This Is How Sam Jones Got NC Whole Hog BBQ Into the Michelin Guide

By Eric Barton | Nov. 21, 2025

AUTHOR BIO: Eric Barton is editor of The Adventurist and a freelance journalist who has reviewed restaurants for more than two decades. Email him here.

Sam Jones likes to say his first job was standing on a cinder block. As a kid in Ayden, North Carolina, he re-weighed pigs at Skylight Inn, the barbecue restaurant his grandfather opened in 1947. He was small enough that he had to climb up on the block just to see the scale.

People want that memory to sound sentimental. Jones is not here for that. “I'm sure people look for this romantic, nostalgic story,” he says. “But in my family, I mean, there was just work,” he says. You showed up and did what needed to be done.

That bluntness, and a willingness to live through hard years without flinching, is what makes the news from the Michelin Guide land differently here.

Sam Jones BBQ, the whole-hog spot he opened with longtime friend and business partner Michael Letchworth, is one of only seven North Carolina restaurants to earn a Bib Gourmand in the first Michelin Guide of the American South. For a fourth-generation pitmaster from the four-traffic-light town of Ayden, he’s just cooking whole hog over wood the way his family always has. The Michelin Guide is a very modern spotlight on something that, as far as he’s concerned, will change very little about the work his grandfather taught him.

Sam Jones

Jones grew up in a family where the work orbiting Skylight Inn never stopped and information did not flow freely. “I want to say our biggest challenge was my family didn't set you up for success,” he says. His grandfather, Pete Jones, was a legend who also wanted to be the smartest man in the room, even if that meant keeping knowledge to himself. When Pete got sick, it happened fast. “He couldn’t give you advice and tell you what to do,” Sam remembers. “At Skylight, it was like he walked into a room and cut the lights off.”

The perception outside the building shifted even though the work inside did not. Rumors flew that the restaurant had been sold, that the barbecue was not the same. The money dried up. “We went literally three years and did not make any money,” Jones says. He was in his mid-20s, suddenly in charge, trying to keep a James Beard America’s Classics winner from becoming a memory.

Then came the kind of stretch most people do not come back from. In 2005, Jones survived a car wreck that killed his girlfriend. Four months later, his grandmother died. Sixty-one days after that, his grandfather was gone too. “I remember at his funeral at the cemetery, I looked at my dad and I was like, ‘Man, I don't think I got a tear left to cry,’” he says. “I feel like we had lived the last six months in the hospital or in the funeral home.”

At the end of the year, Jones was the one who had to tell his father and uncle that, after paying the taxes, there would be nothing left in the account. “Their eyes got real big,” he recalls. “They're looking at a 26-year-old kid that's telling them we ain't got no money.” He hated it then. Now he calls it necessary. “Looking back, I am glad I lived through that because it teaches you to live for the lean years,” he says. “It really helped me learn very quick how to stay within your means and don't worry about what everybody else has got. Just work for what you got.”

Working for what he has eventually meant putting his own name on the sign. In 2015, Jones and Letchworth opened Sam Jones BBQ in Winterville, followed by a second location in Raleigh. The menu is rooted in the eastern North Carolina whole hog he grew up on, surrounded by new spins on smoked meats that helped earn him national attention, a James Beard semifinalist nod, and a place on lists of the South’s best pitmasters.

So when Michelin called, he needed a minute. “I don't ever act like I'm smarter than I am,” he says. “And so when I learned that we were in it, I had to do a little educating myself as to what that means. The more I read, the more I was humbled. We're mentioned alongside these people that have more knowledge about food in their pinky nail than I do in my whole body.”

A Michelin Bib Gourmand recognizes restaurants serving memorable food at a fair price, which is a strangely modern way to describe what barbecue was always supposed to be. “Depending on who you ask, some people bellyache about the cost but we don’t cut any corners,” Jones says. Barbecue started as the most economical way to feed a crowd; now, if it is done right, it is anything but. “Well, you don't throw caution into the wind and charge $20 for a sandwich because that's not fair,” he says. “It is kind of a juggling act of wanting to make the best food, stay in our lane as far as barbecue is concerned, and don't price everybody out.”

Whatever Michelin thinks, he insists the work stays the same. “When the guy that gets off the back of the trash truck goes into the restaurant and gets a sandwich, he ought to get the same quality of sandwich that an influential person or food writer would,” Jones says. “At least that's my thought process. Our idea was to try to offer the best food we can, period.”

Ask him, finally, to explain eastern North Carolina whole hog to someone who has never been to Ayden, never seen the pits, never watched him feed a fire all night, and he does not give you poetry. He does not reach for metaphor. “It’s whole hog cooked over wood,” he says. For Sam Jones, that’s always been enough.