North Hills nabs a new BBQ restaurant with a serious North Carolina following
Everything in 2020 may be a mess, but North Carolina’s barbecue renaissance hasn’t lost steam.
The BBQ Lab will open in Raleigh’s North Hills development, aiming to start smoking in spring 2021. If the name sounds familiar, the new restaurant comes from the owners of the popular Redneck BBQ Lab near Benson.
The North Hills BBQ Lab will take over the former Q Shack space, which closed in 2019.
It will be the first of multiple BBQ Lab restaurants, as owners Jerry Stephenson and Todd Breed launch the new barbecue franchise.
“The Raleigh community has been asking for The BBQ Lab to come to this part of North Carolina for many years, and we listened,” said Stephenson, in a news release. “We are ready to join the North Hills community, and we are excited to finally announce to Raleigh that The BBQ Lab is on the way.”
Stephenson opened The Redneck BBQ Lab in 2017 in McGee’s Crossroads and has developed an intense following of barbecue fans pulling off of Interstate 40 for pulled pork, brisket burnt ends, sticky spareribs and a host of barbecue sides.
Before opening the restaurant, Stephenson and his sister, Roxanne Manley, competed as one of the most accomplished barbecue teams in the state, collecting two dozen championships and ranking in national competitions.
“We believe barbecue is meant to be a shared experience that brings people together to socialize with one another,” said Stephenson in a release. “We hope to spread our core values — to be kind, courteous and customer-centered — and to remain focused on our goal of putting a smile on the customer’s face every time we serve the best barbecue in the business.”
The BBQ Lab will be different from the Redneck BBQ Lab in a number of ways. For one, it will serve alcohol, specializing in North Carolina craft beer, Stephenson said. It will also have a deep fryer and freezer, meaning it will offer fries and hush puppies.
“We’re putting in a fryer and a freezer, which goes against everything I believe in,” Stephenson said, jokingly. “We’re about fresh. McDonald’s does french fries and they’re the best in the world. The Redneck BBQ lab does barbecue.”
Stephenson said BBQ Labs will likely be in North Carolina and South Carolina.
In the last year more than a half dozen new barbecue restaurants have been opened or announced in the Triangle, signaling a new generation of pitmasters picking up the torch of North Carolina’s most famous food.
With the BBQ Labs, Stephenson said he aims to build franchises that live up to this new demand for barbecue.
“A lot of people have asked us, ‘Can we franchise?’” Stephenson said. “I always said I would wait three years. But we’ve been dong a lot of planning on the back end and have created this BBQ Lab model that we want to give to other folks. The Redneck BBQ Lab is a special place. If you start throwing them out everywhere, you water down your concept. As long as I’m a part of it, this will never be watered down.”
This story was originally published October 15, 2020 at 10:17 AM.
