FOOD

Big D’s food starts with a very South Carolina proposition: two versions of pulled pork on the same buffet. The “Original” is vinegar-based, while the second is a sweet mustard barbecue. That is the important distinction here; the restaurant is not building its pork around a tomato-heavy red sauce. The side-by-side choice lets one plate move between the sharper vinegar tradition of the eastern Carolinas and the mustard style deeply identified with South Carolina.

Fried chicken and barbecue chicken are the other everyday meat anchors. At dinner, the line gets broader and heavier, adding ribs, pork chops, catfish and hog jowl. That expansion pushes Big D’s beyond a barbecue-and-sides lunch counter toward a full country buffet, where fried fish and pork dishes can share a plate with chopped pork without feeling out of place.

The weekday lunch rotation is one of the clearest signs that the kitchen is cooking for local habits rather than a fixed tourist menu. Tuesday brings fried chicken livers and gizzards, Wednesday meatloaf, Thursday fried pork chops and Friday chicken-and-pastry. Those specials sit naturally beside the permanent barbecue and fried chicken, giving the buffet the feel of a Southern meat-and-three enlarged into an all-you-can-eat format.

Chicken bog deserves attention because Big D’s is serving it in the dish’s home territory. The Horry County specialty combines chicken, smoked sausage and rice cooked together until the rice absorbs the broth and the pot becomes moist and cohesive. It is one of the foods that most clearly separates a Conway country spread from a generic Southern buffet.

The vegetable side of the line is unusually important. Collards, cabbage, green limas, green beans, baked beans, corn and rutabaga sit alongside macaroni and cheese, sweet potato soufflé, slaw and plain rice. That breadth changes how the barbecue eats: a plate can be built around greens, beans and rice with pork as the accent, or around fried chicken with sweeter, richer sides.

Big D’s has also served hash over white rice, another marker of South Carolina barbecue culture. Here “hash” does not mean breakfast potatoes. In this part of the South it refers to a thick meat stew or gravy, traditionally made from pork and often including organ meat, cooked down until spoonable and then ladled over rice. Recipes vary across the state, so the important point is the form itself: meat gravy, rice and barbecue on the same plate.

A few less-common items deepen the regional character. Catfish stew joins the buffet Thursday through Saturday, while biscuits, hush puppies and cornbread cover the bread side of the meal. The spread also reaches into foods such as hog jowl that rarely survive on standardized chain buffets. These are part of the same country-cooking vocabulary as the collards and limas.

Dessert stays old-school with banana pudding and chocolate delight. The overall food story is not sheer number of choices but density of regional ones: vinegar pork, mustard pork, chicken bog, hash and rice, greens, limas, catfish stew and rotating lunch specials, all inside a buffet inexpensive enough to function as ordinary local eating.