Blue Ridge Country - January/February 2015 - 33

Lake Rabun Hotel &
Restaurant serves this
Crispy Blalock Pork
Shoulder Terrine with
mashed sweet potatoes,
toasted Georgia pecans,
local apples sautéed
with garden rosemary,
and braising jus.
us," says Samantha Callihan, who runs Holloway's Pink
Pig in Cherry Log, Georgia, with her husband, Jacob.
Samantha's grandfather, the late Bud Holloway, opened
the barbecue joint in 1967.
Smitten with a garlicky salad dressing served by his
friend Casey Creamer at the Lakeside Restaurant in Blue
Ridge, Bud once asked for the recipe. "You can have it,
but you can't serve it until I die," Casey said. Bud put it
in his back pocket and left. When Casey died in the late
1970s, Bud added garlic salad to his menu at the Pink
Pig.
"People come in here just for that," Samantha says.
It is typically topped with barbecue pork, chicken, or
beef. Jars of the dressing sit for sale inside the door at the
Pink Pig, with about two inches of chopped garlic at the
bottom.
The Pink Pig barbecues whole hams, sometimes
mixed with shoulder. The original sauce is vinegarbased,
a common offering in this part of Georgia. A
sweet sauce was added in 2009.
Bud Holloway once struck up a friendship with
President Jimmy Carter, who was looking for a home
site on the side of a mountain near Ellijay.
"My grandfather drove a truck and had a sawmill,"
Samantha tells me. "He did some blasting work for
President Carter on that mountain, and President
Carter bought lumber from him."
When her grandfather died, Samantha answered the
phone when Jimmy Carter called to console the
family.
The politics have cooled some and smoothed out a
bit, but this was once known as the Democratic barbecue
joint in Gilmer County. Over in East Ellijay, Oscar
and Edna Poole run the Republican one, Poole's BarB-Q.
Ages 84 and 82 at the time of this writing, Oscar
and Edna opened the place in 1989, after Oscar had
retired from a career as a Methodist minister.
Oscar often dresses in an oversized Uncle Sam-style
hat and bright yellow suit, schmoozing with the likes of
Newt Gingrich and other Republican politicians, whose
images line the restaurant's walls.
Oscar, known as Colonel Poole, has been interviewed
widely. I chose, instead some time with Edna,
who met her husband at Nashville's Trevecca Nazarene
College. She compared with me, that evening, the
demands of being a minister's wife to the pressures of
running a barbecue restaurant, summing up our talk by
whispering, "Oscar may be the Colonel, but I'm the
General."
Holloway's Pink Pig
824 Cherry Log Street
Cherry Log, Georgia
706-276-3311
budspinkpig.com
Poole's Bar-B-Q
164 Craig Street
East Ellijay, Georgia
706-635-4100
poolesbarbq.com
This part of Georgia, honestly, was new to me before
this restaurant run. Usually heading from East Tennessee
to Atlanta on Interstate highways, we're well removed
from a fascinating region, one we're sure to visit again,
on another two-lane trip through the mountains. 
JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2015 | 33
K.A. HAMDY-SWINK
http://www.budspinkpig.com http://www.poolesbarbq.com
Blue Ridge Country - January/February 2015

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