Friday, November 17, 2006

A Disappointment - Skylight Inn, Ayden NC

Address - 4618 Lee St., Ayden NC
Style - Counter service, sit down restaurant

After long last, I finally got to try out a long time legend in eastern NC barbecue, the Skylight Inn. The building is a landmark on the old highway 11 south of town. The gravle parking lot was packed with cars, pickup trucks and vans at lunch.

The menu is pretty simple. Barbecue comes in a sandwich or three sizes of trays, small, medium and large. The tray comes with cole slaw in a separate tray and a slice of fried cornbread on top.

The cole slaw was pretty ordinary. The cornbread was heavy with oil. It could have used a bit more drain time. The parts that were not soaked with oil were not bad. The pork tasted average, but was overwhelmed by pieces of rubbery cartilage throughout the meat. I am used to a bit or two due to errors in the chop, but not in every bite. I don't think these were the crackling's that are normally in the Skylight barbecue, but actual bits of bone and cartilage from improper preparation.

According to Kent Craig, Pete Jones passed away this year. This food was served under the new owner. Perhaps it will improve in time.

9 comments:

DigitalRich said...

Dave,

I am new to blogging, and clueless regarding editing the HTML in my template. Would you mind sharing with me how you got the image embedded in your header? All I managed to do was kill the template header and drop a big bulky image in its place. If you could help that would be awesome.

I LOVE barbecue, but seldom get to North Carolina- though I love your state. Our family owns a cabing in Burnsville.

Dave said...

You're correct that it needed editting of the HTML of the template.

The image I use is on my own web-site, so all I had to do was put an img tag in the header of the template.

If you look through the HTML of the template, you will find a div id = "header" tag. A couple of lines later there is $BlogTitle$ tag. This displays the title in the header. I modified that line to have the following tags: img br $BlogTitle$

The html looks like

< img alt="picture name" src="http://website.org/picture.gif"> < br> < $BlogTitle$>

DigitalRich said...

Thanks Dave. It didn't quite work for me (I didnt have the text you refernced, and I know too little to deal with that), but I will check blogger help- some other person with my skill level and same template I am sure has already asked the question. Have a great weekend.

Rich

Anonymous said...

If you don't know anything about whole hog barbeque, then you should not write about it.

Anonymous said...

Dave,
Just thought I would fill you in and let you know that the same people that have prepared the pigs over the past 20 years are still the same people preparing it today. Pete had stopped preparing many years prior to his death.

Anonymous said...

It happens on a rare day that some extraneous parts get into the BBQ, but that is not the norm. It is usually just clean meat. And the cornbread is not usually as greasy as you say. Sorry you hit them on a bad day.

Anonymous said...

Skylight Inn does not fry their cornbread, it is baked. You obviously have no idea what you are talking about.

Arkgirl said...

I love Skylight Inn in Ayden, NC. The BBQ is delicious, the wait is not long, the prices are good and I absolutely love the cole slaw!
Arkgirl

Lin said...
This comment has been removed by the author.