Smithfield’s Chicken and Barbeque

Everything is great here. Love the music. Fast service. Every restaurant of this type has always given me a wonderful experience!

I always get the value pack! BBC sandwich with no slaw, Brunswick stew and a lemonade. My FAVORITE! Staff is also very friendly and the restaurant is always very clean.

Clean restaurant and very attentive staff. Chicken tenders are full of tender meat and easy to eat. Hush puppies always come out hot and fresh. I have learned to order the Brunswick stew on the side so I get a bigger portion of it.

Family favorite! Fantastic BBQ platters, perfect hush puppies, great slaw. A great stop off 95 for those passing through and craving some real NC BBQ.

Sure, it’s a chain, but they serve quality NC barbecue at a fair price, the employees are friendly, and the restaurant is clean.
It was certainly an oasis in the I-​95 food desert between the DC area and South Carolina.
Highly recommended.

If you are going for chicken please don’t eat the Bar B Q chicken, no wonder it’s not on the menu. It was over 8.00 for a very small piece of chicken breast and was hard as a rock and cold. The potato salad was so sweet. I’m from the good old south and know what good chicken taste like. That’s not it. To bad.

#1 #1 #1 Best pulled-​pork barbecue and fried chicken for miles around. My wife and I have been coming here for years. This location is special — the nicest, hardest-​working employees you will find!

Great southern fried chicken. The Brunswick stew was flavorful and hit the spot on a drizzling foggy day. Had the coleslaw and hush puppies. Great table side service!

We wanted decent NC BBQ. A friend, who’s written a book on the subject, suggested this place given our travel route.
I ordered the BBQ platter with slaw and Brunswick Stew. the pork was good, but very dry: not the juicy, moist bBQ I remembered and craved. Slaw was just ok. B’Stew was very good, but the portion was more like a Sam’s Club sample than a Side. Hushpuppies were cooked in too-​cool grease: the oil had penetrated into the pup. i wish I’d just gotten a bowl of the stew instead.
He has the shrimp, which was heavily breaded mini shrimp.
She ordered the chicken, and was shocked to see it was FRIED, not bbq’d. she said it was good, just wish they’d put the word Fired in front of it on the menu.
while I would eat here again, I would not bring someone here to show off NC BBQ

Great service, great food, great portions, and great sweet tea. What more can you ask for?

How could you be from Smithfield and not love Smithfield’s Chicken and Barbecue? While their chicken is not my absolute favorite, their BBQ pork is definitely in my top 3. They have the best BBQ sandwiches. This was the go to quick pick up and bring home dinner of my childhood, so it always takes me back to sit down in front of a plate of that pork, fries, and hush puppies.
Be sure to ask if they have any bags of pig skins. They always seem to be sold out when I go by there. If you’re super thirsty get a large sweet tea, with only half the ice and you’ve hot yourself a thirst quencher!
If you’re looking for something fast, affordable, filling, and with loads of flavor (but not exactly healthy at all.) then look no further. Stop in and order at the counter, or take it on through the drive through. You won’t be sorry.
–C

Best BBQ Ever. Best Sweet Tea Ever. A Must Try. I am a HUGE NC BBQ Fan and this place has the best. Sweet Tea is delicious. Never not good. Very consistent.

Now, I might have mentioned it once or twice, but I know BBQ pretty well. One might call me a connoisseur. So when I was driving from Savannah to DC, I wanted to find a good Eastern NC BBQ place. It being Sunday, many of the independent places were closed, so we settled on Smithfield, which a believe is a regional chain.
I was pleasantly surprised. The pulled pork was tender and the spicy vinegar sauce was perfect. I usually prefer western NC BBQ, which is sweet, over the eastern with its vinegar base, but this place won me over. Balancing out the vinegar, the sides of potato salad and coleslaw both had a sweet taste– the potato salad was sort of like German potato salad. All the platters come with a half dozen absolutely delicious, perfectly cooked hush puppies.
Forgetting where I was, I naively ordered a large drink. To me, that would be 20oz. To them, it is approximately 685oz. This cup was ridiculously, comically large. I drank it for 6 hours after we left the restaurant. So unless you are looking to fill your swimming pool with soda, I would advise ordering a medium drink.
Décor is nothing special– basically a fast food restaurant interior. You order at the counter and they bring it to your table. Solid 3.5 stars.

