The Pulley Bone at Shealy’s

Batesburg-Leesville, South Carolina | Photography by Buffet Authority

Shealy’s Bar-B-Que has been feeding Batesburg-Leesville since 1969, growing into a South Carolina institution around a sprawling country buffet of barbecue, fried chicken, vegetables, hash, salads and desserts. Yet one of the restaurant’s most interesting specialties is something you will not necessarily find waiting on the buffet line.

Ask a server for a pulley bone and a different piece of fried chicken arrives at the table. The pulley bone is an old-fashioned Southern cut taken from the upper breast, with the wishbone left intact and a generous portion of white meat surrounding it. Cutting a whole chicken this way was once familiar in Southern home kitchens, where the V-shaped bone could be pulled apart after dinner and the person left with the longer half traditionally earned a wish. As chicken became more commonly sold in standardized pieces, the pulley bone became far less familiar to many diners.

Shealy’s keeps the tradition alive. Its regular fried chicken occupies the buffet, while pulley bones are prepared separately and brought out by request, making the piece feel almost like an insider’s order hidden within an all-you-can-eat restaurant. Beneath the crisp, heavily seasoned crust is an unusually plump piece of white meat built around that unmistakable forked bone — a small surviving piece of Southern fried-chicken culture that many people no longer even know has a name.

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