Driving School in Hollywood, SC

HOLLYWOOD — The South Carolina barbecue scene is in a curious spot these days. Just a few decades ago, smoked meat scholars lauded the state’s four distinct sauce zones: thin tomato in the Piedmont, thick tomato along the Savannah River, mustard in the Midlands and vinegar-and-pepper in the Pee Dee.

Those delineations have blurred and merged in the 21st century. From Pickens to Beaufort, joints routinely put squeeze bottles with all four varieties on the tables along with a few out-of-state interlopers.

There’s one such interloper at Easton Barbecue Co. in Hollywood, which opened rather quietly last fall. The menu board includes “Bama White” alongside the four canonical styles. It also offers beef brisket, which was once an exotic species in these parts but has now been thoroughly assimilated.

It’s well worth the drive out Highway 17 through Ravenel to sample that blend of old and new. The standing lineup includes smoked chicken wings ($19.95 a dozen), ribs ($18 per half rack), pulled pork ($10 for a half pound) and brisket ($16 per half pound).

The smoky, tender strands of pork are infused with a nice vinegar tang. The spareribs are even better — meaty, neatly-trimmed slabs with a big bold bite and a balanced, firm-but-tender texture.

I’ve yet to sample Easton's brisket in its sliced form, for I skipped it in favor of the Carolina specialties on my initial visit, and it was sold out when I arrived for my second. I can only assume it’s pretty darned good, though, for the chopped and ground versions are excellent.

The smoked brisket smashburger ($15) doesn’t overcomplicate things: a double stack of well-seared patties, each draped in melted American cheese, atop a layer of tender grilled onions, housemade pickles and pale orange “special sauce.” Beefy, gooey, salty, chewy: it hits all the buttons in a compact, if somewhat messy, package.

The Colonel ($17) is normally made with sliced beef, but I can’t imagine that being any better than the chopped variant I tried. The glistening beef is mounded high on a soft kaiser bun and draped in a blanket of gooey, slightly grainy queso and tender grilled onions, a schmear of chipotle and horseradish aioli adding extra creaminess and zip.

Don’t limit yourself to the regular menu board, though. Perched at the edge of the counter is a small chalkboard in the shape of a pig, and that little porker will guide you to fine treasures, such as the day’s sandwich special. Recent examples have included pastrami cheesesteaks, unagi-glazed pork belly banh mi and a gussied-up club with smoked turkey, pastrami and bacon.

One notable special has no name, just a tempting description: “shaved pork belly & loin, collards, Provolone, pepper relish, roasted garlic aioli w/ Hog jus on a roll.” For working purposes, let’s call it the Great Googly Moogly, which is what I said when I first bit into the thing.

A long, soft roll encloses a tender foundation of smoky, thin-shaved pork topped with mild melted cheese and sweet pepper relish. Best of all is the layer of chopped collards, which are superbly tangy with a touch of crunch from their chopped stems.

The hog jus, in case you were wondering, comes in a little plastic cup on the side for dunking. I have no idea how one goes about making hog jus, but each dunk into the salty, savory fluid merges the riotous assemblage into an even softer and more flavorful bite.

Far-off flourishes meet SC tradition

How such smoky wonders ended up in Hollywood is a bit of a circuitous story, one that is emblematic of our current barbecue moment.

Back in the 20th century, each region’s distinctive style was shaped by an informal apprenticeship system. In rural areas, the younger generation would learn from their elders while tending the pits at family gatherings and holiday events. As restaurants emerged, teenagers would take jobs at the local barbecue joint, and some ended up taking the recipes and techniques they learned and opening a restaurant of their own, replicating and reinforcing what became highly regionalized styles.

In our more mobile and digitally-connected age, an informal apprenticeship system is still at work, but it’s defined less by geography than by happenstance and individual connections.

Joel Easton, a Sumter native, learned much of his style from another South Carolinian, but only after moving up to the North Carolina mountains. In 2019, he left a health care career to take a job at Asheville’s acclaimed (and recently shuttered) Buxton Hall Barbecue, where he was mentored in the cooking of whole hogs and hash and rice by Florence native Elliott Moss. (Moss has since returned to his hometown to open the very impressive Elliott's BBQ Lounge, but that’s a story for another day.)

Easton launched a pop-up of his own in Asheville, but family brought him down to the Lowcountry, for his mother had a house on Edisto Island. When he happened upon the low-slung gray building on S.C. Highway 162, just a few hundred feet from Hollywood’s lone traffic light, he knew he had found his permanent spot.

The building has housed a series of barbecue restaurants over the years — Black’s BBQ, Boogie’s, Too Good Foods — though none of them had made it onto my radar screen. Easton inherited much of the interior décor from its predecessors, which tends toward corrugated sheet metal, open wooden rafters and mismatched chairs. It still feels like a work in progress.

Also inherited from those previous establishments were a pair of custom-made barbecue pits, both of them black metal behemoths. One is enclosed like Mike Mulligan’s steam shovel inside the small kitchen, while the other is affixed to a battered old trailer parked long ago beneath the trees out back.

Joel Easton told me he does a little overflow cooking on the outdoor pit, but firing up the one in the kitchen would overwhelm the A.C. in an already too-hot workspace. Instead, most of the real work is done on an 84-inch Lang offset smoker in an open-sided shed adjoining the restaurant.

I have a particular admiration for barbecue joints that not only get the big things right — the headline meats, a signature side dish or two — but also apply the same focused attention to each and every element of the meal. Easton checks that box for sure.

The “Joel slaw” ($4), is a generously dressed version of the classic barbecue side, offering a cool, creamy crunch spiked with a tart vinegar bite and a hint of mustard and celery seed. There are no actual bones in the backbone and rice ($4), an old South Carolina hog-killing dish. Served in a little paper boat, Easton’s rendition is a cross between chicken bog and Cajun dirty rice, with distinct grains of spicy rice dotted with bits of smoky pork.

Such regulars are augmented by recurring specials, like cool cubes of sweet watermelon kissed with lime and dusted with barbecue rub, which adds a nice spicy kick. Even the freebies are worth notice: tangy and tart pickled red onions and housemade pickled cucumbers with a fragrant herbal crunch, either of which would fit right in at a top Texas craft barbecue joint.