in the city. An owner described the restaurant in terms we could understand. “We’ve made millions of hushpuppies in our nearly 75 years,” co-owner Ty Bullock said.
In the early days, those hushpuppies were shaped by spoons and dropped into hot oil. Now they have a doughnut maker that can drop two at a time in rapid succession.
The hushpuppies at Bullock’s are thick and long, with a light golden crust studded with tiny minced onions. These hushpuppies are also wonderfully crisp, but with a bit heavier chew. The flavor is led by those tiny onions, with only the faintest corn sweetness amid all the savory. Our brown paper bag didn’t come with tubs of butter, but if you sit in Bullock’s packed dining room, that’s what you can expect; a bit of creamy sweetness to elevate these perfectly old school hushupppies.
Drew’s Bullock’s rating: First reaction 7.5/10, building to 8.0/10 after a few more hushpuppies.
Cook Out
At the end of Hillsborough Road’s fast food row is Cook Out, the one where then-candidate Joe Biden ordered a “Black & White” milkshake back in 2020.
Best known for an array of milkshakes, a good burger and less than good french fries, Cook Out is one of the rare fast food joints serving hushpuppies. These are very dark and stubby, arriving to us so hot and dense it’s fair to say they spent some time basking in the heat lamp. These pups are heavy on chew, tasting mostly of savory corn and onions.
While not on the same level as our homegrown hushpuppies in this taste test, Cook Out’s version played its one note well enough. Many, many hushpuppies out there are this style of dense, chewy, somewhat dry, somewhat over-fried bite, that we still find ourselves reaching for.
Drew’s Cook Out rating: 5/10
Twumasi’s Take
Cook Out meets its low expectations
Well below the tier of the top three, the one-note savor of a Cook Out hushpuppy is the kind of assembly-line flavor I expected from a chain. I could eat the other three restaurants’ hushpuppies without sauce. Not the case for Cook Out.
The onion flavor is strong but there’s not much else, so it bores the taste buds after a few chews. The hushpuppy’s interior is desert dry and has a crumbly texture. The hushpuppy itself is so small yet so dense and hard to crunch.
Only a dab of tangy, sour-sweet Cook Out sauce somehow neutralizes and adds flavor to a recipe I can only describe as what the whirring sound of a refrigerator filling its ice maker must taste like.
I may be biased. In my past lives, I’ve discarded many a Cook Out tray with three or four hushpuppies left inside, so I knew coming into Thursday the chain wouldn’t click with me. To be fair to their hushpuppies, though, a full-hearted dip into Cook Out’s trademark sauce salvages their standing with me — somewhat.
Twumasi’s Cook Out rating: 3/10 without sauce, 6/10 with
Bullock’s shows why it’s been in business for 75 years
Bullock’s engineered the biggest golden puppies we tested. Perhaps that’s a risk; a dense batch of hushpuppies is asking a lot of your customers’ appetites. Bullock’s really swings on its taste — and it doesn’t miss.
For a savory take on the hushpuppy, I loved the integrity and fluff of the texture inside. Biting into a puppy felt less like a crunch and more like snapping a Graham cracker. A savory hum throughout, and a subtly sweet aftertaste.
I’m more partial to sweeter and less dense. As can be the case with more savory hushpuppies, these were a bit dry — far from a dealbreaker, but enough to tilt them away from my preference.
Twumasi’s Bullock’s rating: 8.5/10
Saltbox Seafood Joint enamors with bold, unique flavor
The concept of “Hush Honeys,” as Saltbox calls its hushpuppies, colored me skeptical at first. I thought for sure that drizzles of honey would overpower any flavor. How happy I was, then, to be completely wrong.
The perfect amount of honey plus the perfect amount of lemon pepper-tasting seasoning made for an addictive taste. The hushpuppies’ flavor and texture served as a neutral, crunchy base for the flavor to show out.
Saltbox’s hushpuppies provided the most electric experience of the four. The restaurant’s number two ranking is more like a 1B. If, like me, you like sweeter hushpuppies, the Saltbox formula gives savor and saccharine equal showtime.
Twumasi’s Saltbox rating: 9/10
Jean’s By The Sea delights with a vintage hushpuppy
The inches of daylight between Jean’s and Saltbox merely represent the difference between a genre-bending remix and what I think an elite hushpuppy should be: golden, soft to crunch and sweet with a donut kind of texture.
Jean’s aced my arbitrary test with aplomb. The inside of each hushpuppy almost melted in my mouth. The texture was halfway to chewy — even as the hushpuppies’ exterior didn’t require a forceful chomp — and the taste was halfway to donut with the right broil of sugar.
To my surprise, I enjoyed Jean’s hushpuppies more without their maple butter. The butter’s aftertaste overshadowed the real star of the show.
Twumasi’s Jean’s rating: 9.25/10 without butter, 8.5/10 with
This story was originally published June 29, 2026 at 11:21 AM.
