For the third year, we’re profiling five of the most exciting new restaurants below the Mason-Dixon line—one per day, in the order that they opened. Sam Jones BBQ, Winterville, North CarolinaOpened November 2015 Why can’t you find good barbecue just anywhere? There isn’t a lot of money in it. It takes all night to cook a hog, and diners still ...

Alison Krauss has won 27 Grammys and collaborated with laundry list of heavyweights including Robert Plant, Sam Bush, and Crosby Stills & Nash. And let’s not forget that outfit known as Union Station. But, according to Krauss, one act rises above them all in terms of a connection, an unspoken link of comfort and natural kinship: the Cox Family, consisting ...

Al Hodges heard the voice in Reidsville, Georgia, in January of 1984. What this town needs is a sandwich shop, it said. It was the sort of thing the recently reborn entrepreneur took seriously. “I didn’t have the funds, but I said, ‘God, if this is you, then you will provide it for me.’” Eight months later, he had secured ...

There’s always more to know about every Garden & Gun story. In our August/September issue, we visited a conservation-minded Chesapeake estate garden. Here, the owners take us behind the scenes. (Photo by Paul C. Haden) The stumpery. It sounds like Monty Python and looks straight out of the Hobbit, but is in fact simply a garden of tree stumps. Perhaps ...

To raise money and awareness for endangered battlefields in his native Tennessee, author, bourbon aficionado, and devoted preservationist Robert Hicks has created a whiskey of truly historic proportions. On August 30, the first of his two 2015 releases of eight-year-aged Battlefield Bourbon will hit liquor stores across Tennessee. The batch is small—micro, even—with just 1864 bottles available, a number that ...

“I’ve been eating chicken mull from the time I could eat anything,” says Charlotte Griffin, the mayor of Bear Grass, North Carolina. In Martin County, people credit her grandfather with the simple chicken porridge, thickened with crackers and seasoned with salt, pepper, and chile flakes. “Originally, it was just about always for a gathering of menfolk that were either hunting ...

Russian Tea is not from Russia. At least, not Russian Tea as we Southerners know it. The giftable dry mix that is the stuff of countless mid-century community cookbooks dates back to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when American urbanites sipped black tea with lemon and sugar in imitation of upper-class Russians. Within decades, so-called Russian Tea, which ...