Fayetteville named No. 8 on lesser-known barbecue cities list

Screengrab: Livability.com

Fayetteville was ranked eighth on a Livability.com Top 10 list of the best lesser-known barbecue cities in the country.

From the list:

In compiling our list of the best places for barbecue, we decided the lesser known barbecue cities should be better known. We purposely avoided places that you’ll find if you Google “best BBQ cities.” We’re serving up cities that you may not have considered or maybe not even heard of.

The site used Yelp.com’s count of 14 barbecue restaurants to calculate its “BBQ restaurant to resident ratio” of one restaurant for every 5,467 people living in Fayetteville. According to the site, the number of restaurants was one of several criteria used to determine the Top 10 list which also included examining online customer reviews.

By our count, there are 12 places to get barbecue in Fayetteville – Bar-B-Q Place, Boar’s Nest, Buck Nekkid, Herman’s, Lucky Luke’s, Penguin Ed’s B&B, Penguin Ed’s on Mission, Penguin Ed’s Way Out West, Pop’s, Sassy’s Red House, Wes’s and Whole Hog Cafe. We could be missing some, though. For what it’s worth, Yelp.com includes a few places that closed a while back like Pig-N-Whistle and Big River.

Fayetteville restaurants mentioned by name were Sassy’s Red House, Lucky Luke’s BBQ, Penguin Ed’s and Whole Hog Cafe.

Top 10 Best (lesser-known) BBQ Cities

1. Lexington, N.C.
2. Tuscaloosa, Ala.
3. Greenville, S.C.
4. Hattiesburg, Miss.
5. Tyler, Texas
6. Springfield, Mo.
7. Bethesda, Md.
8. Fayetteville, Ark.
9. Gainesville, Fla.
10. Cumming, Ga.

» Read all the listings at Livability.com