Country’s Barbecue

Country’s Barbecue has been serving Opelika Road since 1975, which makes it one of the longest continuously running independent restaurants in Auburn. The restaurant sums up its approach in three words on its own website: “Great barbecue. Well served.” That plainspoken pitch matches the food. Pork and chicken are barbecued fresh over a combination of hickory and oak, the Brunswick stew is made from scratch over a two-day process rather than reconstituted from a base, and the pies and hand-cut fries are made in house rather than trucked in frozen. It is a formula that has kept the restaurant in business for roughly five decades under independent, family-style ownership rather than as part of any regional barbecue chain.

The menu covers the barbecue basics guests expect from a half-century-old smokehouse: pulled pork and chicken platters, smoked turkey, and a hamburger steak made from one hundred percent Black Angus beef for guests who want something off the grill rather than out of the smoker. Grilled chicken fingers give the menu a lighter option, and the Brunswick stew, built the slow way over two days, has become one of the restaurant’s signature items alongside its lemon pie. A full platter menu runs from twelve to seventeen dollars depending on the cut, with sandwiches priced separately for guests who want a smaller, quicker meal, and the restaurant also runs a robust catering program for tailgates and events around Auburn, a natural extension for a restaurant that has spent decades building relationships across the community.

Country’s now operates two locations in Auburn, one on Opelika Road and a second on South College Street, both run under the same family-style ownership rather than as part of an outside franchise system. That expansion has stayed entirely within Auburn’s city limits rather than spreading into other Alabama college towns, which keeps the restaurant firmly in the category of a genuinely local operation rather than a regional chain. The original Opelika Road location is open Monday through Saturday from 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. and Sunday from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m., a schedule that has stayed remarkably consistent for a restaurant that has now been serving the same stretch of road for close to fifty years.

For a restaurant with this much history in one place, Country’s Barbecue has avoided the trap that swallows a lot of longtime local institutions: getting bought out, franchised, or absorbed into a larger restaurant group as the original owners retire. It has instead stayed a straightforward, independently run barbecue restaurant serving the kind of slow-cooked, scratch-made Southern food that built its reputation in the first place. Guests looking for a barbecue restaurant in Auburn with real roots in the city, rather than a satellite location of an Alabama-wide or Southeast-wide chain, will find that Country’s Barbecue on Opelika Road is about as close to an original as the city has left.

Part of what has kept Country’s relevant across five decades is a willingness to keep the fundamentals consistent while still growing carefully within its own city. Adding the South College Street location gave the restaurant a second Auburn storefront without diluting the brand into a statewide or regional operation, a meaningful distinction from barbecue chains that have expanded across multiple Alabama college towns under outside ownership. Both Auburn locations still cook the same hickory and oak smoked pork and chicken, still make the same two-day Brunswick stew, and still cut fries and bake pies the same way the restaurant did when it first opened its doors in 1975, giving Auburn diners a genuinely consistent experience wherever in the city they happen to stop in.

The restaurant’s catering arm has also become a significant part of its business, supplying barbecue trays and full-service catering for the tailgates, graduations, weddings, and corporate events that fill Auburn’s calendar throughout the year, particularly during football season when the city’s population swells with visiting fans. That catering demand, built entirely on word of mouth and decades of reputation rather than a marketing budget from a corporate parent company, is itself a testament to how deeply Country’s Barbecue has embedded itself into the rhythms of daily life in Auburn.