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At the edge of meandering Virginia Beach farmland whose roads might be named for the people who still live there, Pungo Boys BBQ is the sort of smoke-fueled stop you might hope to find wherever subdivision cul-de-sacs yield to rows of tomatoes. It is a place where beef is always what’s for dinner — unless it’s pork — and everyone’s nicer than you even know how to be.
Each week from Thursday to Sunday, hulking “dinosaur ribs” and splendid pulled pork are yours from midday till the meat’s gone, and so are thick slabs of Texas-inspired brisket and large-grind sausage from a butcher down the way. The excellent mac and cheese and five-deep baked beans come courtesy of Doug Humphrey — one of four Pungo Boys with four distinct takes on facial hair. Jeff Dudley cures his tangy carrot-pepper coleslaw nine days in the fridge. Specials live on a chalkboard cutout of a pig.
Ask which meat’s the favorite, and they’ll tell you it’s a tough decision. And if you order too much, they might help you carry it out to your car.
The Princess Anne Road barbecue spot, with its massive Ole Hickory gas-assist belting smoke out back, might seem like it’s been buried in its country strip mall for decades, a northern neighbor to the turkeys gobbling on Flanagan Farm. It’s been more like seven weeks.
The roots, however, run deep.
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Bill Dixon, the straw-hatted and gregarious 70-year-old pitmaster and de facto face of the operation, considers himself an upstart after a mere 50 years in the neighborhood, compared with other partners whose families go back generations in Pungo.
Most things here take time. To smoke those beef short ribs each Friday, Dixon has to be there at 1:30 in the morning to lay down cartoon-big bones over smoldering oak, pecan and hickory.
The brisket and pork go on at the evening before and smoke overnight, foiled up in the wee hours when the birds wake, then rested for hours more until the meat learns to hang on to its juices.
The showstoppers, of course, are those Friday dinosaurs and bam bams, big and beefy and juicy bones that slap down on the platter with prehistoric heft — a form of country spectacle familiar to local fans of Redwood Smoke Shack or Dave’s BBQ, or to those who’ve watched Dixon smoke up wild bear on his website and YouTube channel, Pungo Prairie.
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Of the two, the dinosaur is both bigger and more satisfying to the reptile brain, tighter in texture and as towering on its bone as a cake made of tender meat. With sides, a sole $26.95 bone could serve a pair or a very dedicated singleton. The rub is a blend as complex as mole from Puebla, a recipe Dixon spent years developing but is happy to share on his website.
But it’s the pulled pork that’s the masterwork.
For decades, Dixon has been known to the weddings and parties of Virginia Beach for his whole hog, which he’s also cooked alongside friend and local barbecue impresario Thomas Malbon. At Pungo Boys, it’s a pork butt. But the meat still shows the barky and pink and variegated character you’d expect from a whole-hog cook; it is a production wholeheartedly dedicated to the texture and the integrity of its meat.
Dixon cooks it only on the “fire spice” itself, then meticulously pulls his pork just one butt at a time to maintain its color, working it over while still hot with a many-peppered and slightly brown-sugared vinegar souse. Lord, it’s good — and worth a drive all to itself. Whether on a Martin’s potato roll sandwich or spread out on a platter, it hardly needs another dunk in its sauce.
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But in general, you’re in good hands, here. The thumpingly meaty turkey leg arrives juicy, with just a tannic edge of smoke and pink. The chicken salad is rollickingly flavorful, and blooms with lightly aromatic smoke. The sausages, even the “spicy” andouille, run a bit mild and carry the loose-grained, rough texture of a country sausage — a custom blend and pack made by Jerome Persichina at Princess Anne Road’s Shopwise Meat Market.
A surprise veal-beef-pork-sausage meatball sub, even, is an accomplished rendition. Dixon said he’s the rare redneck who’s also Italian, and the sauce was approved by Humphrey’s Italian-heritage wife, Val, who also works the front counter.
The brisket, served barky and Texas-thick, arrives tender and delicate, though without the salty sharpness that characterizes much Texas brisket; Dixon said he’s not a fan of using too much of the stuff. The rub was developed by Humphrey, a simple five-ingredient blend that would still be considered quite complicated in Central Texas.
