Review Of Mountain View Barbecue Highway 127, Rt. 8, Box 143 Hickory, N.C. 28602 Phone: 828-294-1914 Open: Mon-Sat 6AM to 9PM • Closed Sunday (They also have a location in Morganton, N.C. This review was based on their Hickory location only. My original review of them was in 1999, and was reconfirmed in February of 2007) by H. Kent Craig ©1999 & 2007

The first thing that impresses you about Mountain View Barbeque, other than the requisite jammed parking lot so full of cars that it overflows into the neighboring Citgo gas station and up and down Highway 127's nearby shoulders, is that wonder, wonderful, wonderful aroma therapy essence that slaps your nosebuds silly as soon as you step through the front door. A combination of a base smell of cooked pork shoulders, the overtap of waftings of their special barbecue sauce, and the bottom odor of the faintest wisps of hardwood hotcoals that the Holy Pig has been cooked over for the past long hours, just draws you in like a siren's song, not for a tease, but to a wonderful essence of home and hearth. For hours after you eat there, that aromatic incense of Mountain View Barbeque just wonderfully hangs and sweetly sheds slowly off your clothes in the most polite way possible. I don't think any barbeque restaurant in N.C. smells any better.

The restaurant itself is suitably non-descript. Plain on the outside, as equally plain on the inside, with a small-ish dining area considering the volume of sit-down as well as take-out traffic they have, offering a few booths as well as mostly open tables. The dining area is kept spotless, and I do mean spotless, sporting a floor so clean that your mama would be proud, and zero residual food stains on any of the furniture.

The service is prompt and attentive, professional, not pushy. Because it's a smallish space, it can get a little loud, especially at peak lunchtime, or when a bunch of families with small children show up for dinner later in the evening, but that's a small price to pay for the extremely excellent barbecue.

Their side dishes are fine. The tea is dark and rich and thick enough to stand a spoon upright in, as good NC-Style barbecue restaurant tea should be, being obviously made from real tea, not instant or liquid tea flavorings mix. The french fries are semi-home-cut style, square, perfectly cooked, not greasy at all. The hushpuppies are hardish-chewy on the outside and soft on the inside, yes, the same criteria as for what makes a good bagel, Smile, but they do add onions to their mix which is standard for western North Carolina, which isn't to my personal tastes, but I won't take any points away from them for doing so. The slaw is an Eastern-NC-style white slaw, not the reddish slaw that's often served in their part of the country, with light flakes of carrot added. Depending on the opinions of my dining companions, since I'm deathly allergic to slaw, they pronounced it "excellent".

Because they also serve a more generalized roadside cafe-type menu in addition to their barbecue, they also offer a good selection of excellent desserts such cobbler, hot fudge cake, coconut cream pie, etc., chocolate cream pie, none of which would be ashamed to be on a dessert tray at a much fancier trattoria. Their side-order vegetables are also better than okay, but again are more in the tradition of a great roadside cafe than an equally great barbeque restaurant; you shouldn't be disappointed with any of them. The one tiny disappointment is that they don't offer Brunswick Stew, which isn't unusual for a Western-NC BBQ place, but considering the quality of their barbecue, I'm sure their stew would be equally as great, and I really wish they would.

Now to the mantle of their fare, their barbeque. It has a ketchup-based vinegar sauce like most Western-NC BBQ joints, but unlike most others, they use a culinary trident of vinegar, catsup, and just the barest hint of enough yellow mustard to take the acidic bite away from the other two and give it a distinctive tannish-yellowish color too. In South Carolina, they would call it SC-Style, but it's not that either, because they've achieved a better balance in the three base flavors of catsup and vinegar and mustard than either traditional Lexington-style or more-heavily-mustardly-SC-style sauce. Like a good more heavily-ladened-with-ketchup Lexington-style or plain vinegar Eastern-NC sauce, their sauce enhances the taste and very pleasant aftertaste of their pork, creates a synergy of culinary awakening and delight, without distracting from the flavor of the perfectly-cooked pigflesh.

The meat itself is prepared as a fine but not mushy chop, no pieces larger than the end of your little finger and most smaller, but are large enough for their sauce to hang on to. You won't find a single undercooked bit, nor any overcooked hard pieces nor any globs of standalone fat, just fine-chopped porcine pellucidness. The serving sizes for small and large plates and BBQ sandwiches are exactly as they should be, and their prices if anything are even slightly more reasonable than a lot of other places, very good for families on a budget.

Without a single proviso, Mountain View Barbeque is more than deserving of my highest rating.

Post Script: wondering why they call it "Mountain View Barbeque"? Because nearby Baker Mountain dominates the western skyline behind it, spectacular western North Carolina Blue Ridge Mountains scenery at no additional charge.

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