Qualla: Skylight Inn BBQ

Skylight Inn BBQ: Introduction

Sun, 22 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Look for the dome. On a flat stretch of Lee Street in Ayden, North Carolina -- population roughly 5,000 -- a wood-and-aluminum replica of the United States Capitol crowns the roof of a plain brick building. It has been there since 1984, installed after National Geographic declared the place beneath it "the barbecue capital of the world" in a 1979 article. The dome is absurd and earnest in equal measure, which is a fair description of the Skylight Inn itself: a restaurant that has cooked whole hogs over hardwood coals in essentially the same way since Pete Jones opened for business in 1947, and whose family roots in the craft stretch back to the 1830s, when Pete's great-great-grandfather Skilton Dennis made barbecue for local Baptist church gatherings.

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Skylight Inn BBQ: A Seventeen-Year-Old's Bet

Sun, 22 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Pete Jones was just seventeen when he opened the Skylight Inn on his family's property in Ayden. He had grown up watching generations of Jones and Dennis men tend whole hogs over oak and hickory coals -- a tradition stretching back more than a century. Jones bet that a town deep ...

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Skylight Inn BBQ: The Whole Hog, Head and All

Sun, 22 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Most barbecue restaurants smoke individual cuts of pork. The Skylight Inn cooks the entire animal, head still attached. Whole hogs are placed on open pits and smoked low and slow over charcoals made by burning oak and hickory logs in nearby fireplaces. The process takes many hour...

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Skylight Inn BBQ: Cornbread That Starts Arguments

Sun, 22 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The only bread the Skylight Inn serves is its cornbread, and it bears little resemblance to the sweet, cakey version found elsewhere in the South. Made with stone-ground cornmeal, water, and pork drippings -- no flour, no sugar, no eggs -- it emerges dense, chewy, and faintly sav...

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Skylight Inn BBQ: Four Tenets on a Billboard

Sun, 22 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Outside the restaurant stands a wooden billboard bearing a portrait of Pete Jones and the four tenets of the Skylight Inn: that the restaurant is the barbecue capital of the world, that the men of the Jones family are its founders and statesmen, that they uphold a tradition datin...

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Skylight Inn BBQ: Capital of a Quiet Kingdom

Sun, 22 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Ayden is not a destination town. It sits in Pitt County between Greenville and Kinston, surrounded by flat agricultural land and modest rural communities. The Skylight Inn is the reason most outsiders come here. New York Times food writers have boarded planes for this sandwich. A...

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