If the cook on that brisket isn’t yet as dialed in as what you’d find from the beef obsessives at Bar-Q or Redwood Smoke Shack or Dave’s BBQ, it’s also a work in progress: Dixon’s still tinkering, he said. A visit a month in found its texture a little bit pot-roasty in its fat-rendered softness, while a second trip showed a tighter texture and precise pink ring. The pork ribs, on one visit, also came on a little dry, hewing too persistently to their bones.
The burnt ends, a cheerily unorthodox mix of cubed lean flat and fatty point — smoked to order for an extra 30 minutes in your choice of sauce — are both singular and delicious, more crispily sugar-caramelized than they are burnt, and juicily stewed into tenderness.
The success of those ends is due in no small part to the wonderful balance in Pungo Boys’ sweet-heat sauce, which you could drink out of its dipping cup like a novelty shot. (I’ve done so, and there’s no need to pretend I didn’t enjoy it.) The also-tasty “sassy” sauce isn’t so much hotter as it is more acidic, especially suitable for lighter meats.
But while the meat is reliably good — sometimes terrifically good — what you remember most after a visit to Pungo Boys is the mood in the room.
The old-time pictures on the walls are what a Pungo grandma might display, leaving aside the cheeky Ex-Lax sign that Val insisted her husband hang by the garbage can if he needed to hang it at all. After you sit, three people might yell out from the kitchen to see if you finished your bam-bams.
At times, Pungo Boys can feel like one of those carefully presented small-town restaurants in a Hallmark movie, the one where everybody knows everybody and they’re always extra-nice to the new person in town.
Our protagonist, if you need one, might be the customer behind us on a recent Saturday morning. She’d come in for a barbecue sandwich, same way she’d done about every week since Pungo Boys opened. She was new here from Mississippi, she said, with a husband in the Navy, and this is the one place that felt like home.
“They have barbecue in Mississippi?” Dixon teased. He’d greeted her as the “queen of barbecue” as she’d walked in, and congratulated her for buying the first beer they’d ever sold. The staff not only remembered her, they remembered her cat, who’d gone tragically lost.
“I’ve prayed on your cat,” said Pungo’s pigtailed cashier. “And every time I’m driving at night on back roads, I look out for her.” She seemed genuinely mournful.
In the movie, they would have found the cat. But the sentiment was gratefully received.
Matthew Korfhage, 757-446-2318, matthew.korfhage@pilotonline.com
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if you go
The spot
Pungo Boys BBQ, 1776 Princess Anne Road, Virginia Beach
The vibe
Friendly, down-home Pungo barbecue spot with generous meats across a range of styles, big ol’ ribs, well-executed sides and some terrific pulled pork
Order this
If it sounds good, it probably is. But the easiest thing to do on a first visit is to spring for one of the samplers and split it.
Hours: 11 a.m. till the meat’s gone, Thursday-Saturday. Noon till same on Sunday. Generally individual meats might start going away at 4:30 p.m. or so.
COVID protocols: Takeout, online ordering, masked cashiers, a few patio seats on the sidewalk. The mood in the room can get country-loose, though.
Food prices: Platters, $10,50-$15.75 for single meats with two sides; samplers, $13.75-$18.75; beef ribs, $26.50-$28.50; sandwiches, $7-$11.50; Brunswick stew, $6.50; sides, $3.95-$4.95
Drinks: Bottled beer, soda, water, energy drinks.
Inside Business
Kid-friendly? As long as they like meat
Vegan/veg/gluten: Gluten-free is pretty easy. But vegetarians will find little comfort here.
Disabled-access? It’s an older strip mall, so the bump up to the sidewalk entrance is a bit rough for wheelchairs
Reservations? Nope, but you can reserve your order online for pick-up
Parking: Lot
Contact: 757-301-8661, pungoboysbbq.com. Find Dixon’s recipes and barbecue tips at pungoprairie.com.
Matthew Korfhage, 757-446-2318, matthew.korfhage@pilotonline.com.