One of NC’s most influential barbecue joints will close next month. Here’s what we know

Over an eight-year run, in a town known more for beer than barbecue, Buxton Hall was part of the spark that has reignited North Carolina’s passion for its most famous food.

Buxton put a modern spotlight on whole hog barbecue, created a famous chicken sandwich and built a dining room that buzzed from the beginning, helping to bridge the past and present of North Carolina barbecue.

The Asheville restaurant announced it will close Nov. 22, the day before Thanksgiving. A spokesperson for the restaurant said there are no immediate plans for the space and that more will be determined in the coming months by Buxton’s owner, the Chai Pani Restaurant Group.

“We are so proud of Buxton’s 8-year run,” a restaurant spokesperson said in an email. “We hope the community comes out to support our Buxton team and local producers in this last month of service.”

Buxton Hall opened in 2015, founded by head chef Elliott Moss and the backing of owner Meherwan Irani, whose Chai Pani restaurant won the 2022 James Beard Award for Outstanding Restaurant, a national award.

The news of Buxton’s unexpected closing set off a flood of comments on social media, of fans and Asheville travelers reminiscing of trips to their favorite restaurant destination, of weddings catered, sandwiches savored and the loss of something seemingly so cherished in the town’s bustling dining scene.

Moss left the restaurant in 2022.

“I was as surprised as anyone else to hear that Buxton was closing,” Moss said in a phone interview, noting his absence from the restaurant for more than a year. “Surprised but not shocked. It’s a big operation.”

While Buxton remained popular, Irani said the COVID pandemic had changed the economics for Asheville restaurants, that crowds have yet to return in the way the barbecue restaurant used to see them. He said that 2019 was a record year for Buxton and the brewery-driven crowds of tourists, but that things are different now.

“Since the pandemic, however, the tourism in Asheville didn’t quite come back at the same level and simultaneously it felt that the interest in what we were doing had peaked,” Irani said in a text message.

“Yes we were still busy and popular, but not at a level that was sustainable for the business post-pandemic. The way we’re doing it was extremely labor (and wood!) intensive. And sourcing pasture-raised hogs from a local farm, and supporting as many local purveyors as we did, along with rising costs of goods in made it hard to price the menu where people think BBQ is supposed to be. So instead of pinning our hopes on some sort of major turnaround, we decided to exit with as much grace and notice to our team as we could, and allow the story of Buxton to come to a celebratory end.”

Buxton Hall’s opening

When it first opened in a sprawling 9,400-square-foot space in downtown Asheville, Buxton emerged from the bones of a former skating rink.

The restaurant’s menu was built around the whole hog style of barbecue Moss learned from his parents and grandparents while growing up in rural South Carolina. But its sensibilities were informed by more modern tastes and Moss’ fine dining talent, which had earned him a James Beard nomination for Best Chef: Southeast while at the Asheville restaurant, The Admiral.

Buxton opened into a barbecue landscape in North Carolina that was quite different than the one that exists today. At the time, North Carolina’s best barbecue restaurants were its oldest ones, the collection of historic pithouses still smoking the state’s signature styles of whole hog or Piedmont shoulders.

Buxton was among the first handful of modern barbecue joints in the state, upholding old traditions and methods, but adding inventive sides and serving boozy Cheerwine slushies.

“We heard the question all the time, tourists would come and eat at The Admiral and ask where they should go for barbecue,” Moss said. “And there wasn’t really anywhere to send them besides 12 Bones. ... I wanted to throw my name in that hat.”

The seed of Buxton was planted in Moss’ mind when he first left South Carolina to live in Philadelphia. Moss’ barbecue education came from his family. His father and grandfather were welders and built pits themselves to smoke hogs on Thanksgiving and Christmas.

Barbecue, something that was always on hand — good, bad and indifferent — was suddenly absent. This delicacy of smoked pork had been easy to take for granted, but Moss and others began building restaurants that celebrated it as something precious and rare.

“Barbecue was definitely popular (growing up), especially the mom-and-pop-style places, but you didn’t think about it too much,” Moss said. “But then there really was no barbecue (in Philadelphia). I just assumed barbecue was everywhere and it got me missing the stuff I grew up eating.”

Whole hog revival, national acclaim

The centerpiece of Buxton was that whole hog barbecue, made using local, pasture-raised pigs, and lesser-seen dishes like barbecue hash and unheard-of plates like BBQ mussels made with smoked tomatoes and lemon.

Within a year, the accolades started pouring in, and quickly the giant dining room never seemed quite large enough.

Bon Appetit named Buxton one of the 10 Best New Restaurants in the country in 2016. The restaurant’s smoked and fried chicken sandwich, topped with pimento cheese and slice of American cheese, was declared by the magazine as the nation’s best new addition to the chicken sandwich craze.

Moss collected his second James Beard semifinalist nomination in 2017 and original Buxton Hall pastry chef Ashley Capps was a James Beard semifinalist for Outstanding Pastry Chef in the country in 2019.

“That’s what I knew, that’s the memories I had,” Moss said of whole hog barbecue. “I wanted it to be a passion project, not just a barbecue machine.”

Physically, Buxton was conceived as a different kind of barbecue restaurant, or rather as a barbecue restaurant that looked and felt like other modern restaurants of its time. Its kitchen was mostly open and, for better or worse, its hogs were smoked indoors and its green beans were cooked in the pork fat as it rendered down. A subway-tiled bar stood on the opposite end of a dining room lit by sun streaming through giant industrial windows.

Buxton Hall opened the same year Texas pitmaster Aaron Franklin of Franklin Barbecue won the James Beard Award for Best Chef: Southwest, the first person to earn the prestigious honor cooking barbecue.

That was the surest signal yet that things were changing, or had already changed, for this previously humble culinary tradition. In the last decade the heat of that trend hasn’t let up and the nation’s barbecue regions have continued evolving menus, bringing in housemade pastrami or brisket tacos.

Around the time of Buxton, other whole hog restaurants opened in North Carolina, including the first Sam Jones BBQ in Winterville and Picnic in Durham. Those restaurants led to even more high profile openings in the state, and suddenly North Carolina’s barbecue scene began to match the ambitions and passion of Texas.

When Buxton Hall will close

Since Moss exited the restaurant in 2022, he has pursued other restaurant projects in the last year. Buxton continued on for the next 16 months before announcing its last day of service.

A restaurant group spokesperson said future details are still being decided.

“The future of (the Buxton Hall space) 32 Banks Ave. is yet to be determined,” they said. “This is an evolving situation and we will have more news to share from the Chai Pani Restaurant Group in the coming months.”

As for Moss, he expects there’s still a lot of barbecue in his future.

“Barbecue has been good to me,” Moss said. “I would be silly to walk away from it.”

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