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Here's the sign:
Here's the exterior, quite attractive:
With the requisite pig décor:
The interior has a lunch counter and plenty of both booths and tables:
They had TV's scattered throughout, so you could watch news or sporting events. It's actually quite a large BBQ restaurant, with a huge parking lot. The decor is mostly photographs of cars from the muscle car era, and lots of newspaper clippings of local events. They even have a "Boss Hog" room:
But what about the food, you ask? They have a wide selection of short-order favorites in addition to barbecue, and they serve breakfast, lunch and dinner. Sara ordered a large barbecue plate, and I ordered two large sliced barbecue sandwiches:
Sara regretted ordering fried squash, as it turned out to be frozen rather than fresh. The hush puppies were hand formed and edible, which is better than we have found in many barbecue restaurants. They weren't the best hush puppies we have eaten, though. The pork barbecue meat was sliced as we both requested; not much of a smoke ring in evidence, and not much smoke flavor, either. Still, it was properly tender, if a bit dry (order your barbecue chopped if you want to be able to properly moisten it with sauce). Porky's had two barbecue sauces on hand, a vinegar-based Eastern NC sauce (Sara pronounced it mostly vinegar and otherwise flavorless) and a dark brown tomato-based sauce that probably came from a commercial gallon jug, not much tang and a little too sweet.
Sara had thought about ordering banana pudding for dessert, but after she observed the waitresses manufacturing it behind the lunch counter using a 1-gallon can of commercial pudding glop and commenting loudly enough for Sara to hear about how many bananas to put into it, she decided to skip on the banana pudding. We skipped on the desserts, as a matter of fact.
Service at Porky's was quick and efficient, with our waitress only making one mistake when she poured iced tea into my Diet Coke. She caught herself and brought me a new one, so it was all right in the end.
After lunch we drove home via Albemarle, North Carolina, and stopped in at the Sonic Drive-In there, and ordered milk shakes for our delayed dessert. The waitress roller-skated our order out to us. If you're an American Idol fan, this particular Sonic is the drive-in that Kelly Pickler worked in during high school.
I'll give Porky's Bar-B-Q a three on my five-scale of BBQ restaurants: 3 out of 5: average; reasonably good food, moderate effort by staff/management.
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