He Sold Bubba’s Barbecue After Nearly 40 Years in the Business. He Still Comes In Almost Every Day.

Most days, a retired pitmaster walks into Honey Pies BBQ & Smokehouse on Sunset Road in north Charlotte, North Carolina, and finds a seat in the dining room. He is not on the payroll, and he no longer owns the building. Ralph Miller ran this address as Bubba’s Barbecue for three decades, and in January he sold it.

The buyer, Alison Council, replaced the ceiling, the floors, the lights and the menu. According to a Charlotte Observer profile published Thursday, she kept two things from the old place. One is the Bubba’s Barbecue sign, which still stands out front. The other is Miller.

“He don’t have any kids. This is his kid,” Council told CharlotteFive, the paper’s food and culture section.

The arrangement matters beyond one address. The recipes Miller carried to Sunset Road trace to a Charlotte pit that opened in 1963, and the city has watched most of the barbecue rooms of that generation close for good. This one changed hands and stayed open, which is why the Observer’s headline calls it the city’s last old-school barbecue restaurant.

The pit he could no longer load

Bubba’s built its name on the eastern North Carolina style. NCpedia, the state library’s encyclopedia, describes that tradition as pork dressed with vinegar and pepper, and Miller cooked it the long way. A 2016 Thrillist guide to Charlotte barbecue credited Bubba’s with a 33-hour process to cook the whole hog. The same guide noted that Southern Living had ranked it the third-best barbecue in the state.

Whole hog is heavy work, because somebody has to lift the animal onto the pit and off again. That part ended Miller’s run. In January he told CharlotteFive that hip pain had led to spinal-fusion surgery, an operation with a long recovery.

“I’m not going to be able to get pigs on and off the pit for another 9 months at least,” he said. “I’ve got no choice but to let someone else take it over.”

By then the restaurant had been dark for almost a year. Bubba’s closed for renovations in February 2025 and promised customers on Facebook that it would be back soon. The next public word came from the county. A deed dated January 12, 2026, showed that the restaurant property and adjacent parcels had been sold to Council Industries CLT.

Miller had one piece of news for worried regulars that week. The buyer, he said, was “definitely going to open another restaurant.”

A recipe book that started in 1963

The sale put a long lineage at risk. The business began in 1963 as Jackson and Spoon’s Barbecue on South Boulevard, on the other side of Charlotte. It later became Spoon’s Barbecue. Miller bought the restaurant and its original recipes in 1987.

He renamed it Bubba’s Barbecue and moved it north to Sunset Road, where it served chopped pork from 1994 on. The Spoon family went its own way and opened Bill Spoon’s Barbecue back on South Boulevard, which meant two Charlotte institutions shared one starting point for a generation.

Both of them hit the same wall. Bill Spoon’s closed in September 2020. Bubba’s went dark that year as well and stayed closed until 2022, when Miller reopened with a new staff and a shorter menu. “We have got the best customers in Charlotte, and a lot of them are coming back,” he told CharlotteFive that fall.

The rest of the old guard thinned out around him. Bar-B-Q King, a Charlotte drive-in that opened in 1959 and once hosted Guy Fieri for his Food Network show, set its last day for November 1, 2025, after its property was sold. This summer the Observer asked readers which lost barbecue places they missed, and Bubba’s made the list.

The readers remembered the owner as much as the pork. One, who signed her note Kathleen, praised the vinegar-based barbecue, the hush puppies and the banana pudding. Then she added the part that explains what happened next. “His stories made every visit special!” she wrote.

One hundred briskets, gone in a day

Council came to the deal with a meat business already running. She owns Queen City Meats & Butcher Shop and Brookshire Commissary Kitchen, and she told CharlotteFive in January that the Sunset Road property “couldn’t have been a more perfect match.” She named the new restaurant in honor of her grandmother and her mother.

She also changed the style, and she said so plainly. Honey Pies cooks Texas barbecue, which means brisket and oversized beef ribs where the chopped pork used to be. “Everything’s big in Texas,” she said. “I’m bringing Texas to Charlotte.”

