For many North Carolinians, Ayden is considered home to one of the greatest barbecue joints in the state if not the country. I had never been to Skylight Inn before even though I lived about 25 to 30 minutes down the road when I was in college at East Carolina. My friends and I had always talked about taking a road trip down to Ayden on a Saturday but we either got lazy or had gone out to hard the night before or just stuck with one of our favorite barbecue joints in town because no one wanted to drive that far.

Well, I finally got there a few weeks ago when my father and I were driving down to the coast for the weekend and decided to take a detour off of 264 near Greenville to pick up a late lunch. I want to give a shout out to Jonnie Craven for staying on me about going to eat there for a blog post.

About 95% of the time, I try to go incognito into a restaurant that I am reviewing because I think that is how food should be reviewed. If someone who works there ask why I am taking pictures of the food and restaurant, I will tell them that I run a food blog and will give them the URL if they want to check it out. If a restaurateur or someone associated with the website reaches out to me to come try their restaurant, I will consider doing it as long as they know that it isn’t an automatically favorable review. I just wish that I had called ahead to the Skylight Inn because I would have loved to  have gotten a tour like The Eaten Path did back in 2009. I asked while I was there but they denied me. I guess I’ll see if I can do it next time.