Pork sandwiches are delicious and have just the right kick! Hush puppies good but greasy. Chicken was surprisingly not greasy and damn good. Haven’t been inside yet. I just go through the drive thru which I like that they have.

The service here is fabulous! Our food was out to the table before we even sat down. The girls kept coming and checking for refills or anything to help. They were sweet and hard working. The chicken was perfectly cooked, moist. We liked the cole slaw, potato salad and baked beans. My husband even had some fresh banana pudding for dessert! There were not any actual bananas in it, but it was still good. Coffee was FREE and delicious. There was a «complimentary coffee» sign up and they mean it! In this part of the country, many places were closed on Mondays and it was difficult to find something open. We were satisfied with our choice to stop. The place is clean and neat with nice bathrooms and a beautiful sink and mirror right on the wall in the dining room for you to use to wash your hands before/​after eating chicken. The best thing they do is customer service! We were certainly impressed with that!

Yummy. Just need to grab a quick lunch on our road trip and found this place via Unilocal.Got a very good BBQ combo for a decent price. Chicken and hush puppies were good, Place was clean and service was excellent.

No finer place for Southern fried chicken, hush puppies, and sweet tea. The barbecue’s pretty good too. Always great food and always great service and I usually only go at the busiest of times — lunch or dinner on the dot. It may look and feel like a fastfood place but they’ll bring tea and ask how your meal is.

Stopped on a road trip, and were pretty pleased. The décor is clean, the staff was all friendly. (Kudos to the cashier for being patient with us staring at the menu going «Hmm» a lot!) All the food was plentiful (we took away a doggie box!) and the sweet tea was oh-​so-​sweet and kept coming. In no particular order, the food…
BBQ is one of those things that varies way too much, and Smithfield’s falls pretty solidly in the vinegar-​based camp. Not my favorite variety, but theirs was decent, with a nice undertone of spicy to complement the vinegar bite. My husband (also not a fan of vinegar) was quite happy with his platter.
Hush puppies were plentiful and delicious.
Fried chicken tenders were large, and the breading had a great kick to complement the wonderfully crispy texture.
Daughter loved her fried shrimp snack. Didn’t like the fact I kept sneaking shrimp off her plate, but moving on…
French fries, cole slaw, and potato salad were good. (Potato salad is on the sweet side.) Next time I want to try their Brunswick stew.
If we’re heading up or down 95 again, we’ll stop by Smithfield’s!

My aunt had been raving about eating at Smithfield Chicken and Barbeque each time she drives to/​from Florida from her home in Virginia. So I ventured out to Smithfield one day to meet her on one of her trips. After all this hype, I am sorry to admit but I was a tad disappointed.
The restaurant itself is inviting and clean. The service staff are friendly, helpful and magically appear when you are running low on your iced tea. I wish I could rate my barbeque platter as highly.
I really enjoyed the hushpuppies and the order of fries are plentiful. But the main attraction, the pulled pork bbq, seemed more like something commercially mass produced instead of coming from your local pitmaster.

Good food, clean, nicely decorated family spot. In town to visit the Ava Gardner Museum (sadly closed Sunday morning) this place was a nice consolation prize. In fact the décor was all Hollywood photos and posters from the Ava Gardner era.
Although not an expert on fried chicken, all I can say is this was delicious! Don’t know how it could have been better. My husband had the four piece box that came with tasty hushpuppies. I had the «snack» size white meat offering that came with a huge breast and a wing. Plenty for me. The coleslaw that came with my order was tasty too, with a unusual mustardy note, but still quite good. The kids had «snack» size tenders and fries, which my daughter pronounced excellent. There was so much food we had to get a doggy bag for a bunch of fries and one of the tenders.
The staff could not have been nicer. Bathrooms very clean. We fed two adults and two kids for $ 29.
I highly recommend this place!