Charlotte answered on April 25. Council planned that Saturday as her grand opening, and the crowd turned it into a preview. The restaurant went through 100 briskets and 275 racks of ribs, plus a full smoker of chicken. “The line was down Sunset,” she told CharlotteFive.

There was nothing left to sell the next week. Council pushed the regular opening to May 8 so she could restock, then set her hours as Tuesday through Sunday, 11 a.m. to 9 p.m., “or until we’re sold out.”

The pitch behind the menu is portion and price. Council calls her plates “pile ’em ups,” and she described the goal in January. “You’re going to get more than enough to feed the family without breaking the bank,” she said. The restaurant’s own site puts it in six words: good food, generous portions, great value.

What she kept

Five months in, the Observer found a room that looks nothing like Bubba’s. The wood paneling and the yellow-checkered vinyl tablecloths are gone. Four large wood-fired smokers stand outside, and the ordering counter offers a sample before a customer commits.

The sign stayed, and so did the man it belonged to. The Observer reports that Miller stops in almost daily. The paper also reports that he is now facing cancer. Three days after surgery to remove a kidney he walked in, cane in hand, and sat down with Council to trade jokes.

She told the paper he ought to be home resting. Miller had his answer ready. “Let’s put it this way: I always feel better than anybody else,” he said.

Council is clear about why the door is open to him. “I want his customers to patronize this place,” she said. They had been coming to Miller for 40 years, she added, and they are used to his sense of humor.

She has courted the neighborhood the same way. Before the reopening she introduced herself along Sunset Road, handed out flyers and explained her plans. A few times a week she packs meals for elderly neighbors and has them dropped at their doors. “I took everything back old school,” she said.

One label she will not accept is “barbecue joint.” Council calls the place a smokehouse, because the pits also turn out smoked turkey and, some nights, prime rib. “I’m an old school cook,” she said.

The next addition

The plans keep growing. Council told the Observer she intends to add a bar in the dining room and a patio that should be ready by summer. She is weighing a large garden on the adjacent land. In January she also described moving her butcher shop and commissary kitchen to the property and adding a seafood market.

She is betting on the neighborhood as much as the food. The restaurant sits about six miles north of uptown Charlotte, between Beatties Ford Road and Interstate 77, in an area she says is filling in with new restaurants and commercial projects. “They’re coming this way, and they’re coming this way rapidly,” she said.

None of that was promised when the deed changed hands. Old barbecue restaurants tend to end with a last day, a line of regulars and a property sale, and Sunset Road had the sale. What it did not have was the ending.

The style on the tray is different now, brisket where the chopped pork was. The fires are still wood, the old sign is still at the road, and the man who carried the recipes of a 1963 pit across town has a seat waiting.

Sources

Charlotte Observer / CharlotteFive, Heidi Finley, “Charlotte’s last old-school BBQ restaurant gets a new start” (Oct. 8, 2026), “A longtime Charlotte barbecue restaurant has closed” (Jan. 15, 2026), “Line stretched down Sunset Road as new BBQ spot sold out before opening” (May 4, 2026) and “Tastes of the past” (July 6, 2026); CharlotteFive via Yahoo, “Haven for Eastern NC barbecue in Charlotte will now see Texas-style smoked meats” (Jan. 20, 2026); CharlotteFive via AOL, “Longtime barbecue restaurant quietly reopens on Sunset Road” (Oct. 5, 2022); Thrillist, “The Best BBQ Places in Charlotte” (2016); Tasting Table via Yahoo, Bar-B-Q King closing report (Oct. 22, 2025); NCpedia, “Barbecue”; Honey Pies BBQ & Smokehouse.

Images: Ralph Miller and Alison Council, the restaurant exterior, Alison Council at the counter and the smokers by Heidi Finley, CharlotteFive / The Charlotte Observer. Barbecue spread courtesy Honey Pies BBQ & Smokehouse.